LOL, that was fast. Couldn't even hold out for the IPO to rope in the crypto-bros.
More like they realized they couldn't grift any extra money from it.
Or rather... the tokens were held on a sidechain created in collaboration with FTX... yes, that FTX, the one that "misplaced" a bunch of billions of dollars, and for a long time it took a somewhat elaborate way to convert Reddit community points (Moons, Bricks) into USD.
A couple months ago, after the API debacle, the tokens got listed on Kraken... and their value took a quick nosedive.
They "IPO-ed" them, and it failed, so now they're slashing them.
Man, how much institutional failure is one man's ego actually worth?
Many moons.
Consuming basically no resources and yet it was still losing money.
The arc is wide, but they're circling the drain. Say what you will about the inefficacy of the exodus, but the exodus was well deserved; the platformhas legitimately gone to shit.
All my homies hate spez.
Yeah the exodus wasn’t efficient but they still aren’t doing great
I hated spez before it was cool.
Announce bad change, revert it and apologize saying you're listening to the community, then implement other changes. Rinse and repeat.
Except they were too stupid to do it for the only change that mattered to a lot of us, API pricing/access to the full Reddit.
I was ready to pay up to $15/mo but after they way they treated the Apollo dev and the fact that for all intents and purposes Apollo was Reddit for me by the end. I’d been on Reddit since the start and used many clients but Apollo was the best and I couldn’t go back to the official or any of the clients that put up with what Reddit did.
Looks like my first time hearing about those is from them being removed
Me with most Google projects
I don't ever remember hearing about this in the first place and I've been on there like every day for the past 5 years.
I think it started like five years or so ago? They ran it as a "pilot project" in three subreddit, thinking they'd expand it eventually, but they never did. Now they're just officially killing it off.
My personal suspicion is that it's proven expensive to code it into the app, to maintain the accounts and infrastructure, and that rolling it out more widely would cost too much money. And since it was only three subreddits anyway, it's easy to kill off and say they're going to roll the "benefits" into their new rewards program. The one where you can "cash out" based on your reputation and rewards, except it's specifically designed to make it difficult to "cash out" anything. And I fully expect the available "rewards" to decrease in value over the next couple years.
Fuck spez.
It's more evidence that the platform is being run by investors that don't really know what they're doing. Reddit was a great platform, but instead of spending energy to "fix search" or "build better admin tools" they put their focus into buzzwords and ads. The NFT profile snoos, the crypto approach - is just pandering to the idea of an IPO so that they can all dump their stock and make a buck. Likely used engagement numbers from before the layout changes to pitch advertising without updating them as to how engagement has changed.
If they had any intention of running the platform long term, they would balance the experience that Redditors are used to with a sober approach to advertising. They would create meaningful community features and charge for them as a community add on (such as a community event calendar that ISN'T Facebook, community marketplaces, association management, etc.) With the audience and reach that they have, the long term profitability of the platform was almost assured. They would have adopted federation in order to aggregate even more content. They would have rolled their own AI instance into their search and community recommendations instead of freaking out about it. Instead, we got NFT avatars that literally nobody asked for, because crypto bros.
Fwiw, the site has shit the bed. There isn't nearly as many active users as people seem to think. There's... A LOT of very obvious bots. New communities that being floated now are clearly gaming the algorithm. It's very obviously different than what it was.
the long term profitability of the platform was almost assured
If spez hadn't sunk so much money into his pet projects, reddit would've been profitable long ago.
instead of spending energy to “fix search” or “build better admin tools” they put their focus into buzzwords and ads. The NFT profile snoos, the crypto approach
Now that you put it that way, it sounds like reddit is run by people from r/wallstreetbets.
That's the weird part. Apparently it's existed long before the API shutdown, and they only started advertising it a little bit when they killed off reddit awards, as some sort of alternative.
Not that it would've succeeded either way, but it seems like they didn't even try?
I've only ever heard about it from things posed here
Damn, didn't they only release that a few months ago?
I'm wondering the legality of this.
They promised many stuffs is coming from this fake worthless money, buy now cheap and make lots of money later when it raises value.
They then swindled 40 million out of gullible people, who bought an obvious scam as investment not realizing it was an obvious scam.
then they do a rug pull when the 40 million they cashed are instantly vaporized. One hour before killing the project, some important people have insider info and sell all their assets, leaving users with an empty bag.
if it was with stocks, this would lead to years of prison, i wonder if it's done with magic internet money doesn't bear any consequence.
This is not "anyway it was useless points for giving useless cosmetic rewards to other users", this was marketed as an investment, with this fake money listed on official crypto markets
Thankfully the SEC has been cracking down on this sort of thing lately, correctly identifying how tons of crypto projects are being used as unregulated securities and pursuing charges.
Some crypto bros lost thousands of dollars on this change
Going on the cryptocurrency subreddit can give a lot of schadenfreude
Interestingly, some mods sold all their tokens one hour before the official announcement and they're deleting all mentions of it
crypto bros losing thousands on stupid crypto bullshit? UNPOSSIBLE!
I don't think anyone was able to spin why this would be a good idea when it was first announced.
Any time anyone is pushing crypto they are either A) are a true-believer and think it's the future or B) are trying to get more rubes to buy in so they can hand them the bag.
NFT~~C~~s were invented for reason B for etherum bag holders.
Spez created both reddit crypto and reddit NFTs, and spent millions doing so. At the same time, he was literally paying all the infrastructure costs for some of the world's wealthiest companies to mass-harvest reddit's data for their latest projects, and spent tens of millions in infrastructure, development costs, storage and bandwidth to self-host videos and images and create a broken media player (after having spent 15 years refusing to do so).
He literally sees a techbro trend start, watches it peak, and then tries to drag reddit along in it's wake as it starts to fail. He is a failure as a CEO, and he knows it. He also knows this is his last chance to make bank, which is why he's so stubbornly insisting on following the current path: he wants "his" bag.
That was viscerally enjoyable, I hope you insult people for a living!
You mean NFTs?
Ah hah yep!
Is reddit still a serious thing? I haven't visited in months and it no longer appears in my search results.
To be clear, I don’t search for reddit specifically. What I’m trying to say is that when I search for something that is likely going to be found in a forum reddit does not even appear in my results.
I think that's part of why they stopped allowing third party apps, they were worried our (there?) data was going to be used to train AI. I assume whatever is restricting that, also restricts the search results.
That was their excuse. The real reason was they couldn't monetize data when people used third party apps, or shove useless features from their shitty app into peoples faces.
Why not both?
Because banning third party apps from using the api has nothing to do with AI.
You don't think monetizing data means using it train AI?
Who cares what /u/cincinatticatlover69 thinks about the sandwich /u/someshittypopculturepun ate for lunch other AI looking to monitor human communication habits.
They didn’t ban third party apps. They increased the pricing for using the api to a rate higher than most third party apps could afford with their business models.
That just sounds like banning with more steps.
Like if someone wanting to train some ai on reddit would pay those insane prices for the API instead of just scraping for free.
Openai pirated millions of books via books2/zlibrary to train their model, they don't care about copyright
now to the big run to monetize reddit. guess the apps thing really was reddit's nosedive huh.
They sent me an email about this. My response was "Unsubscribe from future emails."
I still go on reddit once a week for the smaller reddits that have more activity in them. Wishing we could go back 5 or so years ago.
But I am enjoying this community more overall.
Thoughts and prayers to the cryptobro who mocked me for not pouring my 80k coins into $MOON bullshit back when Reddit was killing those off, too.
About damn time, I used to browse /r/cryptocurrency and it was filled with posts farming moons.
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