2y ago

AMAs are the latest casualty in Reddit’s API war

arstechnica.com AMAs are the latest casualty in Reddit’s API war

"Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably."

203 comments

AMAs died when Reddit fired Victoria, they haven’t been worth a shit in a while.
- Victoria leaving was tragic but can we talk about Rampart?
  
  Lol I remember someone in that thread asking Woody if he remembered taking a high school girl to her prom and knocking her up. And the social media manager faking Woody’s involvement just answering “can we stick to the movie?”
  
  I always have time to talk about Rampart.
  
  I just had a good laugh at myself because rampart is so non-existent in my mind, that I had to Google what the hell you were talking about.
  So Woody Harrelson is forever famous for the worst AMA ever because he aggressively plugged a movie that must've been so bad and irrelevant that I have no idea what people are talking about when they reference it today.
- They mention this in the article
- Who is Victoria?
  
  In the statement from the AMA mods, they stated that if Reddit wanted to continue providing that sort of celebrity outreach that they had been doing for free, they should hire a liaison for that.
  Before the mods took that responsibility on for themselves, Victoria (/u/chooter on Reddit) used to be that person.
  Victoria was able to pull in some big names for AMAs, and she was good at identifying good/interesting questions and helping with submitting responses. Reddit unceremoniously fired her one day and the quality of celebrity AMAs dropped significantly after that.
  
  https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33787004

That's not just any publication, it's owned by Reddit's largest shareholder. They must be worried.
- Reddit created a way to drive more people to its native apps (where Reddit shows ads and generates revenue) as of July 1. But we can't overlook that Reddit was built on people's willingness to provide free content and labor, and the API battle has driven away some of the most popular content and veteran volunteer mods.
  Reddit won the battle for API fees, but the war for desirable content—something no social media platform can ever be complacent about—is at risk. And that's not the type of problem that ousted mods and forcibly reopened subreddits can fix.
  Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
  This is too good.
  
  the last line in that article gave me whiplash. like oh shit
- Tbf Ars is extremely editorially independent
- I'll be damned. I had no idea Conde Nast owned it. That said I can see a more recent injection of $150M by Tencent too.
  
  On an unrelated note, r/sino is now a default sub.
  
  Conde Nast has owned Reddit in some part since at least 2012. They've tended to stay pretty hands off with it though.

AMAs stopped being interesting a while ago. It was more like a quick press release session with celebrities trying to promote their latest stuff.
I kinda miss the IAmA part of it. People like us in usual or unusual circumstances sharing their daily lives. Researchers in remote islands, members of ethnicities or cultures that rarely get media attention, cool or unconventional jobs and how they got there. People and their stories.
- Agreed, all it is now is a marketing stunt. Usually with responses built by some lawyer or publicist. But anyway, 1 horse sized duck or 100 duck sized horses?
  
  Guys. I'm here to discuss the movie Rampart.
  
  It's definitely 1 horse sized duck. I mean 100 duck sized horses would swarm you in seconds! I don't get why everyone thinks they can just stomp 100 of anything!! They would circle you and it would be over!
- Yep, that's why it was interesting. Celebs are mostly boring and already have access to platforms if they want to talk to people.
  I want to hear from people who I'd normally never get to listen to and who want to share details of their interests.
  
  celebs are mostly boring and already have access to platforms if they want to talk to people.
  Lucky for me, I, Margot Robbie, can say things on Lemonworld that I would never say in public. So that's a plus.
  
  Podcasts, too. Like, Jeremy Irons is such a great actor, but it's boring hearing him talk about his castle and riding horses. Hearing 2 comedians talk is fun, though.

Tldr: iama mods are no longer seeking out celebrities or doing any high value organizing like that. They will do only basic modding.
- Sorry for the meta question, but what’s the difference between AMA and IAMA? Are these 2 different subs?
  
  IAMA was the subreddit that hosted AMAs.
  Both acronyms come from the titling format: “I am a XYZ, ask me anything”
  
  AMA ask me anything IAMA I am a
  
  The latter belongs to Apple's ecosystem.
  
  Iirc two different subs with similar concepts, but I'm not going back to check.
- Why are they still doing moderation for free on a horrible website that is reddit? They should just quit & laugh.

Why would they want to do something for free for a company that shows them no appreciation? This is the right move.
- Honestly, any user or mod that sticks around Reddit after this entire thing…I just don’t get. How can you be so disregarded, have your opinion so thoroughly dismissed, and then just keep creating content and driving traffic to the company? Fuck capitalism, but fuck reddit in this particular instance.
  
  Honestly, any user or mod that sticks around Reddit after this entire thing…I just don’t get.
  Because they don't care. Why do you think people are still sticking with Facebook and TikTok?
  
  I didn't even care about the original API issue that much but when spez started talking shit and heavy handing mods it left such a bad taste that I'm here on Lemmy now.
  
  I understand users, they just want the forum and don't care about the politics.
  Mods on the other hand... it's a busy job that you are already doing for free. If the platform is turning against you what incentive is there to work for them?
- There are a couple small subreddits I’m part of that are lifelines, close communities for people who need a space to share information & be themselves. I’ve checked in on them once during the past month & they’re still holding together. The mods are staying because those small groups of users need them & don’t have another place to go. I expect once the Fediverse spawns more highly specialized niche communities, they’ll drift over.
  
  This makes absolutely no sense. The smaller the community is, the easier it is to migrate. They could just go to literally any other service.
  The community is the people, not the platform.

It annoys me how none of the news articles mention spez's lying about the Apollo Dev trying to blackmail Reddit.
That's the singular thing that drove me away.
- That was the event that changed me from "sure, I'll wait out a two day protest" to "wow, I should stop using this website."
- They’re expecting lawsuits to fly, and don’t want to touch it with a 10-foot pole lest they get dragged in.

Actually worthwhile AmAs have been a casualty on Reddit for a while and I don't blame the mods one bit.
- That era ended when they fired Victoria.
  
  I think we should get back to talking about rampart
  
  That was a sad day too iirc.
- your name is all emojis?
  
  Go into your settings and you can make your Display Name be anything. For example I changed mine in honour of you...
  ETA: Wait - it didn't work. My sorcery has failed!

Hey this is X celebrity, btw check my latest project, coming out tomorrow. Amas quickly became an easy promotional platform.
- "Ask Me Anything About Rampart"
  
  Ask me about LOOM
- Not if it's my latest project, "Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.
  
  Lmao thanks Margot
  
  Who's managing this account?
- It's one of the reasons I stopped going to them. Once I realized that if I saw an AMA for a specific person, it must have meant that they were just there shilling some new project.
  
  I mean it's literally no different from guests on talk shows or podcasts. They are almost never there just for fun.
  And I get it. Why would you put yourself through that unless you're promoting something?
- It's give and take. As long as they also answer the questions it's pretty effective. Why else would a celebrity or politician so an ama?
  
  Idk for fun? ¯(ツ)_/¯

I bet spez is really regretting that "landed gentry" comment now. IAmA is one of reddit's most well-known communities.
- It was a flawed system, but it really benefited Reddit. Volunteer mods did it because they were supposed to be the leaders of their communities and reddit was supposed to just be a platform for hosting them. By attacking that system they removed the main incentive for volunteer mods to exist.
  
  Yeah it really went from "This is your community. You created it and can run it how you want. Reddit is just a collection of loosely-connected, privately-run forums" to "This is my subreddit and I expect you to work for free making it nice for me, even though you created it."
- I wonder if he thinks about it at all or if he's got a gang of yes men telling him it's all good.
- Spez pm'd me and said he canceled my AMA because my elbows are too pointy. :(

I remember how James Corden got fucked over while holding his AMA. Good times.
The Fediverse needs to trick him over here too, so we can do it again. See it as the Fediverses official legitimization or coming-of-age ceremony on the internet.
- I don't, what happened?
  
  Here- this way you don't have to go to Reddit to read about it- https://www.distractify.com/p/james-corden-ama-mean
  
  Have fun!
- I memba this. That was crazy.

I haven't seen a good AMA on that sub for over 5 years already. This, to me, is like hearing that someone shot my already dead dog. Upsetting, but I had already moved on.

I’ll be very curious to see the stats start rolling in regarding any decrease in Reddit’s views, etc. since July 1. I’m still using it, but only about half as much as I did with Apollo.
- I doubt we will see any big dent in numbers so soon, if at all. The brutal honest truth is that most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else. This is why subreddits protested as they did, interrupting the content feed with blackouts and extremely niche rules.
  What may actually happen is that a lot of the content creators leave, which will decrease the quality of the site in the long term and maybe push out the casual user when the content gets bad enough. This is not something easily quantifiable, so we'll just have to wait and see.
  But personally, I'm ok even if reddit isn't toppled. Now that I've stopped using it, I have no stake in the matter anymore.
  
  Yeah. In the beginning I'm rooting for the death of reddit but now that I've weaned myself off of it I just don't give a shit any more. They can rake in billions, or they can crumble tomorrow. I'm elsewhere and I feel fine.
  
  Im a casual reddit lurker. I left because the official reddit app is horrible to browse even casually
  
  If, you are correct that..
  most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else.
  And, a lot of the content creators and content moderators leave, decreasing the quality of the content on reddit.
  Then, these lurkers will leave the platform.
  I don't see why these folks would stay on reddit if the content decreases in quality. Especially, if we are assuming these lurkers do nothing to contribute to the content they are consuming.
  It's interesting, you actually provided great evidence which counters your original claim that reddit will not be affected by all of this bad publicity.
  
  I hope reddit adopts twitters new rate limiting and stars making people log in to view content that will really drive traffic away and make searches for blank reddit searches dissappear from Google and hopefully be replaced by blank lemmy start showing up in Google
- I deleted my account, I still browse on desktop but I won’t interact.
  I’m glad RES lets you block subreddits even if logged out, because there’s some real shitholes which appear if you aren’t logged in
- I’m only using Reddit on Safari now that Apollo is gone and, even then, my use has been minimal since the blackout last month.
  It will be slow, but Reddit’s death will be fine for me. I will definitely miss the smaller, niche communities, but I think they’ll all find a way to carry on either through Lemmy, et al, or whatever rises from there.
  Reddit’s decisions, from investing in NFTs to letting go of Victoria way back when, have all been contributing to the inevitable, but when the content providers leave - and they are - the site will just collapse. My schadenfreude lies in Reddit never even realizing its IPO after all this drama.
- you can see the posts/comments per day on this site:
  https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
  there was definitely a dip, but there seems to always be a dip on weekends and with it being a holiday in the US it is hard to say how much that is affecting usage
  Wednesday should be the first 'normal' day since July 1st so I'll be interested to see how much it recovers
  
  I’m much more curious about interactions/engagement than views. How many posts and comments compared to before the API changes?
- I don’t really care if Reddit dies as long as we keep getting good content here on the fediverse. So far I have been totally surprised exactly how good this place has been as far as activity goes. I will miss the niche communities on Reddit so if we can siphon a bit more growth off this is excellent but the various Lemmy servers have enough activity to replace Reddit for general content for me
- I only use it when I'm on desktop. Their mobile app isn't bad in my opinion, but I just refuse to give them my data.

I thought I would keep using old.reddit after they killed RiF but I’ve abandoned the platform all together. Finally got my lemmy account and I’m not going back. Google still shows me Reddit when I search for just about anything but I’m actively avoiding them.
- For me, it wasn't so much the loss of third party apps as it was the way the admins handled it. I had never realized how little they actually valued their community. Instead, everything was about the money. Too bad they failed to see that users and the content they created was the reason Reddit was worth anything in the first place.
  
  There were absolutely paths forward that would have worked to allow 3rd party apps without price gouging them. The whole thing was in bad faith and they never wanted to allow 3rd party apps at all, they just didn't want to announce they were kicking them off the platform. It wasn't just about the money, it was about control. Control over the users by forcing them to use their app where they could push unwanted content on you and degrade your experience to maximize profits. The 3rd party apps made money by providing a better user experience which was directly counter to their aims to maximize profits.
  3rd party apps did not make a huge percentage of the user base, so why were they so afraid of them? I think the answer is that they are planning on making the user experience on the main app much worse and they know users would be looking for alternatives after, so they went out to kill the alternatives, or charge them an insane amount.
- Just add “-reddit.com” to the ed of your query and the search engine will omit results from that site.
  
  I hope someday instead of google, I go to a website that has the fediverse indexed and directs me right to a Lemmy thread with my answer.
  Google is shit, Reddit was what I searched for everything on and now Reddit is shit.
  Let’s fucking go Lemmy I have faith in you
- That was my line of thinking too, more or less. After RiF, I was like "I guess RedReader is still up, since they got an exemption! I'll just wait out till July 1 then switch to that.
  But the day after the protest, I just decided to drop the platform altogether. It felt spineless calling out reddit on their bullshit, just to fall in line and still give traffic to their site.

Lemmy needs to come up with their own term for an AMA.
- Lemmy Ask You
  
  That’s fucking perfect
  
  Or from the reverse, Lemmy Answer You. Are we okay with the inevitable shortened version being LAY? Perhaps we should keep the "anything" on the end so it becomes LAYA. Much better SEO.
  
  You won.
  
  Quick someone make it real
  
  That felt real good
  
  Nice
- Ask someone something.
  
  Ding ding, we have a winner.
  
  (⁠ㆁ⁠ω⁠ㆁ⁠)
- Eh Reddit doesn’t own that term, let’s just take it
  
  I agree. Reddit didn't trademark AMA so that means we can use it too.
- LAMA
- AMAR - Ask Me About Rampart
- ASA - ask someone anything
  
  AKIRA: Ask Knowledgeable Individuals - Receive Answers
  
  This triggers geometry memories with right triangles.
  Angle Side Angle
- "Q&A" has already been around for decades before reddit.
- I don't think Lemmy is big enough for more high profile people to come here. The main reason celebrities do AMAs are for publicity for whatever they're promoting. Lemmy has way less total users than /r/iama has.
  
  It wasn't originally any celebrities or high profile people at all, it was literally like, "I'm a postal worker who's also an amputee, AMA" and it was great. Rampart ruined the format, IMO.
  
  I thought about this the other day.
  I couldn't care about high profile AMA
  Seriously. A few were cool. But most were pretty much just marketing teams with celebrities who couldn't care less about the 2011 hit crime drama Rampart starring Woody Harrelson
  I love the smaller ones. And I think that made early reddit AMA great. Also whoever that girl was that helped do the AMAs was great. Who remembers that era. She was a mini celebrity and then they fired her.
  Lemmy could definitely make headway by going back to the basics and doing AMA with random people with cool or niche expertise
  
  It doesn't have to start with A-listers.

Looks like a certain super talented Australian actress picked the right place to promote "Barbie".
Margot Elise Robbie, you're a genius.
- Margot Elise Robbie, your posts of tech commentary and promotion of "Barbie" on in theaters July 21st is AMAZING!!!!!!
  
  That's "character actress Margot Robbie, marketing genius" for you!
- What is this referring to?
  
  It's refering to my new movie, "Barbie", silly.
- Margo
  I just hope my wad of hundreds is enough to include popcorn and drinks.
- Imma need to see your verification pic, Ms. Robbie.
  
  Ew no you're just going to post it to lemmynsfw.
- Lol awsome

It's amazing to me how sanitized the reddit front page is. All this nonsense going on right now (which Reddit The Company, and Steve Huffman in particular is responsible for) is incredibly important to any potential future of Reddit The Website, up to and including the possibility of Reddit (the Website, the Company, and the Userbase) becoming irrelevant.
But go browse reddit, and you have to look for it. Right now, the first arguably "anti-spez" submission is from r/shitposting, halfway down page two.
And that's it. There's nothing else. If you wanna talk about the current events of the website you're on, on that website, apparently go fuck yourself.
- I'm surprised at how low-value the content appears to be. My Frontpage, which I've curated fairly meticulously, looks like All, and All looks like a Tiktokky shit show.
  I suspect they've fiddled with the algorithm in order to put their finger on the scale and better control the narrative, and also, a non-negligible group of original content contributors have decided to step away.
- I guess the dissidents left.
- Most people don't actually give a crap and those of us that did probably already left. I think this is mostly what Reddit was banking on happening. The question remains whether those that have left also were contributing the most content through posts or comments which could make the site stale and in turn drive more people away.

Damn how am I gonna learn about Rampart?

Would love to see a lemmy community step in with a mod team willing to pick up these duties. Would be a huge boon for migrations.

Some lemmy instance admin should do an IAMA there.
- Once things start stabilizing from the latest influx, I feel like outreach like that should be the next phase
  
  Are you sure? I'm not certain that the Fediverse will be improved by an influx of people who generally don't care.

Big companies representatives 😉 doing AMAs telling the truth about the horrible things their companies are doing would be interesting to say the least.

I wonder if AMAs will ever come to Lemmy. Part of the attraction for AMAs on Reddit was the immediate interaction with a mass audience.
Lemmy, as it stands doesn't have that mass media presence.

Damn

Let me guess -- it went from "Ask me anything" to "Stroke me anything".

203 comments