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Meta Moves To More Directly Connect To ActivityPub, But Is It Really Open?

from the how-open-is-open dept

Meta is actually making moves to live up to its promise to integrate Threads into the open ActivityPub standard used by a variety of “fediverse” platforms such as Mastodon and Pixelfed. It’s a fundamental boost to the concept of protocols over platforms, but it’s still not entirely clear how “open” Meta is really going to be with Threads.

In the last few months, I’ve been to a few different gatherings that were heavily populated by Meta folks working on Threads where they’ve made it quite clear that they are earnest about embracing the ActivityPub standard, which we noted was an incredibly important step for Meta.

Every Meta product to date has been a closed, proprietary silo. Once you check in, your only way to check out is to leave the platform entirely, meaning you can no longer easily see posts from others on the platform or communicate with them as easily either. Embracing ActivityPub, a standardized decentralized protocol that allows for a more “federated” experience, was a big step towards a more protocolized world.

It was something Meta didn’t have to do, but it’s a move that could impact the wider thinking about how social media platforms operate and who actually controls the data.

Now, some users who rely on ActivityPub (mostly on Mastodon, but many other services as well) have been quite nervous about Meta’s embrace of ActivityPub, as there’s a legitimate fear of it overwhelming the system or causing problems. Or, if Meta wanted to be nefarious, the infamous Microsoft-endorsed strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish, was always lurking.

And while that’s always possible, there are a few reasons to be moderately optimistic. One reason is just that the folks at Meta working on this seem quite aware of that fear and are doing everything they can to minimize the risks and to be good neighbors in the wider fediverse. And while there is still some fear that maybe they only send out the nice, earnest believers to the meetings, while the real bastards are waiting behind the scenes, even if Meta did try to destroy ActivityPub, the nature of it being an open standard limits how much damage it could really do.

Some instances are already blocking Threads, and if Meta becomes too much of a problem, then others would likely do so as well.

And while some had predicted that Meta would never actually embrace Threads, it keeps turning on more functionality, bit by bit. The latest functionality is that users on Threads can now see likes and replies from the wider Fediverse. Before this, users on ActivityPub-based systems like Mastodon could follow Threads users who opted-in to connect to the Fediverse, but the users on Threads would not see any “likes” or replies. And now that’s changing.

This follows what Meta folks have suggested over the last few months of rolling out ActivityPub integration slowly and carefully, to make sure they really don’t overwhelm or break things.

I think all of this is good so far, and it’s good to see a major platform embracing more decentralized social media. But there are still some concerns.

Just a few weeks ago, in a conversation with some researchers about decentralized social media, I pointed out the one thing I’d really like to see, but hadn’t yet, from the Meta side: third-party clients and additional services built on top of Meta. But, to date, I hadn’t seen any.

And, a few days later, I learned one reason why. Over on Bluesky David Thiel pointed out that, last fall, Meta had big-time lawyers at Perkins Coie send cease and desist letters to developers building a Threads API client that would have enabled more third-party apps and services. And, indeed, you can see that threat letter on the unofficial Threads API Github.

There are a few ways to think about this. First, given how much shit that Meta got into (including massive fines) for the whole Cambridge Analytica mess, you can see why they might want to more tightly control any API access. And sending threat letters to unofficial API tools is one way to do that.

Also, one could argue that thanks to the increasing ActivityPub integration, those who want to build can just build something for ActivityPub and get access to any Threads content from users on Threads who turn on ActivityPub integration. So, arguably, the existing ActivityPub ecosystem can act as a third party to Threads.

But, even as Threads expands its ActivityPub integration, that solution is still quite limited.

So while it’s nice to see Threads really doing more to integrate with ActivityPub, it seems like its lack of true openness still suggests an inherently closed and centralized system, rather than a truly decentralized one.

Filed Under: activitypub, api, decentralization, openness, third party apps
Companies: meta, threads

from the X-it-stage-right dept

When it comes to the big 3 of the video game industry — Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony — the circle is now complete when it comes to integrations with ExTwitter. Late last year, Nintendo killed off parts of its own integration not just with then-Twitter, but with Facebook as well. But then ExTwitter abruptly announced earlier this year that free access to its API was going to be cut off, replaced instead by a tiered payment scheme depending on what level of integration the user would need. Almost immediately afterwards, Xbox cut off the ability to share content via ExTwitter.

And now Sony has removed the PlayStation’s integration with ExTwitter as well, almost certainly for the same reason. Somewhat interestingly, Sony’s DS4 controller came with a button specifically called the “share” button, which allows you to screencap images or videos to your console to then share on social media. That button seems to have gotten measurably less useful now.

Sony said it is removing support for Elon Musk’s X/Twitter from its PlayStation game consoles, effective next week. The company announced the change in a notice posted Monday on its website.

“As of November 13, 2023, integration with X (formerly known as Twitter) will no longer function on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 consoles,” the message on Sony’s website reads. “This includes the ability to view any content published on X on PS5/PS4, and the ability to post and view content, trophies and other gameplay-related activities on X directly from PS5/PS4 (or link an X account to do so).”

As ExTwitter’s valuation sits at somewhere around half of what it was at the time Elon Musk bought the platform, a trendline of the wider world not seeing enough value in the platform to cough up what he’s asking for to use it, well, ain’t great. The entire premise of a social media company is built upon user activity and engagement. Users have begun to leave the platform, including those that may have used it in conjunction with these 3rd party integrations that are likewise going away. Advertisers are going away, in part because of the toxic hellhole that ExTwitter has become, and in part due to the declining user base and engagement of existing users.

Musk can rail against the evil woke mind virus of death and destruction, or whatever strawman farce he wants to cook up to explain why everything he does is the bestest this week, but the platform is in decline in very measurable ways.

Musk closed his 44billiondebt−ladentakeoverofTwitterinOctober2022,afterTwittersuedhimtocompletethedealattheagreed−onterms.Thecompany,sincerechristenedXCorp.,is[nowworth44 billion debt-laden takeover of Twitter in October 2022, after Twitter sued him to complete the deal at the agreed-on terms. The company, since rechristened X Corp., is [now worth 44billiondebt−ladentakeoverofTwitterinOctober2022,afterTwittersuedhimtocompletethedealattheagreed−onterms.Thecompany,sincerechristenedXCorp.,isnowworth19 billion, according to a notice sent last month to employees eligible for stock grants.

Were PlayStation gamers using the ExTwitter integration all that much? Perhaps not. But “some” is a higher value than “absolutely none, because Sony killed it off.” And when you’re bleeding money and usership, well, this is one more data point in a story of how to kill a once-useful and potentially successful platform.

Filed Under: api, playstation, sharing, social sharing
Companies: sony, twitter, x

Air Canada Would Rather Sue A Website That Helps People Book More Flights Than Hire Competent Web Engineers

from the time-to-cross-air-canada-off-the-flight-list dept

I am so frequently confused by companies that sue other companies for making their own sites and services more useful. It happens quite often. And quite often, the lawsuits are questionable CFAA claims against websites that scrape data to provide a better consumer experience, but one that still ultimately benefits the originating site.

Over the last few years various airlines have really been leading the way on this, with Southwest being particularly aggressive in suing companies that help people find Southwest flights to purchase. Unfortunately, many of these lawsuits are succeeding, to the point that a court has literally said that a travel company can’t tell others how much Southwest flights cost.

But the latest lawsuit of this nature doesn’t involve Southwest, and is quite possibly the dumbest one. Air Canada has sued the site Seats.aero that helps users figure out the best flights for their frequent flyer miles. Seats.aero is a small operation run by the company with the best name ever: Localhost, meaning that the lawsuit is technically “Air Canada v. Localhost” which sounds almost as dumb as this lawsuit is.

The Air Canada Group brings this action because Mr. Ian Carroll—through Defendant Localhost LLC—created a for-profit website and computer application (or “app”)— both called Seats.aero—that use substantial amounts of data unlawfully scraped from the Air Canada Group’s website and computer systems. In direct violation of the Air Canada Group’s web terms and conditions, Carroll uses automated digital robots (or “bots”) to continuously search for and harvest data from the Air Canada Group’s website and database. His intrusions are frequent and rapacious, causing multiple levels of harm, e.g., placing an immense strain on the Air Canada Group’s computer infrastructure, impairing the integrity and availability of the Air Canada Group’s data, soiling the customer experience with the Air Canada Group, interfering with the Air Canada Group’s business relations with its partners and customers, and diverting the Air Canada Group’s resources to repair the damage. Making matters worse, Carroll uses the Air Canada Group’s federally registered trademarks and logo to mislead people into believing that his site, app, and activities are connected with and/or approved by the real Air Canada Group and lending an air of legitimacy to his site and app. The Air Canada Group has tried to stop Carroll’s activities via a number of technological blocking measures. But each time, he employs subterfuge to fraudulently access and take the data—all the while boasting about his exploits and circumvention online.

Almost nothing in this makes any sense. Having third parties scrape sites for data about prices is… how the internet works. Whining about it is stupid beyond belief. And here, it’s doubly stupid, because anyone who finds a flight via seats.aero is then sent to Air Canada’s own website to book that flight. Air Canada is making money because Carroll’s company is helping people find Air Canada flights they can take.

Why are they mad?

Air Canada’s lawyers also seem technically incompetent. I mean, what the fuck is this?

Through screen scraping, Carroll extracts all of the data displayed on the website, including the text and images.

Carroll also employs the more intrusive API scraping to further feed Defendant’s website.

If the “API scraping” is “more intrusive” than screen scraping, you’re doing your APIs wrong. Is Air Canada saying that its tech team is so incompetent that its API puts more load on the site than scraping? Because, if so, Air Canada should fire its tech team. The whole point of an API is to make it easier for those accessing data from your website without needing to do the more cumbersome process of scraping.

And, yes, this lawsuit really calls into question Air Canada’s tech team and their ability to run a modern website. If your website can’t handle having its flights and prices scraped a few times every day, then you shouldn’t have a website. Get some modern technology, Air Canada:

Defendant’s avaricious data scraping generates frequent and myriad requests to the Air Canada Group’s database—far in excess of what the Air Canada Group’s infrastructure was designed to handle. Its scraping collects a large volume of data, including flight data within a wide date range and across extensive flight origins and destinations—multiple times per day.

Maybe… invest in better infrastructure like basically every other website that can handle some basic scraping? Or, set up your API so it doesn’t fall over when used for normal API things? Because this is embarrassing:

At times, Defendant’s voluminous requests have placed such immense burdens on the Air Canada Group’s infrastructure that it has caused “brownouts.” During a brownout, a website is unresponsive for a period of time because the capacity of requests exceeds the capacity the website was designed to accommodate. During brownouts caused by Defendant’s data scraping, legitimate customers are unable to use or the Air Canada + Aeroplan mobile app, including to search for available rewards, redeem Aeroplan points for the rewards, search for and view reward travel availability, book reward flights, contact Aeroplan customer support, and/or obtain service through the Aeroplan contact center due to the high volume of calls during brownouts.

Air Canada’s lawyers also seem wholly unfamiliar with the concept of nominative fair use for trademarks. If you’re displaying someone’s trademarks for the sake of accurately talking about them, there’s no likelihood of confusion and no concern about the source of the information. Air Canada claiming that this is trademark infringement is ridiculous:

I guarantee that no one using Seats.aero thinks that they’re on Air Canada’s website.

The whole thing is so stupid that it makes me never want to fly Air Canada again. I don’t trust an airline that can’t set up its website/API to handle someone making its flights more attractive to buyers.

But, of course, in these crazy times with the way the CFAA has been interpreted, there’s a decent chance Air Canada could win.

For its part, Carroll says that he and his lawyers have reached out to Air Canada “repeatedly” to try to work with them on how they “retrieve availability information,” and that “Air Canada has ignored these offers.” He also notes that tons of other websites are scraping the very same information, and he has no idea why he’s been singled out. He further notes that he’s always been open to adjusting the frequency of searches and working with the airlines to make sure that his activities don’t burden the website.

But, really, the whole thing is stupid. The only thing that Carroll’s website does is help people buy more flights. It points people to the Air Canada site to buy tickets. It makes people want to fly more on Air Canada.

Why would Air Canada want to stop that other than that it can’t admit that it’s website operations should all be replaced by a more competent team?

Filed Under: api, cfaa, flights, frequent fliers, scraping, screen scraping, trademark
Companies: air canada, localhost, seats.aero

Elon’s Twitter Kills Off Many More Useful Bots

from the good-bot-bad-bot-elon-bot dept

One of Elon’s big promises when he took over Twitter was that he would get rid of spam bots. So far that’s been a huge fucking failure. That’s from the Wall Street Journal, which has been generally supportive of Musk’s tenure at Twitter. But, the article makes it clear that Musk has totally failed to make any dent in the fight against spam bots. The article quotes a bunch of experts and researchers pointing to various studies and reports all saying that the amount of spam on Twitter doesn’t seem to have changed much. And the article also notes that Musk’s claims that his Twitter Blue fake verification plan (which Musk insisted was key to stopping spam bots) has actually made the problem worse:

Some evidence indicates that Twitter Blue has actually added to the problem of fakes and bots because the way it changed the verification process has left many users unsure which accounts are real and which are fake.

Subscribers can now purchase check marks that Twitter used to reserve for accounts the company had deemed authentic and notable. Some famous users who previously had blue check marks now don’t, leaving those accounts vulnerable to imitators.

“Users are worse off in trying to delineate trustworthy and not trustworthy accounts,” said Princeton’s Mayer, whose study indicated that most U.S. adults don’t understand the platform’s criteria for assigning blue check marks to profiles.

And it’s been clear throughout this process that Musk has never even attempted to understand how any of this works, and makes his decisions almost entirely based on his own, somewhat distorted, view of how the platform works, which is extremely different as one of its most popular users.

And, of course, the prevalence of spammers on Twitter is so obvious now that when one of Musk’s most loyal fans tweeted that spam seemed to have disappeared on the site, multiple users showed up in the replies typing something along the lines of “my Facebook has been hacked, bitcoin, doge, nft” and the spammers went so crazy that the Musk fan deleted his tweet. As for the claim that Twitter Blue “verification” would somehow solve the problem, uh, no. Spammers seem happy to pay $8/month to spam people. Over on Bluesky, the user “Kilgore Trout” recently posted pages and pages of “Twitter Blue” accounts that the account had blocked, all of which had the blue check mark:

Of course, one of the parts that Musk really doesn’t seem to understand is the difference between bot spammers and useful bots. Because of his complete lack of comprehension on this topic, he seemed to think that beyond using Twitter Blue to stop bots (failure), his other big move would be to start charging for the API.

The assumption there seemed to be that all “bots” that used the API were “spam.” But, that’s never been true. Indeed, many of the bots that use the API were creating useful tools that made Twitter better. When he first announced his plans to start charging for the API and getting rid of the “free” tier, he seemed taken aback and surprised when people pointed out that there were tons of useful bots on the site, leading him to hastily announce that they’d create a free API for “good bot content.”

But, of course, there were no details, and the arbiter of “good bot content” wasn’t based on any principles, but pretty much seemed to be what Elon decided was good. Over the last few months, there have been a few different “bot apocalypses” in which suddenly a bunch of bots that used the Twitter API went offline (this includes us, by the way, as our auto-posting of Techdirt stories to Twitter is no longer allowed, since apparently we’re not “good bot content.”)

But, over the last few days, there’s been yet another bot apocalypse, as a bunch of “good bots” posting fun content started disappearing from the site.

Over the past 24 hours alone, Twitter suspended API access for numerous bot accounts that post photos of animals. Far from being a nuisance, accounts of this type tend to rack up large fanbases. For instance, @PossumEveryHour, which posts photos of possums for its more than 500,000 followers, announced it would be shutting down after losing API access on Friday night. @hourlywolvesbot, which tweets wolf pics for its more than 173,000 followers, also announced it would no longer be posting to Twitter for the same reason.

Other animal picture-posting bot accounts that have announced they’d no longer be able to post on Twitter include @CorgiEveryHour, @HourlyCheetahs, and @HourlyLynxes.

“This app has violated Twitter’s Rules and policies,” reads the message provided to the suspended bot accounts in Twitter’s developer portal. “As a result, it can no longer be accessed.”

As the article notes, some of the bots have been able to come back, as the issue for them seemed to be that they were still using the old API, and Twitter finally shut that down. So, for those accounts, they’re able to get started again by switching to the new API. But that’s not true for all of them, as many are just totally being shut out, unless people complain loudly enough and Elon decides that the bot is good enough to return.

Some users have found a solution for the bot accounts. It appears that for some bots, the issue is just that Twitter is now getting around to shutting down their old free API tiers. This means that some bots could continue to run, albeit with less regularity, via Twitter’s new extremely limited free tier that was set up for those “good” bots. They would need to manually setup the account once again on the new Twitter API.

But, that’s not the case for every bot account, as some have found that they still need to shut down unless they pay for API access. And since most of these accounts don’t make their creators any money, few are willing to do so.

And it hasn’t only been the animal-posting bot accounts that have been affected. For example, the popular @MakeItAQuote account, which has more than 623,000 followers, was one of the first taken down in this purge when its API access was suspended last week. The account would automatically create a quote image of a user’s tweet when someone mentioned it in the reply to the post.

Hilariously, as the Mashable article notes, it’s possible that all of this is in response to Elon discovering that the bot account “ExplainThisBob,” was really pushing some sort of crypto shitcoin. The account, which had built up quite a following by using some sort of AI system to “explain” tweets with summaries that were often a mess, had been praised just weeks ago by Elon himself, who claimed “I love Bob” after Bob had summarized a discussion about Twitter cutting off API access:

But, then once he realized that the Bob account was pushing a crypto shitcoin, Elon said it had to be suspended, leading the bot to beg for its life, unsuccessfully.

Again, the only consistency here are Elon’s whims. And, let’s be quite clear: it’s his site. He can do whatever the fuck he wants with it. But, what’s hilarious is that he kept insisting that one of the key reasons he took over the site was to stop the inconsistent and arbitrary moderation policies (back when there were actual policies) and he’d bring about more consistent policies, mostly around letting everything go.

Except, apparently, if you post bots of cute animals.

Filed Under: api, bots, content moderation, elon musk, explainthisbob, possumeveryhour, scams, spam, useful bots
Companies: twitter

As Reddit Threatens To Hand Over Closed Subs To New Mods, Subs Strike Back With Sexy John Oliver

from the john-oliver-beats-spez dept

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman really seems to underestimate the kinds of people who sign up to be Reddit mods, and their willingness to go to extreme lengths if you start pushing them. We’ve discussed the nonsensical nature of Huffman’s new API efforts, as well as his stupid response to the subreddit blackout which caused many subreddits to remain on strike. We also discussed his incredibly entitled position about how third party apps that made his site more valuable owe him money.

But, incredibly, Huffman seems unable to stop digging.

After initially suggesting that he would create policies to allow Reddit users to “vote out” moderators who were striking (in the mistaken belief that “ordinary” Reddit users didn’t support the strike), Reddit sent out a not very subtle threat letter to moderators of the still striking communities.

The whole letter stinks of traditional union-busting practices, starting off with an attempt to divide the striking mods to see if the company can peel some away from the strikes:

We are also aware that some members of your mod team have expressed that they want to close your community indefinitely. We are reaching out to find out if this is the consensus reached by the mod team.

Subreddits exist for the benefit of the community of users who come to them for support and belonging and in the end, moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Your users rely on your community for information, support, entertainment, and finding connection with others who have similar interests. Ensuring that communities are able to remain stable and actively moderated is incredibly important to the people seeking out these spaces to make and foster connections.

Then the threat, worded in a way such that Reddit could later pretend it wasn’t actually a threat:

If there are mods here who are willing to work towards reopening this community, we are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening. We would handle this request and any retaliation attempts here in this modmail chain immediately.

Our goal is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is made available for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community, please let us know.

And, of course, after this letter became public, Reddit pretended there was nothing at all threatening about it:

“We have not threatened anyone,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said in a statement to The Verge. “That’s not how we operate. Pressuring people is not our goal. We’re communicating expectations and how things work. Redditors want to reddit and mods want to mod. We want mods who want to mod to be able to do so.”

Come on, Tim. None of us were born yesterday. Everyone knows it was a threat to remove striking mods.

And, of course, all any of this does is continue to erode trust in the platform. As Scharon Harding over at Ars Technica rightly notes:

Reddit’s battle with devs, mods, and users is just the most recent version of the struggle. Reddit felt like something that the community built with the company, but while Reddit was happy to offload the responsibility for content creation, moderation, and (until recently) app development to third parties, it wasn’t willing to hand over real power.

Sudden, unaffordable API pricing (Reddit will charge $12,000 for 50 million API requests) and Reddit’s obstinacy are also harsh warnings to devs about the risks of building something totally reliant on a platform they don’t own. Many devs thought Reddit would always allow reasonable pricing for its API and have put in years of work based on that assumption. In the future, devs should think twice about building products based on properties they can’t control, assuming a company will always be supportive and reasonable (or even agreeing with them about what “supportive” and “reasonable” mean). That could mean a future where devs are far less incentivized to create innovations.

But hell hath no fury like a Redditor being jacked around by clueless pointy-haired bosses, and the mods struck back. Given the clear (yes, Tim Rathschmidt) threat of replacing of striking mods, possibly through a sketchy “voting” process to remove, as Huffman ridiculously called them, “the landed gentry, two of the biggest striking subreddits held a vote, just like Huffman wanted. Okay, well maybe not “just like” he wanted. Instead, r/GIFs and r/pics held a poll on whether they should “return to normal” or “only allow images featuring John Oliver.”

Let’s just say that Huffman’s belief that the average Redditor just wanted things to return to normal showed a profound misunderstanding of the average Redditor’s desire for funny chaos over helping a company make money. Here’s how the vote on r/GIFs went:

Yes, that shows “return to normal’“ receiving NEGATIVE 1,851 votes, while the John Oliver solution received 13,696 votes. Other subreddits joined in the fun and the results were even more extreme. r/pics voted for John Oliver pics with a vote of 37,331 against negative 2,329. Of course, r/pics went beyond the r/GIFs requirement of just being pics of John Oliver to them having to be sexy.

Then r/aww joined in as well, with its community voting in favor of only “adorable” pics of John Oliver (or his adorable Japanese mascot Chiijohn), with the Oliver pics winning by an even larger vote: 48,506 in favor and negative 2,691 voting to return to normal:

Oliver took to Twitter (unfortunately…) to support the Reddit protests, saying “have at it”:

He then included 10 photos of himself that would aid the cause. Here are a few:

And, of course, other subreddits are joining in as well, including r/Piracy, which has said that “only sexy pirate John Oliver artwork” may be posted.

Scrolling through the various subreddits, all you see are pics of John Oliver, including some that are arguably not entirely safe for work (depending on where you work, of course).

Meanwhile, Steve “this will pass” Huffman may have even more pressing matters at hand as a ransomware group has said that it will release a bunch of leaked Reddit data if the company doesn’t roll back its API policy changes (and pay the hackers $4.5 million).

Not to condone the hacking/ransom demands, but seems like the company might have been better off not pissing off its most active users?

Filed Under: api, john oliver, mods, protests, strike, subreddits
Companies: reddit

Reddit CEO Triples Down, Insults Protesters, Whines About Not Making Enough Money From Reddit Users

from the the-entitlement-is-off-the-charts dept

Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, has decided to just keep on talking. After his disastrous AMA helped inspire more subreddits to join a 48 hour blackout, and his dismissal of the protesting subreddits as something not worth paying attention to resulted in many subreddits extending their protests indefinitely, Huffman apparently thought it would make sense to go do a bunch of interviews and insult the protesting mods some more. We’ll start with the interview he did with NPR which is just dripping with entitlement.

First he dismisses this as a “business decision” that some users didn’t like:

“It’s a small group that’s very upset, and there’s no way around that. We made a business decision that upset them,” Huffman told NPR in his first interview since nearly 9,000 subreddits staged a 48-hour boycott. “But I think the greater Reddit community just wants to participate with their fellow community members.”

I mean, the second part is correct, of course. But it’s also besides the point. Of course the greater Reddit community just wants to participate. But the reason they’re protesting is because Huffman’s own decision to effectively cut off their API makes it more difficult to participate.

And, again, this kind of waving away the protest is insulting:

“The protest, what it really affects is the everyday users, most of whom aren’t involved in this or the changes that spurred this,” Huffman said.

No shit. Of course most users aren’t involved in this, but it’s the people who understand how much damage this does to the site — generally the most passionate users of the platform — who are trying to make the point and get the word out.

But, really, the line that got me the most was this one:

“Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things,” Huffman said. “We are not in the business of giving that away for free.”

I mean holy shit dude. Do you listen to yourself? Where did that “data set of just human beings talking about interesting things” come from? It came from millions of people who gave you that content for free. And many of them used the site through third party apps because those apps made your site much more useful without charging you a dime.

The entitlement of Huffman is astounding.

He got free content and free app development work and now he’s going around whining about how “we’re not in the business of giving that away for free.”

Yikes.

Then he did an interview with NBC News, where he talks about his plan to strip protesting moderators from their subreddits and hand them over to others. Now, he’s correct that sometimes subreddit mods can be little power-hungry dictators (I still remember how Techdirt got banned from r/technology years ago for no reason beyond the fact that one old mod didn’t like us), but that’s not why he’s doing this. He’s doing it to get back at the protesting mods:

Huffman said in an interview that he plans to institute rules changes that would allow Reddit users to vote out moderators who have overseen the protest, comparing them to a “landed gentry.”

He’s even using that same bullshit language that Elon Musk used. Remember how Musk talked about “lords and peasants.” And now Huffman is talking about “landed gentry.” In both cases, these are the guys in full control over their platforms, the literal dictators, and they’re simply trying to set their users against those who have provided massive value to the site for years for free. It’s disgusting.

Then, Huffman went to go talk to The Verge, where he claims that the API was never meant for 3rd party apps:

“So the vast majority of the uses of the API — not [third-party apps like Apollo for Reddit] — the other 98 percent of them, make tools, bots, enhancements to Reddit. That’s what the API is for,” Huffman says. “It was never designed to support third-party apps.”

I mean, you say that now, but that’s clearly bullshit. The reason those third party apps exist is because Reddit was insanely late to the game in offering its own app. And many of the apps made the site itself way more useful and valuable.

Yes, he’s now saying that, as a business matter, those apps are now costing him money, because users aren’t seeing the ads. But there are better ways of dealing with that than just making it prohibitively expensive to offer such an app. Reddit could build in more native ads, or it could offer third party apps additional useful features that cost money. Instead, Huffman is engaging in the cardinal sin of the internet: trying to charge for something that has always been free. And acting as if he’s entitled to that money, and it’s the people who don’t want to pay who are the problem.

And, again, Huffman seems like all entitlement all the time:

“They need to pay for this. That is fair.”

I mean… the users of Reddit could just as easily turn around and say the same thing to Huffman for all the free labor, content, and data they’ve provided to him.

For years I’ve really respected Reddit. It seemed like another one of those companies that really respected the open internet and often fought for it. Reddit was critical a decade ago in supporting the fight against SOPA. The legal and policy people I knew who worked at Reddit all seemed really committed to fighting for the open internet.

And here’s Huffman throwing away all that goodwill, pissing on the open internet, and saying he’s going to lock up his site that benefited so much from the open internet by trying to force companies to pay for it.

Throughout the interview he just gives these entitled quotes one after another, acting as if all the users are his and that he owns everything they’ve ever written. He acts as if they’re ungrateful for using better third party apps and not being “on our advertising platform.” Really:

“And the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s simply expensive to run an app like Reddit.”

And then there’s this:

“We’re 18 years old,” Huffman said. “I think it’s time we grow up and behave like an adult company.”

You want to “grow up” and “behave like an adult company”? Really? Then maybe don’t piss on all the work your own community members and mods put into that company for free, and stop treating them as if their only value is as revenue generators.

That’s acting like an adult. What Huffman is doing now is acting like a child. A spoiled, entitled, child.

Filed Under: api, entitlement, open internet, protests, steve huffman, third party developers
Companies: reddit

Reddit Communities Decide To Extend Boycott After CEO Says It’s Almost Over

from the downvote dept

Oops.

As you likely know, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, desperate to show Wall St. that his company can make money, decided to lock away the information on Reddit behind a paywall by turning Reddit’s free API to paid, creating quite a mess. In response, thousands of subreddits went dark on Monday, with a plan for most (though not all) to come back today.

But, on Tuesday, Huffman’s internal email to Reddit staff leaked to the Verge, in which Huffman continued with the same dismissive attitude towards Reddit’s users that he showed in last week’s AMA.

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would.

Elsewhere he notes, again somewhat dismissively, that the subreddits will come back on Wednesday. He also claims only around 1,000 subreddits went dark, but multiple reports show the number was actually closer to 8,000, and that includes many of the most trafficked subreddits like r/funny, r/gaming, r/music, r/science, and r/todayilearned.

One page visualizing the blackouts noted that, of the 500 top subreddits on the site, over 70% either went private or restricted (black is private, brown is restricted).

Perhaps because of Huffman’s dismissive attitude, a bunch of subreddits are saying that they’re no longer planning to reopen today, but will follow r/Music’s lead and stay dark indefinitely:

“Reddit has budged microscopically,” u/SpicyThunder335, a moderator for r/ModCoord, wrote in the post. They say that despite an announcement that access to a popular data-archiving tool for moderators would be restored, “our core concerns still aren’t satisfied, and these concessions came prior to the blackout start date; Reddit has been silent since it began.” SpicyThunder335 also bolded a line from a Monday memo from CEO Steve Huffman obtained by The Verge — “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well” — and said that “more is needed for Reddit to act.”

Ahead of the Tuesday post, more than 300 subreddits had committed to staying dark indefinitely, SpicyThunder335 said. The list included some hugely popular subreddits, like r/aww (more than 34 million subscribers), r/music (more than 32 million subscribers), and r/videos (more than 26 million subscribers). Even r/nba committed to an indefinite timeframe at arguably the most important time of the NBA season. But SpicyThunder335 invited moderators to share pledges to keep the protests going, and the commitments are rolling in.

Now, plenty of subreddits have decided to come back, and I don’t think anyone is begrudging those who did so. But it’s incredible how every time Huffman opens his mouth, he seems to make the situation worse, rather than better.

That’s not leadership. It’s desperation.

Filed Under: api, boycott, steve huffman, subreddits
Companies: reddit

Reddit Blackout Crashes The Site As Reddit Users Realize They’re In The Power Position

from the upvote-the-enshittification dept

On Monday we wrote about the changes that Reddit was making to their API pricing, causing some services to shut down, and leading thousands of subreddits to choose to blackout (some temporarily, some indefinitely). Apparently, all those sites going private resulted in… Reddit itself falling over.

According to Reddit, the blackout was responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge. The company said the outage was fully resolved at 1:28PM ET.

The issues started Monday morning, with Reddit’s status page reporting a “major outage” affecting Reddit’s desktop and mobile sites and its native mobile apps. “We’re aware of problems loading content and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible,” the company wrote on the status page in a message at 10:58AM ET. At 11:47AM ET, the company said that “we’re observing improvements across the site and expect issue to recover for most users. We will continue to closely monitor the situation.”

That’s… not a good sign for Reddit. The details show that over 8,000 subreddits, with the backing of nearly 29,000 mods have participated in the blackout.

Moderators in r/ModCoord are keeping track of participating subreddits in an ongoing thread — as of Monday afternoon, 28,606 moderators are participating, and 8,300 subreddits pledged to go private in support of the movement. Some subreddits pledged to permanently shut down unless Reddit “adequately addresses” its users’ concerns, according to a post in r/Save3rdPartyApps. The most popular subreddits participating the blackout include r/funny, r/aww, r/gaming, r/Music, r/Pics, r/science and r/todayilearned. The collective userbase across all of the protesting subreddits totals 2.8 billion, which includes a significant overlap of users who subscribe to multiple protesting subreddits. Users can watch subreddits go dark in real time on Twitch.

As numerous people are pointing out, Reddit is discovering the same thing that Twitter is also discovering: when you build a service where the value is all the free content that users provide, you’re going to run into some problems when you suddenly start acting like you “own” all that, and you feel the need to put up paywalls for access.

Sure, it can work in the short term thanks to the sheer inertia of the existing giant audience. But, if we’ve learned anything over the last few decades of the internet, users are mostly okay if they’re asked to put up with some ads here and there in exchange for access to useful information and the wider community itself. But when you start to put up paywalls to access that community and information, including destroying the businesses and services that made your community much more valuable for free, well, at some point those users are going to realize they have the power to go elsewhere.

In many ways this is just yet another example of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification. Remember, the quick synopsis of the enshittification process is:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Reddit was good to its users for many years. But now, as it needs to IPO to keep its investors happy, it’s trying to claw back as much value for itself, and that means taking value away from the users. But the users are the ones who provide all the value.

And this bumps up against another part of Cory’s enshittifcation concept: it only works when switching costs are high. Social media can make that work. But I’m not so sure that Reddit has the sheer gravitational pull that social media has. Yes, there are social media-like communities on various subreddits. But, on the whole, the communities are built around topics, and it’s kind of easy to just move elsewhere (again, fediverse options Lemmy and Kbin are already looking pretty nice for that).

And, Reddit, of all sites, should know this. Because Reddit’s big break was when Digg went through an accelerated enshittification in 2010, with a revamp that was driven by investors at the expense of its users. And Digg’s users quickly decamped for Reddit, which quickly became much bigger, and much more useful, than Digg ever was.

So far, Reddit management still doesn’t seem to recognize what’s happening, and continues to dismiss these concerns. Perhaps users will stick around. Perhaps the alternatives won’t prove compelling enough. But there’s a real opportunity for users to show Reddit management that the value that they’re now trying to capture isn’t about Reddit. It’s about the users.

Filed Under: api, boycott, enshittification, information, open platforms, steve huffman, users
Companies: reddit

What Would Aaron Swartz Think Of Reddit’s Ridiculous New Direction?

from the closing-off-the-commons dept

Aaron Swartz was, perhaps by technicality, a co-founder of Reddit. The more complete story is that he was working on a different project, infogami, that got merged into Reddit, which was created by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, but it’s been said that part of the deal was that all three would get founder credit. Years later, Huffman insisted that Swartz wasn’t really a co-founder and shouldn’t be called such. But, still, Swartz’s views on access to information were certainly a compelling part of early Reddit’s existence.

As you likely know, Swartz believed in open access to information, which likely contributed to his efforts to free academic research, leading to his arrest and the ridiculous criminal charges against him, which likely contributed to his dying by suicide.

Given all of that, I do wonder what Aaron would think, over a decade later, of his former company that he helped grow, locking up information under new ridiculous API terms.

Seemingly taking a page from Twitter (and some other companies) seeing (1) API access as a possible revenue stream, and (2) ridiculously freaking out over generative AI tools being trained on their data, Reddit announced it April that it would begin charging for API access.

A few weeks ago, the developer of Apollo, a popular Reddit app, said that Reddit was pricing the new API in a way that would cost his firm $20 million per year, a price so ridiculous that Apollo has now announced it’s shutting down the app. In many ways this is reminiscent of Twitter cutting off all the popular third party apps that users relied on (and also the ridiculous pricing of Twitter’s new API).

Between this and Facebook instituting paid verification it feels like parts of the internet industry are copying Elon’s bad ideas.

Huffman did a Reddit AMA (natch) late last week, and doubled down on the API fees. Much of Reddit is up in arms over this. There are users, subreddits, and moderators who are all protesting the changes. And a few of the small subreddits I’m in are talking about decamping for other sites.

Huffman’s responses to the AMA also really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, including making a bunch of claims about the developer of Apollo that felt unfair and mean-spirited.

And, really, this whole thing is ridiculous. I can understand efforts to offer a paid API for more direct access to certain features, but it should be standard practice to allow third parties to build apps that interact with your service. Hell, Reddit didn’t even have a mobile app for many, many years and was totally dependent on third party apps (or web access).

It feels like so many of these efforts are really about shutting down access to the open web, locking up data and information in their various siloes. It’s against the very spirit of Aaron Swartz, who helped create one version of RSS among other things, and believed in not just open access to information, but that the internet was designed so that people could build on-top of others’ work, enabling everyone to build better and better solutions.

Instead, we’re seeing companies like Twitter and Reddit looking to lock up information, joining companies like Meta which have long had a somewhat siloed view of how information should work.

Perhaps we need a “Bluesky-like” project for Reddit, building a more decentralized, open protocol for communities of interest. Arguably, that was Usenet/NNTP, but perhaps it’s time for someone to either reinvigorate that or create something new that is more modern, and can be more connected either in a federated manner or a truly decentralized one. There are, already, a few attempts at building a Reddit-like service on ActivityPub, including Kbin and Lemmy (which, because they’re both in the fediverse, interoperate). Incredibly, over the weekend (in another Elon-like move), Reddit temporarily banned a subreddit about Kbin, though as people started pointing out the hypocrisy, the subreddit was allowed to return.

Playing around with Lemmy over the weekend made me think it has real promise — and along those lines wonder what Huffman thinks he’s doing at Reddit. Yes, the company is desperate to complete it’s planned IPO, and yes, to do so he needs to look like the company can become profitable. But how’s he going to do that if the site’s most committed users are leaving?

Already, thousands of subreddits have gone dark, and while the blackout is supposed to be for 48 hours, some subreddits, including the massive r/music have said they’ll stay dark until the API issue is fixed:

So what would Aaron Swartz think of all this? I think he’d be out there leading the protest, spinning up a Lemmy server, and making sure that the information continues to flow, rather than get locked up.

Filed Under: aaron swartz, access to information, ai, api, federation, fees, lemmy, open information, protocols, steve huffman
Companies: reddit

Twitter Demands Academics Who Won’t Pay $42k/Month Delete Any Twitter Data They Currently Have

from the so-very-transparent dept

Elon Musk has insisted that “transparency is the key to trust” in rebuilding Twitter in his image. He says it all the time. But, of course, under Musk, Twitter has been significantly less transparent, choosing to skip its transparency reports, and generally close itself off. But one of the key methods for transparency on Twitter has long been its willingness to allow academic researchers to access its API and do research around Twitter and its users.

This is how, for example, we were able to learn that (contrary to widespread belief), Twitter’s moderation efforts actually favored conservatives (rather than suppressed them), and that the “bias” in its moderation efforts was against misinformation, not any political ideology.

Of course, in Musk’s desperate efforts to poke the bird he saddled with massive debt until it makes money, means that he turned off nearly everyone’s access to Twitter’s API (including ours) and demanded a minimum $42,000 per month from academics. That’s half a million dollars a year. For access to one company’s data. This is… not the kind of money that academic institutions have to.

The whole thing seems deliberately designed to cut academics off from Twitter’s data and to be as opaque as possible, rather than transparent.

As if to put an exclamation point on that thinking, the latest is that Twitter is telling academic institutions that haven’t paid (i.e., basically all of them that used to use Twitter’s data for research) that they are required to delete all the data they collected in the past by the end of this month.

But in recent weeks, the company has been contacting researchers, asking them to pay $42,000 a month to access 0.3% of all the tweets posted to the platform – something researchers have previously said is totally unaffordable. Previous contracts for access to the data were set as low as a couple of hundred dollars a month.

An email, seen by the i, says researchers who don’t sign the new contract “will need to expunge all Twitter data stored and cached in your systems”. Researchers will be required to post screenshots “that showcase evidence of removal”. They have been given 30 days after their agreement expires to complete the process.

Now, in talking to people (both former Twitter employees and academic researchers) about this, they do say that the Twitter API contract has long had a clause regarding data deletion. But also, that it has never been used in this manner (only in cases where there were claims of misuse of the data), and that the demand to prove the data has been deleted is particularly egregious and petty.

But, really, it just highlights how little Elon is willing to have outside experts look into the details of how Twitter is working. It’s the opposite of transparency.

And, thus, Elon himself is effectively telling you that you should never trust Twitter.

On top of that, it seems particularly ironic that Twitter is demanding proof of deletion the very same week that Twitter itself began accidentally putting back tweets that Twitter had told people had been deleted. So Twitter is now being less transparent, demanding proof of deletion, at the very same time that it can’t delete things it promised it had deleted.

Super trustworthy site there.

Filed Under: academics, api, data deletion, elon musk, research, transparency
Companies: twitter