Janny uprising
This is the second time now that a big tech company has recently decided to make changes to their API pricing. First it was Twitter and now Reddit. Strangely enough the reaction to Twitter doing it wasn’t all that negative. People were a bit annoyed and some services and apps might have stopped working but that was mostly it. But when Reddit recently announced their changes a lot of people were very pissed off. The changes in pricing apparently would make third party apps as well as tools impossible because running them would become insanely expensive. Now I don’t know if Twitter’s new prices are more sane, but something seems to be different. One difference might be that the Twitter mobile app isn’t as bad as the Reddit mobile app. I wouldn’t know since I haven’t used either, but one point that I keep hearing is that a lot of people use third-party apps to access Reddit, because the official app is garbage and is also lacking accessibility features for people who use screen-readers.
Because of these announced changes people were very pissed off and voiced their discontent. Apparently you don’t want to awaken the wrath of the phonefags. This resulted in an AMA in which the Reddit CEO tried to appease the masses but ultimately only ended up answering low-ball questions while ignoring the questions that addressed the aforementioned points. Naturally this made people just even more angry. Then the jannies of Reddit rejoiced and started organizing a protest. This protest basically consisted of subreddits being set to private which prevents normal users from seeing any posts or creating new ones. A lot of large and small communities participated in this protest which did actually render large parts of Reddit unusable. When you google for certain topics you’ll almost always get a hand full of posts on Reddit as results which during the protest were all useless. Now of course this wouldn’t be a protest on Reddit if there wasn’t at least one embarrassing side to it. A lot of the jannies wanted to both participate and also not risk any consequences from Reddit staff so they limited their “protest” to only a few days and also communicated this publicly. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that this kind of protest is useless. It shows that you have no spine and no commitment to the cause. The protest is supposed to evoke a reaction and should continue until that happens. If you limit it then they’ll just wait until it’s over.
And that is exactly what they did. The CEO then sent an internal memo which basically said exactly that. He assured that the protest will blow over and things will continue normally afterwards. Had he not posted this in a memo it might as well have come true, but because he said what everyone with two braincells to rub together already knew people became even more pissed off. As a result a lot of the subreddits changed their protest from a few days to indefinite. This would be commendable had they not bent the knee again at the next possible opportunity. Now that the CEO realized that this might not blow over so quickly after all he had another brilliant idea. He’d just force the subreddits to reopen. So the jannies all got a nice little message telling them that they could either reopen the subreddit or they’d have their janitor privileges revoked and would be replaced by someone even dumber. As a result the affected subreddits reopened again. The current status is that these communities are open again but most users have agreed to post content that is only technically on topic, i.e. the subreddit r/Steam for the digital game store Steam is full of images of actual steam engines. This is the most reddit thing to happen. I don’t know how they think this’ll change the CEO’s mind, but who cares.
Get to the point
So what’s the problem here? Is Reddit in the wrong? Are redditors just stupid? People like to argue that Reddit owes its success solely to the brave and stunning redditors who post wholesome big chungus memes all day and the jannies who clean up the actual good posts every day. This is not entirely wrong since the site obviously is entirely reliant on people posting stuff on it, but at the same time they offer a service that costs money to run. The internet has over the decades shifted away from smaller more tightly knit communities who are managed by hobbyists to big centralized companies. These companies almost always run on millions of dollars from investors and they bleed money like crazy. Reddit serves millions of posts and thousands of terabytes of data, essentially for free. Over the past years they’ve tried to monetize the site with their stupid rewards and advertisements, but it’s hard to imagine that this would somehow pay the bills. This is true for almost all big tech services. Twitch, Discord, Twitter, YouTube etc. all hardly turn a profit, because they offer their core service for “free” while having to pay for expensive hardware, software and employees. Usually the goal is to just acquire as many users as possible as this is the metric by which they measure their success. A big service with many monthly active users will attract investors. Caring about turning a profit is a problem for the future.
From what I’ve heard the new pricing for the API isn’t really to make Reddit more profitable. Apparently the prices are way too high to make any sense. If they want Reddit to be profitable they’d have to choose prices that help cover the cost of running Reddit while still being affordable enough for third-party developers and the users of those tools and apps. If that’s not the case nobody will pay for the API. I haven’t looked into this too much, but if that’s the case then the prices are just there to stop people from using the API so that more people use Reddit’s official app, which sounds pretty stupid, but might as well be true. Ultimately this isn’t really the point that I’m interested in. What I find more interesting is that people have noticed that they’re being screwed by a big company and that being reliant on a hand full of centralized services is a liability. And while they have realized that much the conclusion they come to is fairly bizarre. They try to protest the decision and think that they can reason with a large corporation by doing half-assed protests. If they really wanted to send a message they’d just have deleted entire subreddits including all messages. Some users did that with their own accounts, but only very few. To me most of these protests just showed Reddit how much these users depend on the site. They can’t even shut down indefinitely or do something that has a more lasting impact. Some have moved to alternative services which is commendable, but there really isn’t any good federated replacement for Reddit right now. The best option would be to just create individual sites for different topics like rdrama.net. There’re a bunch of other subreddits that were banned and then turned into their own sites using a fork of the old Reddit codebase. These sites aren’t federated, but since they’re based on actual Reddit source code they’re the closest you’ll get to actual Reddit. But it doesn’t really matter where people would switch to as long as they actually did that. That would actually send a message to Reddit, but that’s the issue. Most of these people are way too invested and dependent on Reddit and instead of seeing that this is an issue they just hope that the protest will somehow fix a problem with the site so they can go back to mindlessly browsing it. The average Reddit user doesn’t even use a screen-reader and is probably already using the official Reddit app, so I can definitely see this actually blowing over fairly soon. At the same time it remains to be seen if the people that did switch will stay by their decision.