Savvy tech users consistently underestimate how much hostile corporate behavior the general population is willing to put up with.

A week ago: Bring down the API costs. I’d have begrudgingly accepted paying a few extra bucks a year for Apollo Ultra.

Today: Nothing. Reddit admins acted like smug children in the face of the Apollo Dev’s good faith questions, then the CEO and admins pulled the stunt of trying to act like the dev threatened them. Then the CEO doubled down on that story in the sham AMA. I don’t want to feed that machine anymore.

I have edited and then deleted all my posts and comments except for a few final ones that will go soon. I will keep the account but only as a point of contact for some people until I get them all contacting my email instead.

We are all performing a thought exercise with the presumption Reddit’s goal was to come to a mutually beneficial understanding with third party apps. The proposed solutions are fundamentally misunderstanding Reddit’s intent.

Reddit doesn’t want to find a way to be paid by the apps. They want to kill the apps. Any compromise measure is counterproductive to that goal.

The excuses that Reddit gives are not meant for people like us. The excuses don’t hold up to scrutiny but they were never meant to. The excuses are so that people who are only tangentially plugged in see a headline like above, scroll past without reading about it, and subconsciously just accept it.

When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:

knock knock

“Who’s there?”

”Mods. Hired mods.”

“Hired mods?”

I bet it will be massively curated and full of planted questions.

Question: “u/spez, your administration of Reddit is like a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?”

That's been a thing for a long time. Threads can not go into negatives. You can only see the upvote percentage.

You aren't the first person I've seen confused about that, which I think indicates a big problem with reddit's modern design. Back in the old days on every thread and comment you could see both how many up and down votes it got, not just the total number. It was cleaner and more transparent. Over time, reddit has increasingly obfuscated how all the magic numbers work.

I’m actually curious if there will be a spike on Wednesday and after with people logging in to look at the “aftermath”. Remember: Negative engagement is still engagement!

The scumbag Steve hat really gives it the age of a fine wine.

Crowds of people can be incredibly clueless. Before the blackout, there would be stickied posts explaining the whole situation in plain language, and then dozens of comments like “What’s going on I don’t understand??????”

I see this as a positive aspect of the protest.

I am also amused that random people are pounding on the door for access, as if they think approved submitters are having a private tea party inside.

Older people are an obvious demographic that won’t jump ship, but don’t turn a blind eye to the younger generation. It isn’t boomers who throw $70+ at video games on a constant basis. The threshold for a convenience/value ratio seems very low for a lot of people.

As an unrelated and statistically insignificant anecdote, the two biggest pirates I know are both actual literal boomers.

No Spez

No current reddit admins

No API fees

No other weird 3rd party killing nonsense

Everybody gets frosty chocolate milkshakes

That would be a maybe.

Something that a lot of “power user” types aren’t ready to hear is that a huge amount of redditors won’t be affected. Power users avoided r/all like the plague, and I’m sure that I’m not unique among power users in having a very curated feed, but that dismisses that there are legions of people who open the official app, browse r/all, and consider that the experience.

When power users say “but where will Reddit’s content come from if we leave?” I don’t think they understand the situation. r/all is the home of reposts, Twitter screenshots, and political ragebait. Actual quality content creators are not needed. If all personally made original content disappeared from Reddit, a huge chunk of redditors would never notice.

I count myself among such “power users” and like to think I made good original content, but I have to come to grips with the fact that Reddit Inc no longer has use for me.

Stop blackmailing him.

Good news is best delivered piece by piece, bad news all at once.

The outrage against Reddit is already at its peak, may as well use it as cover to do more anti-user stuff.

Hilarious I can still see it on Apollo. I did notice while refreshing on spez’s comments that on that particular comment his name changed from red (normal admin color) to black, and then a few minutes later red again. I don’t know what it means, but it smells.

I also noticed the time posted got fuckity on that comment. I’m looking at comments sorted newest on top but the time of that comment is out of order

I’m going to bee honest, the mascot was a big factor in picking this instance for me.

I’ve continued to tell people: This won’t kill Reddit in the sense of outright turning it into a ghost town. If your only goal is to make Reddit collapse overnight, you’re going to be disappointed. The quality content that many people here enjoy is not what makes up the frontpage of r/all or what a huge amount of passive users consume. Reddit has more than enough low quality trash to backfill the frontpage and keep users occupied.

Anybody migrating should focus on porting quality content. Let reddit live long and be a dumping ground.

That is my feeling. I want Lemmy to be good, so I hope a lot of quality users jump ship from Reddit, but if Reddit retains the millions of passive users, then I’m happy for Reddit to keep them. One part of Reddit’s issue was the diluted quality of posts and comments, so let it continue to exist to filter people who want that experience. ___

I’ll never understand people who break down the gates to buy single player games on launch day.