D&D General Where do New DMs Go for Help Online?

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

I know nothing of the business model and requirements of Reddit. But remember that Musk took some serious debt to buy Twitter. There it is less hubris, more financial necessity.

For sure that's why he did it! What I'm saying is that I don't think that companies are going to want/be able to afford those rates. I know mine didn't and closed down the Twitter connection within our prime application.

 

[pogre]

The kids in the D&D club at my high school I teach at use D&D Beyond a lot.

 

[Umbran]

Nothing other than hubris forced him to buy it.

Look, if you want to just say the guy is hubristic, say he's hubristic and be done with it. I would find no reason to argue with that.

In terms of analysis of the policy change, though, this is putting emphasis on the distal cause, rather than the proximal one. While it may support a narrative about the man, it is misleading about what's happening in the current moment.

 

[budapest]

Great question and will be following up on suggestions.

Some of the best subreddits for GMs (DM Academy!) are still private and my personal use of Reddit is next to nil since the protest. I’ve been poking around here, RPGnet, YouTube, and Discord.

Funny enough, just this week I was pondering if Grendlelroot should be our next campaign and where to set it. Normally I would find a likely subreddit and post an inquiry. In lieu of that I attempted a series of google searches that were less than satisfactory. (We’ve played DiA and once was enough in hell.)

When I look through the forums here and at RPGnet, the typical post seem discussions about the industry, not specific questions about rules, settings, and improv. Hopefully one of the posts here will lead me to a forum where should post my Grendelroot setting question.

 

[Quickleaf]

Permanent link invitation to the DM Academy discord server: Join the DMAcademy Discord Server!

 

[AmandaBarbarian]

I went to Redditt then came here.
People here are nicer, but I am getting a lot of advise that is very counter to my (admittedly limited) experience as a player.

However here I have gotten the most help. https://www.enworld.org/threads/help-with-new-dm.698265/

 

[jmartkdr2]

Gotcha. So a similar situation to Elon charging for Twitter API usage. That's a business model doomed to fail (speaking as someone in the software development sphere). Open source is the way to go to promote usage of your platform. I suspect the hubris is that Twitter and Reddit think they are such huge players in their arenas that companies will pay these exorbitant costs to access their markets. Both of those tools have multiple competent competitors... the only difference between them and the competition is brand name and acceptance. This pricing model will drive businesses who currently provide access via Twitter/Reddit to the competition. Not because they want to... but because the cost of not doing is so is completely prohibitive.

I heard -and I guess this is now technically a rumor - that a lot of predictive AI pulls from Reddit quite extensively, which means every time someone posts a question to ChatGPT Reddit receives like 1,000 data requests, which is a pain to manage. The API pricing is supposed to make that prohibitively expensive.

Which would make sense I guess (I know next to nothing about how ChatGPT actually works) but unless they had a plan for whitelisting certain 3pp users to ensure 'legitimate' API users still have access (ie if the main purpose is accessibility) but there's no indication hey thought about that at all.

 

[Oofta]

I heard -and I guess this is now technically a rumor - that a lot of predictive AI pulls from Reddit quite extensively, which means every time someone posts a question to ChatGPT Reddit receives like 1,000 data requests, which is a pain to manage. The API pricing is supposed to make that prohibitively expensive.

Which would make sense I guess (I know next to nothing about how ChatGPT actually works) but unless they had a plan for whitelisting certain 3pp users to ensure 'legitimate' API users still have access (ie if the main purpose is accessibility) but there's no indication hey thought about that at all.

I think it is reasonable for Reddit to charge for their API, after all they aren't getting ad revenue from the API pulls. Whether the pricing structure is reasonable is another issue entirely, one that is difficult to evaluate. The LLMs pulling from Reddit is certainly an issue and I have little sympathy for them, but there are other companies that have been using the API as well.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

I think it is reasonable for Reddit to charge for their API, after all they aren't getting ad revenue from the API pulls. Whether the pricing structure is reasonable is another issue entirely, one that is difficult to evaluate. The LLMs pulling from Reddit is certainly an issue and I have little sympathy for them, but there are other companies that have been using the API as well.

I can see a case for clients with high volume API calls (like those using the data from those calls to teach their ML models) to have to pay for that privilege (as that jacks up the processing costs of the API host). I don't work on the infra/devops side of things, so I'm not sure what the actual increased cost of scaling up a system to handle that type of volume is.

 

[Oofta]

I can see a case for clients with high volume API calls (like those using the data from those calls to teach their ML models) to have to pay for that privilege (as that jacks up the processing costs of the API host). I don't work on the infra/devops side of things, so I'm not sure what the actual increased cost of scaling up a system to handle that type of volume is.

I think we're seeing a maturation of the web where people are realizing we can't get a free lunch. At least not forever. Kind of like how "Peak TV" has probably peaked and we're likely to see more consolidation of streaming services in the next couple of years.

I don't know what the charge should be, but someone has to pay to keep the lights on.