What Would Aaron Swartz Think Of Reddit’s Ridiculous New Direction?
from the closing-off-the-commons dept
Aaron Swartz was, perhaps by technicality, a co-founder of Reddit. The more complete story is that he was working on a different project, infogami, that got merged into Reddit, which was created by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, but it’s been said that part of the deal was that all three would get founder credit. Years later, Huffman insisted that Swartz wasn’t really a co-founder and shouldn’t be called such. But, still, Swartz’s views on access to information were certainly a compelling part of early Reddit’s existence.
As you likely know, Swartz believed in open access to information, which likely contributed to his efforts to free academic research, leading to his arrest and the ridiculous criminal charges against him, which likely contributed to his dying by suicide.
Given all of that, I do wonder what Aaron would think, over a decade later, of his former company that he helped grow, locking up information under new ridiculous API terms.
Seemingly taking a page from Twitter (and some other companies) seeing (1) API access as a possible revenue stream, and (2) ridiculously freaking out over generative AI tools being trained on their data, Reddit announced it April that it would begin charging for API access.
A few weeks ago, the developer of Apollo, a popular Reddit app, said that Reddit was pricing the new API in a way that would cost his firm $20 million per year, a price so ridiculous that Apollo has now announced it’s shutting down the app. In many ways this is reminiscent of Twitter cutting off all the popular third party apps that users relied on (and also the ridiculous pricing of Twitter’s new API).
Between this and Facebook instituting paid verification it feels like parts of the internet industry are copying Elon’s bad ideas.
Huffman did a Reddit AMA (natch) late last week, and doubled down on the API fees. Much of Reddit is up in arms over this. There are users, subreddits, and moderators who are all protesting the changes. And a few of the small subreddits I’m in are talking about decamping for other sites.
Huffman’s responses to the AMA also really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, including making a bunch of claims about the developer of Apollo that felt unfair and mean-spirited.
And, really, this whole thing is ridiculous. I can understand efforts to offer a paid API for more direct access to certain features, but it should be standard practice to allow third parties to build apps that interact with your service. Hell, Reddit didn’t even have a mobile app for many, many years and was totally dependent on third party apps (or web access).
It feels like so many of these efforts are really about shutting down access to the open web, locking up data and information in their various siloes. It’s against the very spirit of Aaron Swartz, who helped create one version of RSS among other things, and believed in not just open access to information, but that the internet was designed so that people could build on-top of others’ work, enabling everyone to build better and better solutions.
Instead, we’re seeing companies like Twitter and Reddit looking to lock up information, joining companies like Meta which have long had a somewhat siloed view of how information should work.
Perhaps we need a “Bluesky-like” project for Reddit, building a more decentralized, open protocol for communities of interest. Arguably, that was Usenet/NNTP, but perhaps it’s time for someone to either reinvigorate that or create something new that is more modern, and can be more connected either in a federated manner or a truly decentralized one. There are, already, a few attempts at building a Reddit-like service on ActivityPub, including Kbin and Lemmy (which, because they’re both in the fediverse, interoperate). Incredibly, over the weekend (in another Elon-like move), Reddit temporarily banned a subreddit about Kbin, though as people started pointing out the hypocrisy, the subreddit was allowed to return.
Playing around with Lemmy over the weekend made me think it has real promise — and along those lines wonder what Huffman thinks he’s doing at Reddit. Yes, the company is desperate to complete it’s planned IPO, and yes, to do so he needs to look like the company can become profitable. But how’s he going to do that if the site’s most committed users are leaving?
Already, thousands of subreddits have gone dark, and while the blackout is supposed to be for 48 hours, some subreddits, including the massive r/music have said they’ll stay dark until the API issue is fixed:
So what would Aaron Swartz think of all this? I think he’d be out there leading the protest, spinning up a Lemmy server, and making sure that the information continues to flow, rather than get locked up.
Filed Under: aaron swartz, access to information, ai, api, federation, fees, lemmy, open information, protocols, steve huffman
Companies: reddit
Comments on “What Would Aaron Swartz Think Of Reddit’s Ridiculous New Direction?”
Everybody is looking at Elsevier and trying to find a way to lock up a market in a similar fashion.
Many years ago I enjoyed Digg … too bad what happened there.
Until recently I was enjoying Reddit … too bad what’s happening there.
I suppose it is the natural progression of a business or something like that.
I look forward to the replacement of Reddit.
Rinse, Repeat
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When people stop supporting (with there time and energy) for-profit driven companies that don’t put its users interests front and center, by way of a publicly written agreement, only then will will the madness stop.
Its not the fault of the companies, is the users that, time after time, put there energy into systems that don’t serve them.
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“Its not the fault of the companies, is the users”
Victim blaming is fun game, impress your friends and family.
Re: Re: Re:
There’s enough fault to spread around, really. If you want to call it fault.
Reddit built itself on a model that relied on free moderating (via the customers), paying for it with advertising.
Either it’s not satisfied with the revenue from advertising (fscking stockholders, anyway…), or the advertising doesn’t cover the nut anymore.
It doesn’t matter what Reddit did to remedy the revenue situation, it’s a change to the basic bargain with the moderators and users.
The fact that Reddit chose a way that would bite them in the ass, well, that’s on them. That they didn’t crowdsource a solution, that too is on them.
But the moderators and the users? They get what they pay for. They’ve been paying with time and eyeballs-on-ads. Maybe they’d be willing to buy Reddit out and deal with the costs themselves?
Re: Re: Re:2
“There’s enough fault to spread around, really. If you want to call it fault.”
I did not call it fault, I said victim blaming is fun.
Why is it that the first thing for some is whose fault is it?
Re: Re: Re: it's the users
Users create and curate the content, for free. Users moderate the content for free. All Reddit has to do is keep the lights on. Instead it took all that VC money and overhired? Now it wants to IPO to pay back VC.
Re: Re:
They kinda are doing that right now by joining the fediverse. If anything, it’s a return to form–if not to the roots–for the internet.
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the word is enshitfication
Re: There's a name for it...
It’s called Enshittification.
I knew Aaron. I really wish he was around to give his opinion on this.
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If there’s one time I wish TechDirt had reactions in the style of Facebook, LinkedIn, or especially Discord or Slack, it’s now, so I could react to that post like thus:
😢
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Me too.
I wish he were still with us for many reasons.
Twitter, Reddit et al need to start paying contributors (aka people who post stuff) for their content. Hey… this ain’t no free ride, fellas! …you wanna get, then you should give, too.
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See above
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Funny; that’s exactly what I think Reddit (and Twitter, Elsevier, et al.) believe. They’re just interpreting it differently than you. If not for their benevolence, the people freeloading off Reddit to host communities would have to pay for web hosting, right?
Re: Re:
“If not for their benevolence”
tongue in cheek?
“the people freeloading off Reddit”
Who .. advertisers, grifters, bullshitters?
“host communities would have to pay for web hosting”
I wonder who pays the mods … hmmm.
Re: Re: Re:
You’re missing the point. glenn was suggesting that it’s Reddit who needs its users. I’m saying Reddit, Twitter, and the academic journals are acting like it’s the users who need them. So, from Reddit’s point of view, the moderators should be paying Reddit for data storage and transfer.
Reddit’s position seems short-sighted in both past and future terms, and reminds me of a quote from the film Clerks: “this job would be great if it wasn’t for the fucking customers”, said by a video rental clerk. Reddit was initially popularized by people fleeing Digg, after that similar site’s management pissed them off. And that used to happen all the time; the internet is littered with the zombies of once-dominant sites like MySpace, LiveJournal, and others, nevermind the ones that have gone offline entirely.
Reddit’s code is even open-source (excepting the recent versions, which are widely disliked anyway). Any idiot who can set up a web server and database could run a clone.
Re: Re: Re:2
… and that is why Reddit is circling the bowl
Re: Re: Re:3
I have the same feeling, but who knows? People can stick with abusive companies for way too long. The group involved with this “blackout” do have specific demands, suggesting they’ll stick with Reddit if Reddit simply backs off their most recent plan.
Have any major subreddits actually moved elsewhere, or announced firm or conditional plans to do so? And will the users follow the moderators? What if Reddit replaces them, undoes the blackouts, and deletes every mention of blackouts or moving?
Re: Re: Re:2
Until they need multiple servers to handle the load, along with a CDN or a bundle of fibers for the same reason.
Re: Re: Re:3
Yes, not any idiot can do Reddit at Reddit’s scale. That’s legitimately hard, and the Reddit people were in over their heads, too, in the early days. But if someone’s got a small-to-medium subreddit, they could pretty easily move that to a virtual private server. And then have to manage spam and maybe denial-of-service attacks, but not fiber or hardware.
Re: Re: Re:2
Which is kind of funny, because for the most part the users don’t need Reddit at all. As in not even a little bit. It could be completely shut off forever, and generally the users would just go find something else to do with their time. Perhaps some of them would lose a tool they found useful for something. Perhaps they would find a replacement, and perhaps not. But without the users, Reddit has no value whatsoever.
"New" direction?
There’s nothing new about Reddit inventing ways to suck. It’s one reason why many people stick to “old.reddit.com” (and here’s the proper question-and-answer link). Although, even there, the “load more comments” “links” have been targeted at “javascript:void(0)” for like a decade; which means they can’t be used without Javascript; and even if you’ve got that enabled, you’re still screwed if you try to open the “link” in a new window or tab.
I think it was a couple of years ago that they started sticking ads into the list of stories, even on the “old” server. They’ve been trying to push people from the website to the phone app for a long time, and just last week I heard they’ve ratcheted it up to the level where they randomly ban people from browser-based access and tell them they have to use the app if they want to access Reddit. It’s long past time to leave. It’s just too bad they occasionally show up in search results, or linked from other sites.
Re: it works for now
I have a feeling (and i’m not the only one) that feel old.reddit is next on the chopping block. I think it will suddenly stop working without explanation, or they will announce that they have to kill it because of some new feature that will break if old.reddit still exists.
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I just ended up there via a web search, and they’ve got banner ads on the comment pages now. Banner ads! Didn’t most sites get rid of those like 10-15 years ago? Certainly it’s been years since I saw one on Reddit or felt the necessity for an ad-blocker.
What we've got here is... failure to communicate.
I fail to understand how owners of advertising based businesses think they can increase the value of the business by upsetting the turning away the people the advertisers want to reach. Reddit has a incredibly good user self-segregation that gives advertisers access to people with very special interests. Just what many other platforms are struggling to do today. Secondly, why would managers think they can engineer the people that use the site to conform to what the company wants them to be? I guess they have been sitting at that desk for too long and only soliciting the opinions they want to hear.
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Those vaunted decision makers spend more time at golf courses, seminars and board meetings than they do at a desk.
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What are you talking about?
Apollo has 1.5M monthly users. Reddit has 430M monthly active users. So the number ‘turned away’ is maybe 1% when you add all the [dozen or so] clients that would be impacted this way. And those users, they’re NOT SEEING THE ADVERTS.
So, your argument about ‘turning away the users the advertisers want’ fails, because the total number of users actually impacted is low, and they literally didn’t see the adverts anyway.
Re: Re:
I suppose that is a business decision, maximize short term profits or maximize usability. Is there a way to achieve both? IDK – has anyone tried?
Re: Re: The 1%
The people who rely on third party apps the most are the army of volunteer Moderators. These apps provide essential tools to administer content, prevent spam and make these communities functional.
Reddit could have easily bought iOS and Android devs out to provide the tools Mods depend on to keep Reddit usable.
It is good example of the process which Cory Doctorov
called enshittification
Magical thinking
The owners of these companies want to make more money without adding anything of value. Brilliant!
Did Elon buy Reddit?
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Nah, it’s either a hedge fund, or Wall Street enshittifying the place up.
If Elon bought Reddit, it’d be very fucking obvious, if Twitter is of any indication.
Morbidity
Just like Slashdot exists, so Reddit will exist. Zombification is coming
IPO
Well, there’s part of the problem. Another part is that none of these UGC sites are actually profitable to begin with.
Handling these problems by being asshats certainly is of no help.
Interesting discussion:
“Wild guess: visiting a private sub requires an extra call to a service/db to check if the user can view it. Normally there are only a small number of these checks because private subs were usually small communities. Now, many large subs having switched private is causing some poor mircoservice somewhere to get hammered.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36294244
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Reddit is full of bluffers
Anyone talking shit about reddit has no balls to follow through.
It’s simple: leave the website and don’t look back.
Protest by not visiting it anymore
When ibuprofen was trolled, and people against controversial injections were banned- I dipped and never looked back
All you pussies can’t handle withdrawal.
Go cold turkey
Fuck reddit, leave
With the blackout of r/funny, how are people supposed to find out if the blackout is funny? Or all the memes about reddit being black out (drunk-on greed)
I do wish proper tech outlets (like this one!) would stop using Bluesky as an example of an open, decentralized Twitter-adjacent thing.
Please understand Bluesky has T&C’s which give them ownership of the protocol and all the content. Jack knows what he’s doing in attempting “Twitter 2.0 but I promise it’s open this time”
I get all the frustration with ActivityPub (I run a mid-sized mastodon instance), but we really need people to see Bluesky for what it is.
What’s forgotten is that he has 1.5M monthly active users, and has a $5/month subscription option. His company also makes NINE BILLION API calls a month.
When he says he can’t afford to pay $20M, he means that then he’ll have 20M less in income.
His users keep saying the app is so amazing and great compared to everything else, yet not great enough for those users to pay $15/year (far less than the $60/year they currently offer), which would more than cover it even at the 30% apple cut (which they don’t pay, being in their ‘small business’ exception).
but there’s been a lot of peer-pressure thrown at subreddit mods, by mods from other ones, usually with helpings of lies, like its killing accessability features and all that.
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So it was a bad business model from day one?
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Looks like that small business exception is only if you make less than a million a year. So which is it? Is Apollo under that exception, or is it already making more than $20M a year?
Are you assuming all 1.5M of those monthly users are paying the $5? You realize that’s ridiculous, right?
You also forget, or perhaps are deliberately ignoring, that Reddit gave app developers only 30 days warning to deal with how steep these fees are. 30 days to absorb the surprise, figure out a new business model, communicate to their users, I update their app and then get it through the app stores’ verification process (which is so famously quick /s).
It’s worth noting
I’d like to point out for this audience the first comment below the screenshot that Mike posted of r/music is from a long time (volunteer) moderator who I used to mod with years ago on r/music. In their comment (summarizing from memory, since the sub is private until Spez decides to overthrow the current team and install someone more corporate friendly), they mention that:
So, think about it for a second: when Spez gets on an AMA and says “oh yeah, mod tools, coming soon!”, and the people who have not just been volunteering their time, but have been paying money out of pocket to keep the damn lights on say, “nah, I think I’m done”, that’s maybe a sign that you’ve misjudged how much value Reddit brings versus the literal army of volunteers (who on any other site are paid, poorly likely, but are absolutely not paying for the privilege) and
talented content creators / curators / etc. that made Reddit a place worth visiting.
Maybe nothing will change and they can cruise through to an IPO, after all we do live in a one of the most cursed timelines, but maybe this time Reddit will learn some of the lessons about the impact of valuation and pissing off segments of your user base that create value that the folks at Twitter have(n’t) recently
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as a reminder, nothing about those mod tools access were changing. The claims it was was part of a whole pile of BS claims, that those mods staked their position on, and now literally can’t back down on because their egos won’t let them.
And no, Volunteers don’t get paid, that’s what volunteer means.
Also, this IS the corporate-friendly thing (what it’s not friendly to, is the ego’s of the big subreddit mods) as a lot of it was prompted by the news ChatGPT was trained on reddit, and these costs make it expensive for anyone to do it again. so it’s reducing their liability from the scraping.
Plus it’s an income stream that means those making millions off reddit and not paying reddit a penny (such as Christian Selleg) will start paying for the content he’s monetizing.
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As the content is not Reddits, why should they get paid for its use?
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A common trait among the wealthy is a desire for slaves, idk why but the wealthy need those super boats!!!
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This does seem plausible. I’m way too ignorant to comment on this in technical detail, but I do know of at least three other moral panics that had dubious foundations (all pertaining to Blizzard, because that’s what I’ve been following).
With this track record (let alone real-world examples such as QAnon or BLM), it would be safe tentatively to say that the moderators are throwing a temper tantrum, so near and dear to many Westerners, up to the destruction of their very own [online] communities. Now what I could have learned by a quick Google search, I have to bother folks on Discord with. Web 3.0 is a failure.
What I haven’t seen so far in the coverage – how much is Reddit traffic down these past few days?
I also don’t understand why they didn’t just ban 3rd party apps instead of putting on a clearly unreasonable and bullshit price. Or change the TOS and API so that they show Reddit ads.
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I don’t understand why some folk think blood comes out of turnips.
I knew him. He was a spoiled little shit who hurt people as often as he hurt himself.
Amazing that people act like he invented Reddit or something.
Dark days
Every thread that goes dark is taking a risk. A risk that the users fully and completely agree with the reason for the protest.
In reality I’d bet money on significant losses to a good number of these topics as users simply create a new one or move off site.
Doing dark in protest is still censorship. And censorship is routed around.
Wave goodbye to a good many of these threads.
This needs a sequel
Given the news that Reddit is now axing privacy rules altogether by preventing users from opting out to having their ad data “personalized”/sold to the highest bidder, I immediately thought of “what would Aaron think?” and this article was the first thing to pop up in my search. @MikeMasnik
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Don’t know. But you don’t see a mass exodus over this either.
I disagree with forced targeting. It should always be a choice. But I prefer targeted advertising. I’m more likely to click through and buy something that way.