Reddit protest by its community moderators has impacted user engagements, traffic and visits to its ad portal since its beginning on June 12.
      • eleitl@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        The two subs I have still left are now even sensibly NSFW. Many workplaces dislike what is considered IP violation in some jurisdictions. Shareholders frown on that kind of thing.

  • twelve@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    16·
    2 years ago

    I still find astonishing that tech crunch buys the argument of ML model training.

    No one in their sane mind would use the API (that have always been rate limited) for fetch data for text generation. People would use HTTP or, even better, archives of reddit.

    Why? Because there is better or no rate limit, there is no need to write anything (only reading) and it will stay free 🙂 Also super fresh data is not dramatically useful (except in very specific corner cases when something in the news change the way we talk)

    • Hotzilla@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      9·
      2 years ago

      Web crawling has always worked through raw HTTP/HTML parsing, why create site specific API calls that require authentication and are throttled.

      This excuse is pure bullshit.

    • AstralJaeger@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      Considering the Reddit API has a hilariously low limit, I fully understand why the AI bro’s will use a scraping approach instead. I’ve built small discord bots that had a difficult time following the API because you had so little Requests available! I was in the process of building an event-driven system which used multiple API tokens in order to be able to keep up with multiple feeds. Its just terrible.

  • EeeDawg101@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    I think it’ll take a while for us to know the real overall impact spez’s decision has made on Reddit’s user base. Until then, it’s really just speculation unless something concrete comes out (like financial reports etc).

    • n33rg@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Yes, exactly my thoughts as well. I’ve noted the following: I started exploring options and landed on Lemmy as many of us did around the time the API changes were announced At that time, there were a lot of test posts here and loads of Reddit complaints. It was challenging to find real content, but it was clear the community and interest was growing.

      I continued to open various Lemmy apps over Reddit, but still peaked into my Reddit feed periodically and noticed that Reddit was definitely still alive, with the occasional flare up that made browsing annoying. Not much different than when any other viral topic would take over the top posts everywhere, but more regular and less amusing from an entertainment point of view. Those days I had no problem coming to Lemmy almost all day. But that left me with using Lemmy more and more frequently.

      The last couple days, I’ve found that Lemmy is still growing and becoming much more interesting to browse and view, though I definitely see the added complexities and early nature of apps as a limiting factor for the general use at the moment. So going to Reddit now seems to be largely filled with lower effort posts as most users that haven’t migrated are those that felt it was too much work to join a Lemmy community and get reestablished (in my opinion). However, there is still definitely a functional and lively community over there. At least for the time being.

      Whenever I check in on Reddit, I am still using third party apps. Those apps will go dark July 1, so if that actually happens, I likely will stop checking in. And I have no idea how many else will be doing the same.

  • RedSky2200@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    Wait an article I read earlier is claiming that subreddits are business as usual. Now, this article claims the opposite?

    • ruffsl@programming.devOPEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Could you share the link to that one? Thanks. Looks like this TechCrunch article is sourcing info from emails with advertisers partnered with Reddit, not just from public statements about visitor traffic published by Reddit themselves.

      I wonder what the measured metrics are internally. Funny that those earning metrics would’ve been more readily available had they already IPO’ed on the public market.

  • rr7@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    Love it, I deleted my 150k+ karma account last week and never visited again

  • knaugh@frig.socialEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    Those numbers hardly describe a “plunge”. Much lower impact than I had hoped honestly

    • Potato@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      They’re lining up an IPO. Anything suggesting that they can’t maintain 5-10% real growth year after year (like other companies that investors could put their money) is truly damming. A sustained decrease in revenue, even a small one, is going to gut the IPO valuation.

      • knaugh@frig.socialEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I really doubt this will translate into a decrease in revenue, anyways. These numbers suggest very little sustained loss in traffic, and if that continues when the new API pricing kicks in they’ll probably come out ahead

        • Kerfuffle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          These numbers suggest very little sustained loss in traffic

          You’ll probably see a decent sized dip at the point where the changes go into effect. There are probably a lot of people using apps like Apollo until they can’t: once they can’t, certainly not everyone is just going to go install the inferior reddit app and start using it.

          Also, it’s possible the relatively small drop will have more of an effect than might immediately be obvious. Social media sites like reddit, Twitter, etc aren’t really that profitable (when they’re profitable at all) — but people are willing to invest in them because they’re currently still experiencing growth. So in this case, growth has not only stopped, but reddit lost some ground.

    • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Except we can be sure that the entire drop is due to humans deciding Reddit is dead. How much of the remaining traffic are bots?

  • Hazzard@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Don’t love the framing of this paragraph from TechCrunch. It’s not that they’re charging for the API. That’s understandable and obvious, and we all wanted the platform to survive. I’ll be happy to volunteer to contribute to lemmy development/server costs/app development one day. It’s that they’re grossly overcharging for the API to such an extreme degree that paid subscriptions to third party apps actually lose money.

    In April, Reddit announced its plans to start charging developers to access data through its API. The move was obvious — to restrict third parties from accessing Reddit data that can help build text-generating machine learning models such as OpenAI’s GPT 4. Developers building apps and bots to assist people using Reddit and researchers who wish to study the platform for noncommercial purchases were among the few exceptions. However, as a result, third-party apps, including popular Reddit client Apollo, found it difficult to pay for those charges and decided to go offline. Various popular subreddit moderators came in support of those apps and developers and started protesting against the API pricing move.