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Reddit mods are organizing blackouts to protest against API changes
(www.reddit.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Technology
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They can pitch a fit and protest all they want, but the only real way to get traction is to show there is a viable alternative. Want to renegotiate your Oracle license fees? Run a credible fraction of your enterprise on PostgreSQL. Want to get WotC to stop screwing 3rd party publishers with a new license? Start playing pathfinder. These are only two examples that I've experienced. Twitter will never improve as long as people keep using it. If reddit API users (3rd party apps) shift 5 to 20 % of use to Lemmy, you'll see API pricing drop incredibly fast.
The blackouts may encourage users to go elsewhere, and going elsewhere may help move the needle on this issue. But, the only thing that's going to stop reddit from going down the path it's on is stopping the IPO. Let's face it, any short-term victories will eventually be overcome by shareholder interests.
Plus, protestors leaving the site might actually help reddit at this point. Redditors are notoriously cantankerous and difficult to advertise to. But, it's becoming less so as mainstream users flock in. As protestors leave the site, the userbase becomes increasingly saturated with apathetic users who are willing to put up with more.
And let's be honest. Reddit has a lot of users who feel entitled to entertainment enough to get angry, but addicted enough to put up with it. Look at just about any fandom
I am kind of surprised that people are "addicted" to WotC at all - D&D always was one of the least recurring cost sort of thing I ever did. I think I played 2e for 6 years with 3 books. 3e for 6 years with 15 books, of which half or more were third party. But once you have the core books, it's hard to see what more one needs? I remember in the old days Dragon Magazine would give more extra content than you'd need, and the net must certainly now provide all the house rules discussion etc one could ever need.
And to show how curmudgeonly I am, I think D&D peaked with 3.5e anyway. 2e to 3e had obvious benefits. 3e to 3.5e refined things if you cared that much. But 4e sucked and 5e is still overly simplified IMHO vs 3.5e. It still feels too much like "just play a video game" then. Yes, I'm butthurt about what they did with skills.
Anyway, maybe this is indicative of how much we've fallen from DIY stuff in the masses. We used to be able to modify stuff we bought to let us do more and new stuff compared to how it came. Now it's not thought of, the companies try to make it illegial, or it's seen as the new "nerdyness" of being a "maker" I guess. But for a fricken game or finding a different website? For entertainment? I just don't know how or why people can't handle going to a new site it seems.
Such a blackout could help accomplish that goal though.
The blackout must be accompanied from a viable alternative easily presented. I just learned about lemmy and I’m trying to see if I can have a place here. I don’t plan on leaving Reddit forever but you never know, and this api fiasco has at least shown me alternatives I never knew existed.
Lemmy is good, it's still rough around the edges but still useable, its not bad at all, the influx of people overload the servers tho, but it will certainly improve, and the current app (Jerboa for Android) is not as good as the popular Reddit clients for the moment, but it's definitely better than the Reddit official app.
I kind of hope redreader either switches to lemmy or helps improve Jerboa.
/u/whupazz has RedReader connecting to Lemmy via a api translation gateway he is building: https://imgur.com/a/IF5HYGz
Looks promising, i hope more clients could work with this.
I've seen that the redreader dev considers it.
I’m hoping the blackout drive fediverse adoption to the point that we don’t care what reddit is up to, any more than we don’t care about slashdot, digg, fark, et. al.
That'd be amazing.