Thousands of moderators overseeing the site’s subreddits are on strike. It’s a wrinkle in Reddit’s plan to go public, and a sign that plan is premature, columnist Anita Ramaswamy writes.
The ongoing strike, spurred by Huffman’s plan to charge fees to third-party apps that serve up Reddit content, was supposed to last for 48 hours.
Not just charge fees… Exorbitant fees. Outrageous fees.
If Huffman wanted to target these much higher costs to LLMs, they could have instituted an approval process for 3PAs which got charged sane API fees while they charge much more for LLMs. I’m no dev but I think they could tell the difference between the two by just analyzing the API traffic.
But they aren’t doing that. Maybe LLMs were the primary target but they sure aren’t even trying to keep 3PAs around.
I want all of the scabs and the naysayers to see this. Without the protest, without the exodus, without the blackout, we don’t have Reuters, one of the world’s most respected journalistic institutions, publishing disparaging info on Reddit’s IPO. The longer this goes on, the worst it gets for u/spez and any other rube who feels entitled to make tens of millions off of the backs of the community they neglected.
Yeah, I agree. I love the idea of u/spez trying to explain to the potential investors why so many users of the investment are working together to actively disturb and destroy the platform as much as they can, while being way more effective than users of pretty much any other other popular social media platform.
Hahaha. Marvelous.
I hope the site never sees an IPO until it fades into obscurity.
I hope it does IPO… and wallstreetbets has a field day shorting it
Can you even short an IPO?
I don’t see why not? Not the actual IPO, but as soon as there are shares on the market, you can short them.
IPO stocks can be sold short once they are trading on public markets
There also has to be an uptick in price before you can short… its not like forex where you can short whenever you feel like it… as far as I’m aware I’ve never been much of a stock guy though only played in currency exchanges
It’s still disapointing to see media misrepresent the reason for the protests. Nobody went up in arms when Reddit announced they’ll charge for API access, which was announced in April. The protests started because they’re charging a bazillion dollars, aka “the fuck you price” effectively banning 3rd party apps without actually banning 3rd party apps
And the “strike” got extended due to the extremely poor handling of the protests from Reddit, like slandering the Apollo dev
The primary excuse for the API change, to charge AI companies for Reddit’s data, doesn’t hold water. After the change goes into effect, AI companies can just switch from the API to web scrapers for continued free access. It’ll require marginally more processing power, which AI companies already have in spades.
