Shocked Pikachu face meme.
Can someone explain me this “Reddit API” thing?
Mods used third party tools to help them with their unpaid work. These tools relied on access to the reddit api.
Then reddit charged ridiculous prices for api access, which would mean the apps would need money, so mods would need to pay to do their unpaid work or use the inferior reddit interface.
Given these choices, some mods decided to leave instead.
Reddit used to have a free and open API. This allowed 3rd parties to develop apps / interfaces for the site. These apps helped everything from making the site usable for some with accessibility issues to blocking ads to providing a customized interface to tons of other things.
Generally this was done by taking the API feed and re-engineering it to allow the desired presentation.
In a move to make the company more attractive to investors before going public, Reddit changed that API to a paid model. This meant any developer of those 3rd party apps would now have to pay a not insignificant in most cases fee to continue their access to Reddit. As such, most apps closed down and a very small portion of us long time Redditors migrated to Lemmy/ the fediverse.
Reddit used to have an open API. A lot of mobile apps sprung up to access reddit over the years, with different features. Reddit gained a lot of loyal members through users of these apps, but couldn’t make ad revenue off them. Reddit decided last summer to start charging a lot of money to these app developers to continue using the API. A few of the apps started a for-pay subscription model to continue operating, but many just shut down their apps. Many redditors and Reddit mods revolted, because these apps made the site usable (some of them offered advanced mod tools, etc). We protested, shut down subreddits temporarily or permanently, deleted our accounts, moved to new platforms (like lemmy/kbin), etc. This was basically a move to maximize their ad revenue while Reddit positions itself for an IPO. It was really not cool.
There was some magic internet data thing where third party apps (like various reddit apps not owned by reddit) access and use reddit to power their apps, free of charge. That’s API. Pretty much all voluntary reddit mods use third party apps to mod. Reddit started charging for the API, making third party apps useless, forcing everyone into the Official Reddit App. A lot of people boycotted or quit.
It wasn’t just mods using 3rd party apps. Anyone that experienced the switch from old.reddit or that used mobile had to be using 3rd party or only half their brain.
Others have covered it but the API pricing was $12,000/50 million requests, which is absurd bordering on comical.
It was a thing last… summer? Where reddit announced they were going to start charging for every call a third party program made using the API. This was done with the intent of shutting down 3rd party reddit apps and to get users on the official one so reddit could make more money. However, it also destroyed a bunch of 3rd party tools that mods more or less needed, and which reddit had been promising for years with no progress. There was a brief protest where mods of many subs shut them down (mostly for less than a week, though some are still down IIRC). A bunch of users and moderators left reddit and went to other sites.
That sub and this community has always been like that.
Is like twice a week I see that sentiment on here. What’s OP complaining about? Their mirror?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I MUST COOONSSOOOOOOOMMMM, I MUST FORFEIT AND WAIVE ALL MY RIGHTERINOOOOS TO THE COOOORPORATIONS AAAAAAAH IMMMMM CONSOOOOOOOMINNNNNG.
Thanks for the laugh m8! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
News reports have Reddit making the IPO push this year. Get ready for more DRAMA!
Will be really sad when the ransomware files get leaked on the IPO date lol
Wait, what ransomware files lol.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/19/tech/reddit-hackers-demands-api/index.html
The stuff BlackCat stole and haven’t released yet.
God, I forgot about that 🤣
If you follow the… “correct” channels for stuff like this, the user is going to release the info the moment that Reddit IPOs :).
Info about them (likely spying on their users) might really spook the insta-normie-scroll-on-the-reddit-app dorks.
If anything, it’s going to be a shit show even if BlackCat decides to hold on to it for a bit.
Maybe there is a place you could ask them about it specifically? I personally wouldn’t know.
Tbh I have no idea what a dark web even is 😏
How are you viewing this?
As in what app ks that?
Sync for Reddit patched with Revanced, but not sure if it is worth the hassle though.
Reddit isn’t worth remembering a 8 character password these days.
It’s not. Reddit is a cesspool full of shills, brigading, shitty mods, and bootlicking idiots. I appreciate your use of revanced, though!
“If you don’t like spez decision, then just open up the sub and leave!”
Mods left
“Where is all the mods?”
“They’re just butthurt they didn’t get any support hue hue hue”
Internet is a funni place.
I’ll be honest here: it was pretty fun to respond to people going “well if you hate it here so much, then just leave!“ To which I responded: “I did, check the sidebar.“ I stuck around for a few days after to help the mods with a few unruly threads, banned a few problem users on a different sub I was just sick of, then left forever.
Love how they bellyache about the mods not doing a good enough job when they spent the final weeks of the June protest harassing the existing mods and and basically dismissing and disrespecting all the work we were doing for the past decade. They just expected things to go back to business as usual and the mods should just shut up and continue doing unpaid janitorial duties for the benefit of spez out of sheer momentum I guess? The scale of their entitlement is unreal.
Yeah, that was part of the reason I decided to leave. I mean, it wasn’t the only reason by far, but just another item to snowball into the “fuck this platform” that pushed me to leave.
The number of people that actively told me I was dumb, abusing power, and my moderating could be done by anyone was crazy.
Then they bitched about the moderation quality going down when 50% of the moderation actions walked out the door.
I got banned this week from r/aboringdystopia for “spreading misinformation” by sharing a france24 link (credible established newspaper) debunking thegrayzone (whatever that is).
Here is the url I was trying to share.
The r/piracy wiki died when I stopped updating it which is a shame, I used to recommend it to everyone. Now I pass them onto FMHY or awesome.
Never heard of FMHY or awesome before, what are they? Could you point me there too? Thanks!
FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH https://fmhy.pages.dev/
Shakil-Shahadat’s awesome-piracy fork https://shakil-shahadat.github.io/awesome-piracy/
These are the most comprehensive lists of resources I’ve ever seen, thank you!
We do have our own piracy wiki here BTW!
How could you?! As a Karen I demand the r/piracy manager and that he forces you to go back and work for free!
Oh, I wasn’t a mod of r/piracy, I modded r/noahgettheboat.
But yeah, the users feeling entitled to both have a sub that was taken care of, and to shit on the mods, was quite perplexing.
the users feeling entitled to both have a sub that was taken care of, and to shit on the mods, was quite perplexing.
New Reddit, in a nutshell. I really liked that sub back when things were good.
Welcome to Customer Service, you’re here forever.
“Clean it up janny!” Good on you for getting out
I always laughed when someone called us a “janitor” after we banned them. Like you understand in this analogy you are the trash being taken out, right?
It’s probably just because janitor is the term for a low level mod on 4chan.
“They do it for free!”
Not anymore, fucko. Have fun selling your ungovernable site.
Wasn’t reddit always like that? Or was this particular sub okay?
All my subreddits that I moderated went to shit after the protests. I stopped, the replacements stopped, the sudden influx of shitty posts and shady users drove off the normal communities.
Fuck em. I haven’t felt the urge to post on reddit in months and it’s lovely knowing the people I’m interacting with probably aren’t rabid fascists unless they’re Lemmy.world pissbabies.
What subs did you mod? I wanna watch the trainwreck 😂
/r/snackexchange/ - I made it a protest subreddit by embracing Spez’s call for user democracy. Every day every single thing about the subreddit would be reset and users would have to vote for every aspect. The only rules were that you couldn’t abolish democracy and you couldn’t abolish me as the caretaker. /u/Icxcnika was a weird little goober who took it seriously instead of seeing it as a protest meant to derail the subreddit. He voted to make himself mod for a day and then the admins did a mod coup to make him the head, even over the other two mods that had been there for a decade and built all of the third-party tools we relied on to make the subreddit work. He had only posted once, some 8 or 9 years before, and had never moderated. The users and other mods fucking hated him and activity in the subreddit fell off. Now he no longer posts, one of the other mods no longer posts, and the last remaining one is apparently now a bot that sells funko pops.
/r/fifthworldproblems/ - The other mods and I were all on board with the protest. They forced us back open so we refused to do anything. Now it’s restricted and the only link posted since the protest was a Lemmy instance that I didn’t have anything to do with.
/r/modernart - I started rebuilding this one after it was overtaken by spam from people who don’t know what “modern art” actually means. I want to keep the subreddit because there’s good radicalisation potential with it in the right hands, but I stopped posting and only remove the most obnoxious spam days after it’s reported to tank the quality of the subreddit. I’ll be replacing everything with a Lemmy instance link at some point but was always holding out for Hexbear to open up community creation.
I had a few others that I just left or let the admin bot take over.
Oh wow you rock! I definitely followed the snack exchange saga for a while before switching over here
you know I never used that but it always seemed like a useful idea, kudos to you
did people swap anything with countries outside the https://lemmygrad.ml/c/alwaysthesamemap area?
It was fun at its high point. The problem was like you said, always the same map. Shipping costs run like $20-150+ and that’s a month’s wage in many of the countries that have interesting snacks we aren’t already over-saturated with. Scams were only ever like 5% of trades at most and we never had a poisoning though, so overall a successful prototype of the thing that would work.
i followed the snack exchange subreddit thing from day one, that little piece of shit was so utterly removedish in so many ways. First time i genuinely wanted to doxx someone because YOU KNOW that dork looks like
irlHe was weird. In addition to the posts on the daily election threads, he was sending me PMs that were flattering in a way Patrick Bateman would compliment someone. Everything was blatantly manipulative and worded in a way that was simultaneously an interrogation I knew he was feeding to the admins. Then the dog caught his car and had to drive it while everyone else on the road screamed at him. I think he lasted like three days before handing over control to one of the mods who was so offended that they quit the website.
Nothing irks me more than someone who can’t handle positive chaos or slight inconvenience. He was so determined to stop the protest which was only over us not being able to moderate the subreddit without those third-party tools, all to preserve the sanctity of a community he hadn’t interacted with in almost a decade. There’s something deeply pathological about a power grab like that. Like what the fuck.
ive never read something so pathetic, in fact im going to PM him on reddit right now to mock him.
Seems like the way for reddit to “solve” this is to just close bad subs.
But that’s easily exploited, if people migrate to other subs and protesting the sub closures, those subs get worse and they need to be closed…
Oh no, reddit, did you just discover that you relied on your users to make your site good and by screwing them over you’ve made your entire business unsustainable at scale?
Also, somewhat related, is there a short snappy name for lemmy communities? Spme people call them subs out of habit but I don’t wanna do that, and "communities is four whole syllables, and ain’t nobody got time for that.
I’ve seen “Lemmies”, I’ve also seen “sublemmies” which brings “subs” back on the table imo. Alternatives are /c/s, commus, com’s, etc.
I guess “subs” isn’t exactly a reddit specific term. I don’t even know if it started there tbh.
I’ve just realised there’s nothing wrong with taking some of the language they used, we are after all following the basic link aggregator format.
I like communities and sublemmies.
Coms/commus sounds forced and unnecessary, doubt it’ll catch on.
As for Lemmies, I think that should be a synonym for instances/servers. So, for example, the biggest Lemmy with the most sublemmies would be lemmy.world.
And of course, the users are lemmings.
“Communes”, populated by “commies”?
@Obi /c/s is not long (albeit a bit complicated to write, on phone at least) and it could easily be expanded verbally, so you know that
/c/s = communities.On Friendica, everything that is not a person or a page is displayed as a group. As a Facebook alternative, it does make sense, but for you in the Lemmy world I imagine it would sound a bit bland. 😁
Coms?
Kbin calls them “magazines”, which has the advantage of being only three syllables but has the disadvantage of being a dumb name for them.
Yeah, I don’t see anyone adopting “mags” or “zines” either.
I’d adopt “zines” expressly to overuse it, make people cringe and demonstrate just how dumb it sounds. “mags” just makes me think of guns
Zines sounds like something Tom Haverford would come up with.
I have never had a comment make me feel this old.
-Signed, an old man who used to publish zines in the early 90s.
I’m not old enough to have published zines but I am old enough to know what they were, and I think it is actually a pretty apt name for it
Got dem Klips…
“solve”
to make your site good
unsustainable
I think you’re misunderstanding reddit’s goal. Over the past year, they have been in IPO mode. They don’t care about making the site good or attracting a healthy community. They want to cash out and are burning down any structures that are providing any resistance to that.
Hopefully it costs them dearly. Kinda loke the whole Tumblr censorship fiasco and drastic fall in value but before they sell it put #FuckSpez in the poor house
Why do you care how it turns out financially for reddit? The outcome I’d wish for is that more people come to lemmy
Because I was generally enjoyed Reddit before being forced out by the API crap. I’m a creature of habit so tend to dislike change and as much as I’m generally liking Lemmy but I’m having to force myself to not check the app every time I get bored because I’ll just see the same posts 20 times in a day thanks to the relatively low level of interaction on the platform currently. Whenever I go looking for tech support online, it’s nearly always a reddit post from 2-8 years ago that has the answer but I don’t want to spend any amount of time on the site, particularly if I’m on my phone at the time since it means doing that annoying step of having to manually change “www” to “old” to make the site functional and readable. I guess I’m just feeling vengeful at yet another good (or some approximation of) ruined by yet another money-grubbing, power-hungry, self-important tosser.
Though I see what you’re saying… ish. I think at this point, we aren’t going to see a massive influx of users without the death of competing platforms like Reddit since there are enough people either happy to keep taking the punches or think sunshine shines out of Spez’s asshole. Frankly, we can do without the second kind of person but the first won’t do anything without a certain amount of persuasion and I reckon the sinking of the ol’ Reddit ship would be just enough of a toe-capped-boot up the nether regions to persuade.
You’re right, they aren’t trying to make something sustainable. I guess I was giving them too much credit when I said that.
The problem they’re facing here is that if they can’t sustain even the appearance of a functioning site that investors might want to buy, then they fail at that too.
So maybe the best way to fix this is just to ride it out and not close the subs, but if they’re just full of users that have finally clocked why mods are needed and that the place sucks now, that’s also a bad look.
If the search engines start to realise that it’s a cesspit with nothing worth linking to anymore, then that really hits their metrics. I’ve jist realised I really need to get onto downloading my posts and deleting them.
Maybe daddy Elon can pay another $50b to buy Reddit and run that into the ground too.
They don’t care about making the site good or attracting a healthy community.
They never cared about the “healthy” part either, just “big”. Reddit has been a cesspool for years and years and years, largely thanks to the moderators.
Commies.
I can’t decide if I hate that or love it.
Given the automotive slang term for “transmission”, I think this one has a chance
Subs still works in my mind. Subdirectories of all, or subscriptions… whichever way you want to think of it. I never really thought of subs as short for subreddits though, that was just convenient marketing based of those same terms.
Yeah subs and the mods are the doms, which works for my dyslexic, kinky ass.
I’m honestly surprised I’ve not seen anyone make that connection for a joke, thanks dyslexia, it’s pretty funny.
I’d like the name to be “community feed” and “feeds” for short. Reddit was always essentially a collective rss with voting weights. In this way “subs” would still work since one subscribes to the feeds.
Ultimately it’s something the devs need to encourage though
Oi @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ! Are you one of the Reddit Piracy mods? Or are one of your brethren here from Reddit?
I must say I find Piracy, Linux and the Star Trek communities have had a rip-roaringly successful switch over.
I much prefer Lemmy. I have the opportunity to call you a “dick head” whereas on Reddit there’s no way Spez would ever see me calling him a “dick head”.
That makes me feel powerful and I become engorged.
So, anyway, are you one of the Reddit mods?
P.S. I can’t post to this community from Lemmy.World.
P.S. I can’t post to this community from Lemmy.World.
Thats because they’re reddit-brained over there too
Coming from a Stalinist russaboo, that’s something, I guess.
Are you a fan of the IS-2 tank?
Reddit does not tolerate Russophilia of any sort. Like China mentioning the most benign cultural things about it gets brigaded.
They’re obsessed with shit like at the end of Band of Brothers when they respect the Nazi general bc he’s also part of the military & how Hitler could have won on half the history subs. AskHistorians is okay
You are the Redditor. Good day sir! Harrumph!
Let’s not judge people only from the instance they’re registered on.
True, it’s not right to call lemmy.world users “reddit-brained”.
Why not?
I’m more a fan of the T-34 followed by the Sherman if we’re talking about ww2 tanks. Whats your favorite tank, you Trotskyite limey?
Why the T-34? Of all tanks. Any particular variant or just any T-34?
I’m particular to the T-34-85 variant.
Well, I can’t fault you for that one. If you were going to hit me with a 1942-43 variant, I might have tried to persuade you to the 85. That’s a badass T-34. The rest of them are garbage imo
Oh I love Soviet and German tanks from WWII most of all so I’m a big fan of the IS-2 and T-34 for Soviets and the Panzer IV, Sturmgeschütz III and Tiger I for Germans.
I build 1:35 scale models and my last build was an Elefant.
Well that’s a fun hobby. I used to make model planes when I was a child. I recall making a P-38 and an A-10 before entering junior high but then never really getting into it again.
P.S. I can’t post to this community from Lemmy.World.
Strange, there are quite a few comments from that instance
What a goofy interpretation of that series of events. Reddit changes API which fucks over moderators -> mods protest and say if they can’t use these tools they can’t moderate -> when API restrictions come into effect, mods either leave over moderating being way harder now or basically not being able to mod
Why is that final step so hard for this person to believe? All of Reddit moderation wasn’t lying to people for fun
Also wasn’t the sub basically taken over by one mod who spends their time working their way into as many moderator positions as possible and then not doing anything with them? Looking at their post history they’ve made like a dozen posts in the last month and one of them was asking to mod another sub.
Why is that final step so hard for this person to believe? All of Reddit moderation wasn’t lying to people for fun
You are so naive to believe they even were aware of step 1 lol.
They just were mad at their favorite subreddits being closed against their will, that and just being inconsiderate pricks.
What amused me back then is that in most of the subreddits I was subbed there were polls where mods were gonna act as the results said, (we were basically running against the time, so there were not very many alternatives for this kind of democracy, I add this note because many people were very mad and argued they never got to nor realize there was an ongoing poll lol) and more users approved to keep the protests and regardless these cunts were saying that this was mod’s power abuse lol.
Dead internet theory
Don’t they understand the mods leaving is a consequence of that “tantrum”?
They’re clearly using shaming tactics. By calling it a “tantrum” they try to make those mods look childish. In reality the mods demanded something to make their jobs easier, the company refused, so they parted ways.
Not “job”, they are “volunteering contribution”, that are not only time consuming, mentally consuming, and unpaid as well.
Hello, I’m meep_launcher, and I’m a recovering moderator.
Not only did my tools get taken, after the mass exedus, my mod queue exploded. There were so many more racist reports than before, and I was mod of a political satire subreddit.
Turns out the exedus took all the left leaning redditors leaving behind real pieces of work.
Glad I made the switch, and I set up anarchycartography here, so maybe I can get back to doing what I love, shitposting maps.
cartographyanarchy
post it with the proper syntax so we can subscribe, fellow pirate!
Lol I’m a newb
I’ll edit my comment!
Thanks buddy! I am subscribed!
Let us know when it is setup. I would appreciate some shitty map in my day.
Looks like its here: !cartographyanarchy@lemm.ee
Took some poking before it fully showed up for me so I’m guessing I’m the first person on my instance to try to view that community.
Tried clicking on that link, got this error…
The server returned this error: FetchError: invalid json response body at [Redacted]. This may be useful for admins and developers to diagnose and fix the error
I’m assuming you were trying to link to here?
Like Trainguyrom wrote, you’re probably the first user on your instance trying to access it. Try the link again. It’s the proper way to link to communities using Lemmy. Your link doesn’t give people on other instances the easy option to subscribe to the community.
EDIT: Interestingly enough it looks like someone went through the first page of my profile and downvoted each comment of mine. Hmmm, how very strange ;P
Yes, same on the explosion to mod queue. I modded a sub for a traditionally male-dominated hobby but we had a really positive environment (mostly) for the few women members and any who happened to pop their heads in with a newbie question.
That turned quick, and women were being flooded with “well if you don’t like it, you don’t belong here”, “you should carry a gun at all times to protect yourself or just stay home” victim blaming type stuff. One of many reasons I peaced out, as did so many of the long-time members (men and women) who no longer saw the community they had built.
You know what? Okay! I’m in.
Psh, nice shameless plug for your community bro
…to which I’ll subscribe as soon as I can
Dude the name alone sounds awesome
I’ve just been uploading to imgur and then posting the direct link. Lemm.ee won’t allow direct image uploads, so we kinda need to Jerry rig it for the time being. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After Reddit, Xitter, and Duolingo, I start to feel like hosting our work on a proprietary and profit-driven service is not a great idea.
Agreed, what’s a good alternative I can advertise on my community?
Finally, the rail system U.S. deserves, old, loud, slow, never on time, and is under maintenance EVERY! F**KING! WEEKEND!
Probably not, I doubt they even understand what the fuss was even about and are now wondering why quality has gone down so much and why subs are becoming full of spam and reposes.
Asking anyone who didn’t leave reddit to “understand” anything is an exercise in futility. Their brain lack the wrinkles, because they only eat eucalyptus leaves.
Lol imagine still being on there
It’s infinitely more active than this site. The discussion is equally shitty. The difference is people here feel self righteous…
Thank goodness people on reddit aren’t self righteous lol
Lemmy isn’t any better, I’m only here because it works better on mobile
I don’t use Reddit as much as I used to since the API change. I also don’t use Lemmy much either. It feels different since that moment to me. Both feel quite divisive and don’t get me wrong, Reddit was divisive before the change but it feels like it’s got a lot worse.
The BS in the last comment aside, what about the meme needs moderating? Was it a repost, or is the argument it makes unacceptable on reddit’s piracy board?
