They have around 500 million users between them, but two of the biggest ‘social media’ companies on the internet seem intent on infuriating their own users.
Reddit has faced prolonged strike action for the past fortnight or so, with volunteer moderators and users protesting against huge price hikes to the company’s API which have today forced several popular Reddit apps to close.
Twitter, meanwhile, is barring people who aren’t logged into the service from seeing content posted on the social network and is blocking previews of tweets appearing in apps such as Slack or WhatsApp.
Two of social media’s biggest players have turned distinctly anti-social.
Apollo Grounded
Despite Reddit moderators pleading with the company to revise its API pricing, Reddit has held firm. Consequently, popular third-party Reddit apps such as Apollo, Sync and Bacon have today closed, with the new pricing coming to effect from July 1.
The Apollo app for iPad is now nothing but a shell containing an ad for a Goodbye Apollo wallpaper set.
Apollo developer Christian Selig, who’s had an increasingly antagonisitc relationship with the Reddit team in recent weeks, suggested the company didn’t even let the app die gracefully.
“Well, looks like Reddit pulled the plug a little early,” Selig wrote in a tweet last night. “Apollo started crashing, but I just manually revoked my token and it looks like it fixes the crashing, but no more Reddit access haha. Those folks are fun to the very end!”
Reddit is continuing to take an equally hard line with moderators who’ve taken their communities private in protest at the API changes, effectively removing those communities from public view. Reddit has reportedly written to the moderators of some of the most popular communities that remain private, warning them that “this community remaining closed to its [millions of] members cannot continue” and is threatening to remove their moderator status.
With a large number of protests continuing to rumble on across the site, the challenge for Reddit may prove to be finding volunteer moderators willing to step into the striking moderators’ roles.
Twitter Clampdown
Twitter, meanwhile, continues to rail against anyone or anything it perceives to be denying it revenue.
Visitors attempting to read a tweet via the Twitter website, who aren’t logged into a Twitter account, are now being met with an unhelpful error message.
What’s more, it seems previews are no longer visible when sharing links to tweets in apps such as WhatsApp or Slack, meaning all users see is the naked URL, forcing them to click through to the Twitter site to read the tweet’s content (assuming they’re registered users and logged in, of course).
Epic Games boss, Tim Sweeney, has lambased the actions of the social media companies. “The internet feels increasingly broken,” he tweeted.
“News sites are paywalled or account walled, Reddit is nag walled, Google search spams ads and SEO to the point of uselessness, and now Twitter is account walled. Web browsing feels horrible now.”
That prompted a response from Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who tweeted: “Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience. What should we do to stop that? I’m open to ideas.”
Sweeney told Musk to limit scraping and sue those companies who abuse the service, to which Musk replied that Twitter will “take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now.”
The social media barons show no absolutely no sign of softening their aggressive attitudes…
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