More from Reddit protest updates: news on the apps shutting down and Reddit’s fights with mods
And that’s before the protests went down. As reported by TechCrunch:
Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund valued its holdings in Reddit at $15.4 million as of May 31, according to the fund’s monthly disclosure released Friday. That’s down 7.36% from $16.6 million mark at April’s closure and altogether a slide of 45.4% since its investment in August 2021. The updated share value suggests a $5.5 billion valuation for Reddit.
I wonder what that valuation will look like next month.
The Reddit app-pocalypse is here, and the developer of Boost for Reddit, a Reddit client for Android, announced Thursday that the app will stop working after July 1st. Like others, the developer says that the price of the API is too high and is unhappy with other decisions by Reddit:
That price and the prohibition of ads makes it impossible to mantain free users. They want Boost and other third-party apps to move to a subscription model, where our users will have to pay a monthly subscription to use our apps to access reddit and get user generated content which is available for free on the website. In addition, the experience would be incomplete since the API will not return NSFW content anymore.
Third-party apps are shutting down, API pricing has arrived, and protesting mods are begrudgingly giving in. But at what cost?
After receiving a message from a Reddit admin on Thursday saying that its moderators were going to be replaced, Reddit’s Firefox community opened up from being private — but with a temporary new focus on an animal species instead of a web browser.
He shared some details about how he plans to keep his Reddit app alive, and I’ve updated my story with the context. Other popular apps, including Apollo and rif is fun for Reddit, will be shutting down tomorrow.
Moderators have been on edge after CEO Steve Huffman indicated the company might consider rules that would let users vote out moderators, but based on a message seen by The Verge, a Reddit admin (employee) says that no such tool exists and that is not on the company’s roadmap.
In the message, the admin points out that only other Reddit admins can remove a top moderator from a community, but the company’s goal is to “empower communities to navigate these kinds of changes with more autonomy.” The admin says that to do so, it will “be coming up with solutions collaboratively with the moderator community.”
Reddit has already run one experiment to let users give feedback to mods, according to the admin.
RIF, you’re quirky and rough around the edges, but you’ve always gotten the job done. You know how to get out of the way and show people the articles, discussions, pictures, and videos they came for.
You have the silliest name, but we love you all the more for it. RIF will always be fun in our hearts.
The app is set to shut down tomorrow.
[www.talklittle.com]
That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it:
Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. It cannot. It’s a symbiotic relationship. It’s giving up control. And when you do that, you’re able to say: here’s the value that they create. Here’s what they’re actually bringing to the table. And then there’s no question of whether or not they’re valuable.
This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
If you subscribed to the app, you’ll now be able to decline a refund on your remaining subscription. If you choose to do so, it could help developer Christian Selig in a big way: he’s currently looking at refund costs of about $250,000. The update also includes a wallpaper pack you can buy to help offset the costs of refunds.
Like other popular apps, BaconReader will be shutting down in a matter of days, according to an announcement in the app.
CNBC shared this from a Google all-hands this month:
At an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president in charge of search, told employees that the company was working on ways for search to display helpful resources in results without requiring users to add “Reddit” to their searches. Raghavan acknowledged that users had grown frustrated with the experience.
“Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy,” Raghavan said. “We need to make users happy.”
One tool to try and help with that is Google’s new Perspectives feed that’s designed to show results from humans. But now that many of the protesting subreddits have opened up, the Reddit trick isn’t as nerfed as it used to be.
“As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits,” a user with a flair indicating they’re a Minecraft developer wrote in a post. “Because of these changes, we no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer our players to.”
We’ve contacted Microsoft to see if other studios it owns are taking the same approach.
If you know of other gaming studios — or any company, actually — that is moving on from Reddit in response to recent changes, I’d love to hear about it. You can email me at jay.peters@theverge.com.
Three Reddit moderators have just told me that Reddit is sending a message to closed communities asking if they plan to reopen.
Here’s the full message, taken from screenshots I’ve seen:
The last time we messaged you, you were still discussing your mod team’s plans to re-open your community, had decided to close your community indefinitely, or had not responded to us. Per Rule 4 of the Moderator Code of Conduct, moderators are required to be active and engaged within their communities. Given this, we encourage you to reopen. Please let us know within the next 48 hours if you plan on re-opening.
The 48-hour timing is notable; Reddit mods had asked the company for a response to an open letter by June 29th (which would be 48 hours from now), and that means that this deadline would be up just a day before many popular Reddit apps are set to shut down on June 30th.
Some users on the Sync for Reddit subreddit reported running into rate limits on Tuesday, and Apollo for Reddit developer Christian Selig tells The Verge he’s been seeing rate limits, too.
While that might sound like an early rollout ahead of the official July 1st start date, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge that the company hasn’t implemented the rate limits ahead of schedule and that Reddit had a bug on its end on Monday. “Folks shouldn’t be experiencing issues anymore, as it was resolved yesterday,” Rathschmidt says.
Update June 27th, 2:31PM ET: Added further comment from Reddit.
Many will arrive by July 1st — the day after some popular third-party Reddit apps are set to shut down. Reddit is promising to share another update on Friday.
I’m planning to write more about these updates soon. Stay tuned!
It dipped during the height of the protests, but it’s starting to come back, according to Similarweb data shared with Gizmodo. Interestingly, traffic to Reddit’s ads portal is apparently down:
Before the first blackout began, the ads site averaged about 14,900 visits per day. Beginning on June 13, though, the ads site averaged about 11,800 visits per day, a 20% decrease.
The New York Times interviewed Reddit CEO Steve Huffman this week, and despite beloved third-party apps preparing to shut down, more than 2,500 subreddits remaining dark in protest, other subreddits reopening but with vastly revised rules, dissatisfaction from the platform’s accessibility community, and moderators feeling increased pressure from Reddit employees, Huffman apparently does not plan to make any changes to the company’s current plans.
[The New York Times]
According to The Information, Reddit’s revenues were up 38 percent in 2022, but that’s down from the “more than doubling of revenue” it saw from 2020 to 2021.
That said, The Information says Reddit still earned “about $670 million” in revenues last year. I don’t know if getting back the $10 million in “pure infrastructure costs” CEO Steve Huffman told me that it takes to support third-party apps is going to make all that much of a difference.
[The Information]