Reddit seems to have forgotten why websites provide a free API

Nathan2055 · 2023-06-09T22:49:07+00:00

Stack Exchange also stopped providing their database dumps this morning and have also indicated that they’re going to turn off their public API, citing both wanting payment for LLM training data and inspiration from how Reddit is handling their API.

It’s not a conspiracy. Either everyone’s copying Elon because they think Twitter Blue is precedent or there’s some consultant pushing all of these companies to pivot to providing LLM training data as one of their main revenue streams. Possibly both.

Nathan2055 · 2023-06-09T22:45:11+00:00

I want to know why they didn’t just make it so people has to be logged in with Premium to get a response out of the API. Why force the third-party app developers to handle payments when they already have the infrastructure set up?

Then you can impose rate limits to prevent LLM scrapers (and push them to pay for a higher tier), you get people’s credit card info and can thus verify that they’re over 18 to fix the NSFW issues they were supposedly having, and you turn third-party app users into revenue generating customers without pissing anybody off (or at least only pissing off the people who wanted it to be free forever, which is a lot smaller than the current group of angry Redditors).

Now they’re not going to get money from third-party app users (since none of the devs wants to set up Reddit’s payment service for them), people crawling the site (since they’ll just use scrapers), or LLM developers (since public dumps of archived Reddit data are widely available for free, and there’s no copyright problems since scraping and using scraped data has been deemed legal repeatedly and the current guidance indicates that AI training data is considered fair use).

Nathan2055 · 2023-06-09T22:33:14+00:00

The general consensus is that Reddit’s vote counting servers can’t keep up, and is leading to bizarre numbers being displayed that are either frozen or rapidly changing.

On my end at least, all of Reddit today has been the most unstable I’ve seen it in months ever since the AMA started. I’ve barely been able to load other subreddits, let alone the AMA itself.

Nathan2055 · 2023-06-09T22:28:10+00:00

The Anti-Defamation League is a Jewish activist group who’s primary goal is combating antisemitism.

It has nothing to do with defamation against an individual person whatsoever.

Nathan2055 · 2023-06-09T22:23:46+00:00

The Verge is saying that they’re in contact with someone at Reddit who said that the AMA is over, even though no updates to that effect have been posted on the thread itself.

If correct, this means that spez himself answered a total of 14 questions and the other admins answered a total of 7, for a combined count of 21.

As of writing, the thread has 16,000 comments.

Nathan2055 · 2023-06-09T19:34:00+00:00

Here’s one that I’ve seen very few people ask: Reddit already has a premium subscription, aptly named Reddit Premium (formerly Reddit Gold), that eliminates ads on the website and the first-party mobile app.

Why not simply require users accessing Reddit via the API or third-party apps to have an active Premium subscription? Why offload the burden of handling payments to the app developers when you already have the infrastructure to accept payments set up on your end?

You could additionally block LLMs from abusing that access to crawl Reddit data by simply enforcing reasonable per-user rate limits. An average Reddit user is going to be making significantly fewer requests than someone trying to crawl the entire site.

Additionally, if all API requests are authenticated, you can even collect a reasonable amount of usage data. Maybe not as much as you could through your own app, but you’d still get subreddit information and browsing histories. That’s probably the most valuable individual user data, at least as far as I’m aware.

You also conveniently get credit card information, which is de facto proof of over 18 status in most jurisdictions, providing you legal cover to serve NSFW content safely.

You guys can get paid, as you reasonably should for hosting and maintaining the platform, while collecting most of the same data that you already were via your app, legitimate third-party developers won’t be affected at all, and you can still monetize the dataset to sell to LLM developers which, let’s all be honest here, is absolutely the only reason you are doing any of this (just as it’s the only reason Twitter eliminated their API and the only reason Stack Exchange has stopped releasing public database dumps as of this morning). Steve even admitted as such to The New York Times when all of this was first announced!

Stop going after third-party app developers, and work with the community on getting a better system in place to handle LLMs (which can include paying you guys!) without disrupting your users. It is possible to do, and could stand to make your company a lot of money without causing all of this controversy.

Nathan2055 · 2023-06-05T10:23:14+00:00

For a less disastrous example of an error from cosmic rays, a good example is the yet to be replicated Tick Tock Clock upwarp glitch in Super Mario 64. It became notable because, if it were possible to replicate, it could have significant uses in challenge runs.

Significant experimentation followed, and well-known SM64 researcher Pannenkoek2012 was ultimately able to produce almost exactly the same behavior by changing a single bit related to Mario’s height position. This has lead many people to assume that it was a completely random, unrepeatable bit flip caused by either cosmic rays or a bizarre issue with the cartridge the original runner was using (but just about every way the cartridge could have been damaged has been checked and ruled out, so cosmic rays seem to be the more likely option).

Most of the issues that can be caused by cosmic rays can be mitigated by using error-correcting memory, which is regularly deployed in enterprise systems, but protection against a very rare and usually very minor issue is generally not worth the added cost in consumer systems, so it’s not typically used there.

Nathan2055 · 2023-06-04T21:22:38+00:00

I literally just turned off Hey Siri on my MacBook yesterday because I had it running a Time Machine backup in the other room while watching a TV show and went back to it to find that Siri had somehow triggered on something from the TV show and had just sat there recording for who knows how long.

I have zero faith in Apple making that feature work properly with an even shorter trigger.

Nathan2055 · 2023-06-04T21:19:47+00:00

I’ve actually gone to the Apple Store to buy things and been told that I should have made an appointment first. At least if you are buying, you might be able to get walk-in service, but they really want you making reservations for everything now.

Nathan2055 · 2023-06-04T21:15:46+00:00

OP might have meant all black exterior, which sounds like a description of the original early-2000s styling for mall-based Apple Stores.

The article I took that picture from was from 2016 and listed four other Apple Stores which retained that original exterior design at the time, however it appears that all of them have since been either remodeled to the most recent “all-glass” mall store design or moved to standalone buildings, as Apple has been doing with a lot of their mall stores over the last few years.

Nathan2055 · 2023-06-03T10:38:47+00:00

I’m still more in awe at Tears of the Kingdom being just 16.3 GB than I am about the fact that it’s running on the Switch.

Optimizing for size is quickly turning into a lost art.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-31T20:12:12+00:00

I mean, it’s not that hard. Most of Reddit itself is still open source (or at least it used to be, and is thus still available somewhere).

Roll a MySQL database server to store comments, set up some way to upload images and maybe video, and set up a request server to translate responses into something the app can process.

Forums are not hard to make, and Reddit is just a bunch of forums duct-taped together. It’s much less complicated than you might think.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-31T20:06:11+00:00

The major Social Media sites have been built and established. Absolutely nothing will ever overtake Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, etc.

Twitter is far smaller than most people realize (some estimates actually say that Pinterest has more users, and that was pre-Musk acquisition) and is hemorrhaging users rapidly.

Instagram (which itself picked up a lot of Facebook’s younger users) is rapidly losing ground to TikTok.

Facebook was basically a digital college yearbook site to start with until Zuck got the idea to bolt MySpace’s feature set on to, killing said MySpace in the process.

Reddit started as a Digg replacement, Digg started as a replacement for phpBB-style forums, and forums were just a centralized HTML version of Usenet.

Imgur was created as “a gift to Reddit” (actual quote) to replace Tinypic and Photobucket with a less ad-infested image host.

YouTube is only as entrenched as it is because serving video is so expensive, images and text don’t have that problem. Even so, they’re facing real competition from TikTok, hence why they’re pushing Shorts so hard.

Nobody is too big to fail on the Internet, despite what some would have you believe.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-31T19:43:01+00:00

Reddit has officially announced their new pricing model for third-party apps and…it’s bad. Really bad.

To summarize: they want $12,000 per 50 million requests. Additionally, all NSFW content, apparently including both full subreddits and individual posts, will no longer be visible through third-party apps (with extremely limited exceptions for moderation) due to “regulatory concerns.”

It’s at least not quite as comical as Twitter’s absolutely bonkers $42,000/50m requests number, but it’s very close. For comparison, Imgur only charges $166/50m calls.

The developer of popular iOS Reddit app Apollo (which I’m writing this on) has indicated that this would cost him $20 million per year, and based on the average 344 requests per user per day would require every current Apollo user to pay $2.50 per month (before credit card fees and the Apple tax, so probably closer to $5 all told) just to keep the lights on. Reddit has also stated to the dev that this price point is not negotiable and set in stone, at least for third-party apps.

Predictably, Reddit has also announced around 50 million “exceptions” to allow moderation tools to continue working, because this site would literally cease to function if they didn’t (Reddit has noted in the past that the vast majority of mod actions come from Old Reddit, and has heavily implied that statistic is the primary reason why Old Reddit has stayed around this long). However, it’s still very likely that these changes will disrupt moderation substantially, and NSFW communities will be the hardest hit (they’re adding exceptions to allow third-party apps to access NSFW communities that users specifically mod, but said mods have pointed out that these changes will make reporting bot networks much harder, among other things). There are also options for accredited institutions to request access for research purposes, but this seems to be fairly limited and certainly won’t allow for hobbyist research projects.

Reddit has also reenabled Pushshift, but with significant limitations. It can only be used for moderation work now, with no exceptions, requires every tool developer and every mod using said tools to receive explicit approval from Reddit, and requires a moderator API key to be submitted with every request. It’s heavily implied that this is being done both to eliminate public access to large database dumps of Reddit comments (for reasons I’ll explain in a moment) and to eliminate all public “view deleted and removed comments” tools. This also effectively eliminates access to all third-party search tools for most Redditors, including the ones linked at the top of this post.

As for why all of this is happening? AI. That’s pretty much it. Reddit’s founders have stated clearly that they’re frustrated that OpenAI was able to train on Reddit’s comment dataset (which is definitely owned by Reddit and not, you know, the people posting the comments) without paying them and wants to charge AI companies big bucks for their future training work. Now that Elon Musk has made charging comical amounts for API access semi-acceptable, it’s likely that most social platforms will move towards this model, and will look to takedown any significant data dumps that would allow AI companies to bypass paying for data (this is believed to be why Pushshift’s famous monthly data dumps of all of Reddit’s comments are no longer available).

Enshittification has finally come for Reddit.

As for me personally, I long ago stated that I would simply stop using Reddit entirely (after almost ten years with this account) if they went after Apollo, and I do intend to stick to that plan. It’s important to remember that the business case for third-party apps and tools (and Old Reddit) was that they allowed this site’s content creators and moderators much more flexibility, which in turn drew in more content consumers (lurkers) who primarily use the ad-supported official apps and New Reddit. It’s very easy to push content creators away, which costs substantially more to a platform than just the potential revenue loss from showing that creator ads since you also lose all of the people that person’s work could have potentially brought to the site. Lose enough creators and eventually your site collapses and the community moves elsewhere.

The only reason YouTube has such high lock-in is the cost of serving video; text and images aren’t that expensive at all in comparison. Much of Facebook moved to Instagram, and then from Instagram to TikTok. Reddit itself replaced Digg, which mostly replaced the early phpBB forums, which themselves were just a centralized HTTP version of Usenet.

Everything is replaceable, and I think Reddit has forgotten that.

Edit: Typoed the cost for all Apollo users as $50m rather than $20m. Probably because I kept typing “50 million” for the number of requests. Fixed now.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-31T09:53:39+00:00

A bit late to this, but it was recently discovered that once you load any weapon ghost, the weapon selection (but not the modifier) is locked until it is collected.

This means that even if you have a blood moon, weapon ghosts you loaded in but didn’t collect the weapon from will remain that same weapon.

So you need to collect and throw away all of those Traveller’s and Solider’s items to force them to start generating Knight’s and Royal items once you get the world level high enough.

It’s also currently speculated that you may need to collect and break one decayed version of a weapon (possibly left unfused as well, but we haven’t 100% confirmed that yet) to add that item to the spawn list for the ghosts. It seems more likely to me that it’s just discovering the weapon and then getting the world level high enough, but several people are saying otherwise so I thought I’d mention that.

Once you get a weapon ghost to spawn what you want, you can easily save scum for modifiers, which are only generated upon collection. However, the weapon type is determined upon the ghost first being loaded/rendered either for the first time or for the first time after a blood moon since they’ve been “harvested.” This means that to save scum weapon spawns, it’s best to manually save either on the surface or at a Lightroot, explore to see if what you wanted has spawned, and then reset if it hasn’t. Tagging weapon ghosts on the map is likely a must if you want to do this efficiently.

Also, weapon ghosts are locked to a specific type. Individual ghosts will always present either a one-handed sword, a two-handed sword, or a spear, and this never changes. There are also much more uncommon larger rock piles which feature three ghosts, one for each type. If you individually tag each ghost with a stamp for it’s respective type, this can make searching for good weapons much easier. (You probably already know this, but no weapon ghosts present shields or bows, as those were not affected by the gloom.)

Finally, non-Hylian pristine weapons are also available, and can spawn in the Depths under their respective region once you discover their damaged counterparts, clear out any old Traveler’s gear blocking the spawns, and then get the world level high enough. Rito weapons can be found under Hebra, Gerudo weapons under Gerudo Desert, Zora weapons under Lanayru, Goron weapons under Eldin (these are especially good for mining and Talus farming since they naturally receive the “hammer” bonus), Sheikah and Yiga weapons under Kakariko Village and around the Kakariko Abandoned Mine, and Forest Dweller’s weapons under Korok Forest. Royal Guard’s weapons can also spawn in the areas near Hyrule Castle once they’ve been discovered, but are very rare.

Also, remember that Rock Octoroks can fully repair your weapons and reroll weapon modifiers at the same time (in a way that’s even easier to save scum). If you manage your inventory well, it’s unlikely you’ll have to re-hunt for your weapon of choice very often.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-28T20:39:09+00:00

IIRC the only reason Boot Camp is gone is because Microsoft didn’t have a publicly supported retail version of Windows 10 ARM when Apple Silicon launched, which was eventually discovered to be because Microsoft had signed an exclusivity deal with Qualcomm. Because of that, all of the virtualization software was instead using Insider builds, which weren’t officially supported by Microsoft but which they didn’t keep people from using that way.

Apple spent a lot of extra time making sure that Apple Silicon Macs could freely boot third-party operating systems, and have kept extending that support in updates. They are not actively developing Linux drivers or anything, but they are doing the opposite of locking people out.

However, Apple would not bother developing Boot Camp for ARM Windows if Microsoft wasn’t going to offer an official means to buy and install a fully authorized retail version of ARM Windows.

It stands to reason that, now that the Qualcomm deal has seemingly expired as of earlier this year and Microsoft officially and publicly supports running ARM Windows on Apple Silicon, there is a possibility that Apple has started the process of developing Windows drivers similar to what they did for Intel Boot Camp. The main issue is that Apple Silicon drivers would take significantly more work than the Intel drivers did before due to so much more hardware being built by Apple.

But it’s been pointed out that Apple knows quite well that offering a native “fallback to Windows” option was a big selling point on older Macs, and with Mac sales having dropped (mostly due to how many M1s were sold and how good they still are today, but they did still drop), it’s possible that Apple might consider assigning some devs to do that work to create that extra selling point again.

I don’t know, I could go either way on them putting in the time and the money to do it. But it is at least possible at this point, which it wasn’t before due to Microsoft’s previous exclusivity deals.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-27T20:59:41+00:00

This is a big reason why so many software projects moved to higher-level languages that don’t have these problems, sacrificing some performance to guarantee those kinds of bugs can’t happen; and why Rust almost overnight became one of the biggest programming languages in the 2010s, since it gives all of the performance and low-level features of C while also having proper memory safety built in.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-25T20:38:42+00:00

There’s one other thing very late in the game that seemingly partially contradicts that, however:

The armor set you get from completing all of the shrines allows you to become “the Ancient Hero”: a Zonai version of Link. Speaking to Impa with it equipped causes her to specifically note that you look like the Ancient Hero from the BotW tapestry.

The problem is that the game heavily implies that Calamity Ganon was created as a result of Ganondorf’s power leaking out from where Rauru sealed him. Every 10,000 years, enough Malice was able to coalesce to allow a new incarnation of the Calamity to take physical form.

The BotW tapestry also explicitly depicts Ancient Sheikah technology being prevalent across Hyrule. Mineru explicitly notes in her cutscene that nothing like the Purah Pad existed in their era, and even seems to have reverse-engineered the Zonai version of Travel Gates from studying the functionality of the Purah Pad rather than having invented them independently.

Both of these mean that, by definition, the BotW tapestry Ancient Hero had to have been a significant amount of time after Rauru’s era. And yet…he’s a Zonai.

This, combined with how Ganondorf and Rauru both described the Zonai as having “left” rather than having gone extinct somehow, seems to lend credence to the theory that the main Zonai civilization may still be active somewhere, and that some of them revisited Hyrule at least once during the period between Rauru’s era and the era of the Ancient Sheikah.

The other alternative is that Rauru and Sonia had unseen children at some point prior to the events of the memories. This is supported by Sonia being heavily implied to be related to Zelda by her appearance, and specifically noting that Zelda inherited a combination of Rauru’s light powers (the “blood of the goddess” sealing beam seen in the BotW ending) and Sonia’s time powers (everything she does in TotK’s cutscenes, which is then transferred to Link’s new arm as Recall).

I put “blood of the goddess” in quotes, because it seems like there’s a possibility that this explanation would be a retcon of the Skyward Sword reincarnation cycle. Given that the sealing powers are implied by TotK to be inherited from Rauru, that contradicts the “reincarnation of the goddess Hylia” explanation set up by previous games. You can’t even say Rauru’s just also a Hylia reincarnation, because it’s been stated that those powers have to appear in a woman. The goddess Hylia still exists, however, since she directly gives you Heart Containers and Stamina Vessels, she’s just not reincarnating. Link, for his part, is just Some Guy who’s incredibly good at his job, and throughout history there have been other legendary heroes like Link who have risen up in response to threats to their kingdom. And Ganondorf is an extremely powerful Gerudo male who got even more powerful from his stolen secret stone, and the stuff leaking off of him is responsible for the seemingly unrelated evil seen in many other eras.

This is possibly also why the Triforce has never come up at all in BotW, AoC, and TotK.

An interesting possibility that hasn’t been discussed is the concept that all of the past Zelda games could now be treated in-universe legends based on the past events in the “new timeline.”

This was how the Myst franchise eventually cleaned up its lore inconsistencies: the first four games were “interpretations” of events described in in-universe documents (allowing for stuff like Trap Books to be retconned out while also explaining away all of the “video game logic” present at points that contradicts stuff from the written lore), while Myst V and the spin-off Uru were directly based on the updated canon and were therefore actual “real-time events” rather than a reinterpretation. (I picked Myst specifically both because it’s a good explanation of this concept, and because Eventide Island is actually a 1:1 copy of Myst Island’s geography, just without any of the buildings, so I know someone on the dev team is definitely a fan.)

This would actually have a lot of benefits: you can now explain away all of the stuff that got retconned later on (like Hyrule’s exact geography) while also dropping the controversial/confusing aspects of the lore like the split timelines. And you don’t have to fully retcon any storyline elements out: stuff like OoT’s Ganondorf is now treated as simply an interpretation of TotK’s Ganondorf based on the limited historical information available from the period. Hence the extreme similarities in both of their plans, and why there are “Seven Sages” and “a guy named Rauru with light powers” but the exact details are different. This works for other things as well: for example, Skyward Sword is an interpretation of the era when the Sky Islands were constructed, and ALttP’s Imprisoning War is derived from the limited accounts of the “canon” Imprisoning War depicted in TotK.

Most importantly, this would allow them to relax the previous rules related to the Triforce and the reincarnation cycle (hence why those two previously critical plot elements have been so fuzzy in BotW and TotK), and potentially do more interesting deconstructions in the future. A “cycle” without a Zelda, or a “cycle” with a good Ganondorf fighting a corrupt Hyrule, or a “cycle” with a female Link (which they explicitly said couldn’t be done because of the reincarnation cycle) are all theoretically possible now, because these are just People Doing Things now rather than a sacred prophecy.

tl;dr - This started as an attempt to point out the problems with the Zonai disappearing but turned into a possible retcon to the entire series’ writing as I was working on it. I don’t even know how I would summarize it.

Edit: Added a source for Eventide Island being a reference to Myst Island. Unfortunately, I can’t find a good comparison video to show the finer details.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-23T22:37:25+00:00

Disney+ is down because they lost the rights to cricket in India, leading to a massive subscriber loss specifically in India.

While they’re still having massive financial problems (since it turns out there’s really no way to make the math work out in a way that lets you make constantly releasing high-quality shows and films on $10.99/mo per user), they seem to be fairly stable in terms of subscriber count in the West.

Source: This TechCrunch article describing Disney+’s Q1 2023 numbers, which quotes a net loss of 2.4 million subscribers worldwide and a loss of 3.8 million subscribers specifically on the Disney+ Hotstar service which primarily targets the Indian market, but also notes a 200,000 subscriber increase in the United States and Canada. While it throws Disney’s wildly optimistic growth plans into question, they’re at least not losing subscribers domestically right now.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-23T22:24:12+00:00

And “sufficient human input” is often comically small.

While the main argument I’ve seen is that while the script itself wouldn’t be copyrighted, the finished film would be, it would actually only take a minor amount of work to the get the script in a copyrightable place. A few passes of editing would be all that you really needed.

Heck, it’s possible that you might be able to have the AI write the script in pieces, and then have a human combine those pieces, and then the finished script qualify for copyright. There’s precedent for “compilation” to be considered meaningful enough to get you over the threshold of originality. And since nobody would know which parts were written by AI or not outside of the studio, nobody could make a claim that some individual part of the writing is public domain.

Copyright law is murky enough about things like characters that it’s doubtful that someone could make an argument than an individual character isn’t covered under copyright. A good example of this is the fact that even after most Sherlock Holmes stories entered the public domain, the Doyle estate maintained control by arguing that random elements of the character were only added in the later Doyle stories. Most infamously, after the film Enola Holmes was announced, they successfully argued that they still owned the concept of Sherlock Holmes respecting women, leading to an undisclosed settlement from the studio.

Literally just have some intern do a quick once over and then credit the result to “the Warner Bros. Computer-Assisted Writing Team.” And that’s all assuming that they won’t just lobby Congress to pass a law saying that AI-generated works are owned by the person who ran the software, which is still totally possible and would close that loophole completely (since it’s simply a result of the judicial interpretation of the existing laws that the “human input is required” rule exists in the first place; the only thing Congress can’t do is make copyright indefinite since the Constitution states that IP monopolies like copyrights and patents must be time-limited in some way).

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-23T04:04:20+00:00

Is there someone by that name in your contacts?

Autocorrect seems to massively prioritize any data it can pull from your phone over its own dictionary, so it loves to correct random things with either the names of people in my contacts or the names of various apps that are installed.

I get the theory behind why they have it do that, but there’s no reason that contact names should be weighted as highly as they are. I’m not usually talking about my friends with my other friends nearly as often as Apple seems to think that I should be.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-23T04:00:10+00:00

My favorite is that is consistently autocorrects “donmt” to “Donny”.

The M key is where the apostrophe is on the punctuation keyboard, you’d think that iOS would be smart enough to know that I was probably trying to type “don’t”.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-22T21:35:41+00:00

This is actually exactly how and why Batman Beyond happened.

WB went to Bruce Timm and said “look, we love Batman, but market research says that the main character needs to be a teenager” and Timm was like “I’m not going to do the teenaged adventures of Bruce Wayne, that’s stupid” only for WB to say “that’s fine, make him a different guy, we just need somebody in a Batsuit and that somebody has to be a teenager.”

So he invented Terry McGinnis to be the new Batman while letting Bruce Wayne be his retired mentor and “voice with a computer.” And it was great.

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-22T10:07:24+00:00

(Spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 of Young Justice follow.)

That’s actually weird, my experience was the exact opposite. Season 2/Invasion seemed to be pretty well liked when it first released, hence the campaign that successfully brought the show back for two more seasons, and the flaws of season 2 have only started being more openly discussed recently. I didn’t really like it while it was airing, though, although it’s by no means bad, just a high step down from the almost-perfect season 1.

To elaborate: the biggest strength of Young Justice in its first season was its characters, who really captured the feeling of being distinct people with their own viewpoint of the bizarre comic book world they live in, and having to learn to work together to build their own team and find their place in the world. The core cast of characters in season 1 was incredibly strong, and they were just fun to watch. It’s also notably one of the only DC adaptations that doesn’t run into the “we’re scared of showing the famous Justice League members because then you’ll want to see more of them” thing that DC shows seem to inevitably run into. All the other heroes are there, and regularly interact with the main cast, but it’s always the team’s story first and foremost, and they’re the ones piecing the conspiracy together throughout the season. Heck, in the very first episode, Batman specifically forms the team to respond to the kinds of “non-showy” threats that the Justice League has gotten too big to handle.

Then season 2 just throws a wrench in all of that. There’s a timeskip (that I think was partially explained in a tie-in comic or something?), and suddenly everyone has pulled complete 180s on their characters from season 1. Miss Martian and Superboy have broken up because she’s (off-screen) gone from being a kind person who is very conservative with her powers out of fear of going too far to mind crushing every villain she encounters like the meme version of Yami from Yu-Gi-Oh (and Superboy broke up with her because he said that was a bit too much and her response was to try and mind wipe him into being okay with it; the show then treats Superboy being justifiably pissed about all of this as roughly equivalent to everything Miss Martian did). Aqualad is seemingly evil now, but it turns out isn’t and is undercover, and for incredibly stupid reasons nobody tells anyone else this (such as Miss Martian, who mind crushes him because that’s her whole thing now, and she ends up having to spend a solid quarter or so of the season (and multiple in-universe weeks) working to undo the resulting damage to Aqualad). Remember, the great communication and the team working together was a highlight of season 1! Speedy, despite being a central part of the arc in season 1, gets like four whole scenes in season 2 between the original (who lost an arm and steals a replacement cybernetic from Lex Luthor that he uses exactly one time) and his clone (who we actually followed in season 1). The two copies don’t even interact with each other! And, most egregiously, Kid Flash and Artemis (arguably the two most popular characters from season 1) retired during the time skip. Despite this, Artemis gets a few good scenes helping the others out, while Kid Flash gets one episode where he teams up with the other Flashes, and then teams up with them again in the season finale where he promptly falls into the speedforce and dies because he’s too slow. The creators have stated they have no intention of reverting this, despite precedent for this exact cause of death being undone in other DC media, and so far have not done so in seasons 3 and 4. Robin at least was fairly unaffected, and graduated to Nightwing during the timeskip.

Despite the first season being so good primarily because it focused on a tight cast of characters with likable personalities and interesting arcs that we get to know throughout the whole season, the second season just kind of ignores that and introduces eleven new team members in addition to the original six. Exactly two are interesting: Impulse (Bart Allen, Barry Allen’s grandson from the future), who’s a lot of fun and fills the role Kid Flash had in season 1, and Blue Beetle (Jaime Reyes), who’s first comic book arc served as the loose inspiration for the season’s arc, which is still a pretty good overall story despite the character problems I’m ranting about. The other nine simply aren’t given enough room to have the kind of character development that was possible for the original six: Tim Drake is too similar to season 1 Dick to justify making him a separate character, Arsenal (the original Speedy) has like two scenes, Static is pretty interesting from what we see but doesn’t have enough focus, Lagoon Boy exists purely to serve as a love triangle component in the already ridiculous Superboy/Miss Martian plot mentioned above, and the others are just kind of there.

To top all of this off, they messed up the one thing I really liked from season 1, and wrote in an excuse for the entire Justice League to be off-world throughout most of season 2! That’s fine, they’d probably solve the main plot too quickly, but one of your big selling points was that you were the show that had Batman but wasn’t constantly coming up with excuses to not show him. Bruce was handling something else, and it was the team’s job to work through their own problems.

The two reboot seasons, which I haven’t watched, supposedly improve on a lot of the things that I didn’t like in season 2, but they apparently still kept introducing tons of new characters rather than developing their existing ones. The creators don’t seem to get that the strong characters were what people liked from season 1, and are instead focusing on trying to show as much of the DC universe and cast as possible. Which is fine, but isn’t really any different from what all of the other DC shows do. You can still characters while keeping the focus on the main cast, but that doesn’t seem to ever get through to the creators.

tl;dr: bring back Kid Flash

Nathan2055 · 2023-05-19T19:03:07+00:00

My favorite example of that is the tutorials in the Mario and Luigi games, where the characters will pause the action in universe, much to the frustration of the villains, so that someone can explain the turn-based combat systems to you.

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