Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

I wish they would just let Reddit die.<p>I hate it so much. I&#x27;m tired of ecosystems.<p>We need to get away from content farms. Get away from shitty monetization driven efforts. Get away from shitty people moderating communities without giving members any locus of control.<p>Bring back the 90s web. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms.<p>God I hope Reddit sticks to this API nonsense and kills themselves in the process.<p>Part of me wants this to happen to Hacker News too. This community sucks, but for different reasons.

Subreddits are literally controlled by volunteers who get paid nothing. What is stopping them from just going out for a month? It ought to be a month of vacation time, right?<p>You could argue they might lose users, but who cares, Reddit suffers more from loss of users than them anyway.

What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative?<p>Hosting the posts shouldn&#x27;t be that hard. Storage is so cheap these days. Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content?<p>Ranking the posts is another issue. Is that where the value of Reddit lies?<p>Maybe one could build some hybrid thing which capitalizes on existing structures? I could imagine a frontend which only shows posts by users who signed their posts via their Hacker News accounts. Aka they sign their post with a private key and publish the public key on their HN profile. This way, a new Reddit alternative could benefit from the karma distribution of the best community on the web today.<p>Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.

Can someone explain why this is such a big deal to some people? I legitimately don’t understand why this matters.<p>Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage, I’m not sure why inexpensive access to an API is a required right for forum software.<p>I don’t expect this to affect my usage of Reddit at all, and wondering who and what it does affect aside from a small number of third party client users.<p>To be clear, I’m _not_ asserting that there is no reason. I’m just hoping someone can explain what I’m missing.

I&#x27;m perplexed as to what to support here. For someone like me who brazenly hates Instagram, FB, Snapchat kinds of social media, Reddit is a gold mine of wisdom, advice, and content, if used appropriately. And the best way to use it was through third-party apps like Relay, Apollo etc.<p>The eventual loss of better user experience is saddening, but I&#x27;m not sure I fall into the category of not using it at all, because it&#x27;s where I learn about a lot of useful stuff on life, personal finance, frugalism, unfiltered review of a product I haven&#x27;t used yet etc. I hope this decision doesn&#x27;t break the site.

I started to build an alternative: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flingup.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flingup.com</a><p>It’s not much, but it’s honest work. If all this does is create a tiny fragment with a hundred people, I’ll call it success. For now, me and a handful of people use it to share articles we find interesting.

The API arguments are interesting from another point of view - who really owns the content generated on a site like Reddit, Twitter, or Hacker News.<p>Once I send this post out, do I own it? Can I claim some sort of compensation for my comment being used in an AI training set?<p>Does HN (or whichever site I post the comment on) own the comment, and therefore should be compensated for the comment&#x27;s use in said training set?<p>Do we both own the comment, and both have rights to its use?

The mobile reddit site is so bad, it is basically unusable and they tell you to get the app. I personally don&#x27;t even prefer Reddit mobile, I use Apollo if I have to moderate on the go, and it&#x27;s really good for moderation I haven&#x27;t used the Reddits mobile app for moderation but I remember when I did that it was terrible.

I understand the purpose of this and that if they raise a sufficient enough stink, it will likely get them to cave for the time being.<p>However the problem is that they have already showed their true intentions. The business of Reddit is not beholden to users, it’s beholden to its investors. They have an obligation to provide value to them and they decided this is a way to do so. There might be a temporary price reduction but overall, the writing is on the wall: Reddits corporate priorities are no longer aligned with the community’s.

I wish Usenet becomes popular again.

The days of MySpace losing to Facebook or Digg losing to Reddit are over. We reached a phase where the biggest networks are too big to die quickly. It no longer seems possible to replace these sites wholesale.<p>Their decline will look like Craigslist&#x27;s. They&#x27;ll still be around a decade from now, but having slowly and steadily lost traffic and cultural relevance.<p>I fully welcome Twitter and Reddit suddenly sacrificing their future for short term gain. It&#x27;s the only path to being eventually rid of them.<p>And instead of replacing them with new single winners like Mastodon, I&#x27;m hopeful the new trend will be to spread our activity to multiple sites, and to be a bit less online in general.

I&#x27;m curious how the logistics of this strike are going to happen. With the old reddit themes you could just put a black everything over with squares in CSS but the new themes are so uncustomizable (especially in the app) that your average mass consumer may not even notice. In addition, anti-spam&#x2F;anti-bandwagoning measures may be leveraged by reddit to censor protestors in the subreddits, along with banning of &quot;malicious&quot; moderators who attempt to enforce the strike on the most popular of the subreddits. While that would obviously degrade the moderation of those subreddits the sheer inertia of the communities will result in the consuming masses thinking everything is working as usual

I&#x27;ve been following this since it erupted and am currently developing something that I hope will either enable the Reddit community to transition to a new home or force Reddit to abandon its paid API plans.<p>The first step in my plan is to implement a read-only API proxy which does not use Reddit.com&#x27;s API but instead scrapes the necessary data. This should cover 80% of the API traffic, if it works then third-party apps will be able to transition their apps to this new API. So if Reddit does put their API behind a paywall there will be a way for developers to avoid at least some of the ludicrous costs.<p>I already have next steps in mind, but they really depend on what Reddit does. I sincerely hope they reassess what they are doing with their API.

They will be back. I don&#x27;t think they will stick to their guns.<p>They should step up their game if they really want to voice it. Delete all the posts and the accounts. Then if decision is reversed come back with new account.

What is a one day strike going to accomplish?<p>You want to strike? You strike until there is a real financial harm to the company and shit gets changed. Otherwise, keep your useless opinions to yourselves.

I know I&#x27;m not contributing to the conversation, but this is really funny.

I agree. Please let Reddit die already.<p>Just before I stopped using, some stranger messaged me (in the same language) and offered to sell me video sex with a young person.<p>Reddit has become a prostitution platform.

I see this as a grand opportunity to start new subreddits. It&#x27;s been decades that the biggest subreddits are being ran by the same aging small group of moderators. The new ones may not be better over time, but it&#x27;s worth giving it a try.<p>There&#x27;s nothing wrong with reddit finally being a bit more serious about their content which is awesome compared to a lot of what is today&#x27;s internet.<p>Maybe if they focus on making money they &#x27;ll stop their childish grandstanding and culture war