[Brad]

If you didn't know, Reddit, one of the centralized social media juggernauts in the likes of Facebook and Twitter, is about to undergo a major change. Their leadership recently announced API pricing changes to take them from free (but rate-limited) to such an absurdly high price that would make even Elon Musk blush. The direct result is effectively all third-party apps, clients, and bots are shutting down on June 30 because it would be impossible to pay such steep bills on such short notice. The result will likely be the death of more than just the apps.

Apollo, a wildly popular iOS app for Reddit, was just featured on screen at WWDC and name-dropped by Craig as coming to Vision Pro, and its author has been very open and transparent about what he's been dealing with. He has had direct dealings with Reddit leadership for years because if you have millions of users funneling through your app into Reddit's APIs, you get their attention. Apollo's dev would be seeing a $20 million-a-year bill with these changes. If it was a tenth of that or maybe even half of the proposed rates, he could make some pricing adjustments and possibly keep up, but these new API prices seem to be set deliberately to kill all third-party apps. To make things worse, Reddit leadership has been caught lying to him, gaslighting, slandering, and trying to make him look like the villain. He "kept the receipts", though, and legally recorded their recent conversations, and posted them online for all to see and hear. It's a bit of a shit show. Here's his announcement.

Speculation is that killing third-party apps is a strategy to pump up official app usage before Reddit's IPO later this year. It's all to enrich the shareholders.

Apollo isn't the only app, though. RIF (aka "Reddit is Fun"), Sync, and other popular apps are all throwing in the towel and permanently shutting down on June 30th. Nobody can afford these API prices. If you want to use Reddit on your phone, very soon your only options will be the website or the official app, both of which have been plagued with horrible design and usability issues that made the third-party apps so popular.

Apps like Apollo are popular not only because they improve on the official interface but also because they provide better posting and moderation tools. From what I've read, like the moderators of every major subreddit you've heard of are using an app like Apollo to do their job. In a show of solidarity, many popular subreddits are temporarily "going dark" and are closing or refusing new post starting June 12th because it'll be so much more difficult for all these unpaid volunteer moderators to do their jobs. Some have said it will be permanent. Of course, they expect Reddit corporate leadership to step in and kick them out and forcibly reopen the subreddits, but then they'll have to deal with having no moderators or no good moderators.

Like Twitter and Facebook, Reddit has some shitty communities and people, but it also has some truly amazing communities and people. I've always preferred Reddit to the other giants because its design encourages more thoughtful, organized, long-form content like an old forum (like AppleNova). I've rarely posted to Reddit in the ten years I've been there, but how much I've enjoyed and learned from posts there is immeasurable. Often if I have a technical question for DDG or Google, I'll append "site:reddit.com" to my query because there's a good chance a detailed discussion exists somewhere on Reddit that answered it with loads of context and help. So, I will miss the pre-2023 Reddit a lot.

This won't completely kill Reddit, but I wonder how much it will impact like recent Twitter changes or years ago the changes that relegated Digg to the history books.

[chucker]

Might as well cross-post something from Mastodon:

I’ve been there since 2006-ish, I think. My original account is forever lost. Back then, e-mail validation wasn’t mandatory, so I can’t recover its password. My newer one is from ~2008, maybe.

Most communities (subreddits) are… hit and miss. Proggit (nobody calls it that any more) has deeply insightful conversations, but also a lot of “we’ve always done it this way; why are you proposing a different way; you must be stupid” dismissiveness that reminds you this isn’t truly a place for open conversations.

CSharp and DotNet (they should be one and the same, honestly) are mostly good. Some newbies asking questions, with some people chiming in with good advice. Some assholes, too. Some, interestingly, staffers on teams like Roslyn. This is mostly great, but sometimes annoying. You speculate or evaluate a C# feature, and then someone “official” tells you the “actual” story, and there can be a bit of a “uh, I didn’t ask” vibe.

They’re also a bit depressing because, outside the ASP (read: Web) portion, the .NET ecosystem is a mess. This is no coincidence: Web is what Microsoft pours money into, because it nets them Azure subscriptions, is their hope. Desktop and mobile don’t get the same resources.

And you can tell on Reddit: lots of “uh, so which GUI framework should I be using, then?” and “is MAUI usable yet?” conversations.

Taking a hard right turn: AmITheAsshole. This… can be interesting. But, again, it often has a very in-group/out-group feel. Voice an opinion that others disagree with, and you get downvoted into oblivion. You also get replies arguing with your opinion, which: shut the fuck up. Want to tell people*your* opinion? Reply it to OP, nor me.

But still, you get a bit of a “what are random people’s lives like” glimpse.

Porn.

This is a bit of a weird corner of Reddit. I’m not sure I have much to say.

Politics.

Unsurprisingly, very secluded. Not many if any conversations that reach across aisles. Also very US-focused. Speaking of: I’ve had my fair share of bizarre moments like

Me: (says thing)
Rando: oh, you’re just thinking in a US-centric way
Me: dafuq? I’m not even from that country

Anyway, no, Reddit hasn’t cracked “how do you talk about politics and learn from each other” at all

Celebs. Occasionally see comments from Wil Wheaton or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Tend to be good stuff.

Regional!

I subscribed to my city as a subreddit. This is an interesting blend of social networks. Some casual (and sometimes inappropriate) “I’d like to meet someone” stuff, some “I’ve just moved here / thinking of it / want to come by for a long weekend” conversation, some local news. Mostly good!

Trek.

You’d think Reddit is great at this and… it’s… OK? There’s a weird “you can’t criticize recent Trek because there’s people who just want to bash it” vibe. I’ve had entire threads of mine deleted with zero communication from moderators.

But still, a lot of nice nerdery.

I think that’s about it? There’s conversations to be had about how people misuse downvoting to voice disagreement, or how they complain about reposts, etc., but in terms of vibes, this is Reddit.

And I’m about to lose it, mostly: on desktop, I only use the old website, whose days are presumably numbered (I sometimes use the Stellar? app, too). On mobile, it’s almost all Apollo. The mobile site and mobile app are awful. Apollo is nice.

Reddit is about to no longer be nice.

[Ebby]

I'm in the RIF group and when Reddit kicks that app off, I'm spending more time outside. I spend waaaay too much time scrolling and this is the kick in the pants I need to break habits.

Would be cool if these app developers got together on GitHub and made a scraper to restore some function. I imagine kicking 3rd party users off the API to inefficient HTTP would hammer their systems pretty good.

I'm going to miss a lot of communities I found there. Find a good little niche and you make friends. It was also my #1 source for local news.

[Ryan]

I wish reddit a very happy digg dot com.

[drewprops]

What *legitimately* replaces reddit?

It isn't Mastodon or Twitter or Facebook or Anything Else.


...

[Brad]

Originally Posted by drewprops What *legitimately* replaces reddit?

I don't think there are any strong contenders to replace Reddit today, but I think the most likely (but still not very likely) would be Lemmy (join-lemmy.org). Lemmy is a decentralized link aggregator and forum that looks a lot like Reddit, and Lemmy is to Reddit basically as Mastodon is to Twitter. I've seen lots of frustrated Redditors suggest moving to Lemmy over the last couple weeks, but selection bias being what it is, these are probably a tiny minority of tech savvy early adopters, not anyone close to mainstream. I suspect far fewer people use Lemmy than the relative number of people who used Mastodon before Musk started burning Twitter, but it's something. shrug

edit: Maybe don't use Lemmy. See my post below about this…

There's also Kbin (kbin.pub), another decentralized service like Lemmy that I just discovered, but it's even newer and less active than Lemmy, and their homepage has at least one dead link to an instance whose DNS fails to resolve (literally the first one I clicked). Not a good look. F.

edit: Also Tildes, but it's a centralized service hosted by a Canadian not-for-profit corporation, not a federated self-hosted service. I remember running into this one a couple years ago, but at the time, there wasn't a compelling reason to use it.

Maybe the replacement is old dedicated hosted forums like AppleNova? Nah.
Maybe Redditors go touch grass? Even less likely.
I recommend taking a trip to your local library. Read a good book.

Honestly, just like with Twitter, I don't think Reddit will completely go away any time soon. It'll get much shittier, no doubt, as any good mods are replaced with sycophants or internal bots, and as a sizeable portion of good people just leave. Will it recover? Probably. Will is be different? Definitely. Will it be worth going back? Time will tell, but I wouldn't bet on it, especially since executive leadership is making it abundantly clear that this is an IPO cash grab. Once they get their money, they'll strap on those golden parachutes and bail, leaving the mess for whatever poor sap is next in line.

[drewprops]

I just read the article about the iPhone subreddit going dark ahead of schedule. The mods refer people to their affiliated Discord server.


...

[Brad]

Yeah, Discord is probably going to win a lot of Reddit's lost traffic, and that's a real shame. Discord is a fine service for real-time chat, but it's terrible for anything else. I hate that it's all a private black hole, with information trapped inside lots of individual silos, practically impossible to get out. External search is literally impossible since it everything is login-walled, and the nature of it being a glorified chat log makes its internal search incredibly hard to get useful results. It's trading one problematic platform for an even more problematic platform.

[drewprops]

Hey y'all, let's put on a play!!

:: points toward barn ::

Programmers to the front, please.

Let's call it TOLEDO.


..

[Ryan]

It's almost like we should all just go back to vBulletin and phpbb.

[turtle]

Actually I still love boards. I spend most of my "internet time" on boards. Sure there are links through my RSS feed aggregator, but most really are back to boards.

Reddit is handy for some links and details, but it lacks direct hosting most of the time. So when a tech search brings me to a Reddit post it is almost 100% certainty the link in the OP is dead by the time I look. That get really frustrating.

[709]

I've been using Apollo since Reddit bought (and ruined) Alien Blue, and Apollo to me pretty much is Reddit. If it goes away my Reddit use will go down substantiality. Which... might be a good thing anyways.

Originally Posted by Brad Maybe the replacement is old dedicated hosted forums like AppleNova? Nah. Maybe Redditors go touch grass? Even less likely. I recommend taking a trip to your local library. Read a good book.

– I'll never not think that boards are superior in every way for knowledge sharing and personal connections.
– Since the Minecraft server shut down I've started an herb garden, fiddled/fixed a bunch of 'house things' and next weekend I'm building a deck for Anna's folks. So much free time! If Reddit goes away I'll probably perfect nuclear fusion power.
– I've been making a pointed effort to get back to my old ways of reading a book every week or two. It's harder than I thought it would be, for some reason, and disappoints me the most about myself. Gotta get away from the screen and just focus on reality more.

[kieran]

I followed the same path from Alien Blue to Apollo. I never really sued Reddit before using them via the apps.

I can understand the motivation behind pricing out third party clients, but this seems just so eerily family of the Twitter nonsense.

I will definitely use Reddit much less than I currently am, if at all. It's pretty much my go to "I have some time to waste" app so I'm definitely going to miss having it available.

[Ryan]

I switched my go-to timewaster apps to sudoku and crossword puzzles. I figure now I'm at least getting something out of it.

I can also recommend a subscription to Chess.com.

[psmith2.0]

Years-long crossword junkie here. At my height I was doing 3-5 a day (two online, two in the daily paper, one from a book).

I kinda peaked/burned out on that heavy grind. Now I work from my book and I do get the local Sunday paper, which contains the Sunday NYT crossword, which I always complete in under 30-40 minutes and do in blue pen.

I LOVE a good, challenging crossword puzzle! Like catnip. Will Shortz is the man. All my compilations/collections are NYT Sunday puzzles from his editing era.

These three favorite hobbies of mine all tie together and help with one another, these past 6-10 years: crosswords, Scrabble and Jeopardy. Trivia, vocabulary and seeing a jumble of letters and instantly start making words of them (Boggle, Jumble). I love word/letter-based puzzles. Numbers (sudoku)? Not so much. I’m missing that gene.

[Brad]

So, it seems like Lemmy is run by some unsavory folks, and a lot of better-informed folks are steering new users away from Lemmy servers and tech. Apparently the main devs and server admins are "tankies", pro-authoritarian holocaust and genocide deniers. Although the software is open source and they aren't technically getting paid for it and you could run it in isolation without interacting with them, it's probably not a great idea to give these folks more attention since they'll get donations and notoriety and a platform to promote hate as a side effect.

Kbin seems to be more mature than I gave it credit. The software itself seems solid, if still somewhat young.

Kbin and Lemmy are both using the ActivityPub messaging protocol, the same protocol that powers Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other of these newish federated services. So, technically you could access Mastodon content from Kbin and vice versa. Kbin can also see Lemmy messages, and Lemmy can see Kbin messages. It's kinda weird to think about, but it has promising possibilities. (Whether you can actually access content across different types of servers is a different matter, though, depending on server configuration.)

So, if you're looking for a Reddit-like link/discussion feed, I'd recommend checking out kbin.social for starters before finding (or setting up) your own instance. Again, much like Mastodon or e-mail, you'll have a username @ a server name, but that doesn't mean you are limited to that one server. There aren't a lot of servers yet, and kbin.social is clearly under some resource strain right now as people flock to it, but hopefully it'll get better once this surge passes.

[chucker]

It's honestly over my head. Both Lemmy and Kbin seem to have a pretty mediocre web interface. And both seem tiny…

[turtle]

Originally Posted by 709 I've been using Apollo since Reddit bought (and ruined) Alien Blue, and Apollo to me pretty much is Reddit. If it goes away my Reddit use will go down substantiality. Which... might be a good thing anyways. – I'll never not think that boards are superior in every way for knowledge sharing and personal connections. – Since the Minecraft server shut down I've started an herb garden, fiddled/fixed a bunch of 'house things' and next weekend I'm building a deck for Anna's folks. So much free time! If Reddit goes away I'll probably perfect nuclear fusion power. – I've been making a pointed effort to get back to my old ways of reading a book every week or two. It's harder than I thought it would be, for some reason, and disappoints me the most about myself. Gotta get away from the screen and just focus on reality more.

While I never did tie into Reddit, these points are generally where I'm at too. Mrs T and I have been homesteading and really building up our home food production. It has been fun and rewarding. Fruit and nut trees, raised gardens with everything from potatoes to corn to strawberries. More berry bushes and such than I can count, including boysenberries!

I'm doing things around my house more for improvements and repairs that were easy to ignore.

Of course that last week I'm been testing my solar system for off grid life.

[Bryson]

As of right now (10:45am ET) Reddit appears to be broken - I just get a "Couldn't load posts for this page" error on both Mobile and Web.

[Brad]

Originally Posted by Bryson As of right now (10:45am ET) Reddit appears to be broken - I just get a "Couldn't load posts for this page" error on both Mobile and Web.

I wonder if they're getting DDOSed. I wouldn't approve or partake in such actions, but I probably wouldn't mind watching the dumpster fire from the sidelines either.

Also, fuck /u/spez.

[Brad]

Originally Posted by 709 – Since the Minecraft server shut down I've started an herb garden, fiddled/fixed a bunch of 'house things' and next weekend I'm building a deck for Anna's folks. So much free time! If Reddit goes away I'll probably perfect nuclear fusion power. – I've been making a pointed effort to get back to my old ways of reading a book every week or two. It's harder than I thought it would be, for some reason, and disappoints me the most about myself. Gotta get away from the screen and just focus on reality more.

Originally Posted by psmith2.0 Years-long crossword junkie here. At my height I was doing 3-5 a day (two online, two in the daily paper, one from a book).

Originally Posted by turtle Mrs T and I have been homesteading and really building up our home food production. It has been fun and rewarding. Fruit and nut trees, raised gardens with everything from potatoes to corn to strawberries. More berry bushes and such than I can count, including boysenberries!

You guys are an inspiration! I really need to get into some more offline hobbies like this!

When I'm not mindlessly consuming content online, I'm still usually doing something in front of a screen. Over the last month, I've been pouring tons of hours into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Otherwise, I'm usually doing or building something in the computer. Other video games, 3d modeling, animation, programming, setting up or maintaining a server… I would be completely lost in a true technology blackout.

Before COVID, my biggest offline projects were usually Halloween costumes that might take months of prep and construction. Since COVID killed all social gatherings, all that inspiration just evaporated, and I couldn't care less about costuming any more.

[turtle]

This will keep me from using Reddit.

I'm trying to dig up valuable info and will instead be searching longer because a protest. I don't care about the protest. The subs should stay open and roll with it. I get they don't like the changes, but if the site dies then let it die and migrate to another platform. Why make general users like me deal with your disgruntled attitude over something the vast majority don't pay for and don't make money using.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by turtle Fruit and nut trees, raised gardens with everything from potatoes to corn to strawberries. More berry bushes and such than I can count, including boysenberries!

Funny, doing the same. Our climate (Seattle) doesn't lend itself well to fruit trees (various spores, molds, and fungi, thank you Dr. Spenkler) but we just had another 12 yd^3 of premium garden soil delivered this morning for the new raised beds. Add it all up, and it's about 600 ft^2 of automatically irrigated and ridiculously rich soil surface, crammed full because my wife is a green goddess who does everything from seed. Add to that the natural huckleberries, blackberries, raspberries, and salal we have on property, and it's been good. (The blueberries are struggling, need more sun.)

I'd be out there shoveling, but had a full shoulder replacement a month ago, and gee darn, I guess the boys are going to have to haul the soil this time.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by turtle This will keep me from using Reddit. I'm trying to dig up valuable info and will instead be searching longer because a protest. I don't care about the protest. The subs should stay open and roll with it. I get they don't like the changes, but if the site dies then let it die and migrate to another platform. Why make general users like me deal with your disgruntled attitude over something the vast majority don't pay for and don't make money using.

That's... the point.

The API cost change means that the freely provided content is being monetized beyond reason. The content providers are not being compensated, but that was alright as long as everyone played fair 'enough' because it's a gift culture. The app creators were willing to pay reasonable fees to participate, as long as they were reasonable 'enough', because they are businesses.

The new changes are just pure greed, and will kill reddit in short order as apps are shut down, and communities dissipate. This is the only leverage the communities and app creators have to try and *keep* it from dying. If the cost hike isn't reversed, reddit will just flat out collapse. Putting that in front of the users is the point of the blackout. "Here's what happens, irrevocably, if this isn't reconsidered."

I've spent the past few years working with volunteer online professional communities with significant investment in time and money by the members, sometimes to the tune of 8, 9 figures. Volunteer communities are robust as hell, right up to the point that they are not, and then no force on earth can reverse their dissolution. Reddit is riding that edge at the moment, and this is literally the only power the communities have to push back: simply not participate for the moment, in hopes that it snaps some sense into reddit leadership and participation can continue in the future.

[turtle]

So pull the plug before it dies is the goal, got it.

[drewprops]

The technical costs of making these sites run, crafting a robust and powerful UI, and policing the users ain't cheap. Reddit deserves to make money, but it feels like they buried the needle into profit mode, prompting me to wonder: are they financially stable?

.

[turtle]

Given the layoffs across the Valley I'm guessing no. In the end, I don't care. I 'm just gonna move to the next source of information I need that is working and stop using the ones that are not. I don't really care if the reason is moderation or folded. The end result is the same for me, it doesn't provide the service/information I want, I'm moving on.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by turtle So pull the plug before it dies is the goal, got it.

More like "We provided you the content, we disagree with what you are doing with it, this partnership is in peril if this continues" but that's one viewpoint. Volunteer communities are 100% a partnership between hosts and community members, and when the hosts forget that, they need to be reminded. (Community members are reminded regularly via moderation and other mechanisms.)

Agree 100% it's time to find other platforms. This smells like a desperation move that will only hasten the financial slide.

[turtle]

I guess that is fair to say. Maybe culling the herd is what Reddit leadership really wants.

[chucker]

They're striking. Inconvenience is the point.