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Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

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Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#341

Post by mustacheemperor »

joshjob42 wrote: post #294
consumer451 wrote: post #249

Can someone give me a couple reasons why it does not make sense to buy Apollo out, and make it the default iOS app? It is currently maintained by one excellent developer, is featured by the Apple App Store for design... what's the downside?

It is insane how absolutely shit the Reddit app is and how great Apollo is. It's bizarre as hell that reddit doesn't just offer to acquihire him for like $10M cash and $1M/yr salary and be done with it.

They bought Alien Blue and its dev, then fired him and shut down the app.

I think the key problem with all the theorycrafting in this thread about how Reddit could approach this in a better way is that these better strategies are fundamentally incompatible with whatever is broken in Reddit's management.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#342

Post by [deleted] »

bmarquez wrote: post #217
pkulak wrote: post #181

I've been very happy with Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/ Every few months I kick a couple bucks to my homeserver (which is currently running a pretty large surplus or I'd do more) and that's the end of it.

Ivory is for Mastodon. Lemmy is the Fediverse replacement for Reddit. The only iOS app for Lemmy is Remmel which is dead and no longer available on the App Store.

[deleted]

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#343

Post by IAmGraydon »

Without a doubt, this is another step in Reddit's demise. It will really go into freefall when they go public later this year, after which I'm certain you'll start seeing more intrusive monetization. The window just opened for someone to develop the replacement. It will rip itself apart over the next few years and all 52 million users will be looking for a new home.

Reddit's product is authenticity. Monetization is the antithesis of authenticity. The two cannot coexist, as they're about to find out.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#344

Post by hraedon »

scarface_74 wrote: post #330

I don’t see the issue. Apollo should charge a subscription fee that equals (cost of “reasonable API access + desired profit)/.70 and cap the number of request per user so it remains profitable. Users should understand and I would gladly pay for Apollo per month.

The current subscription price is $1.50 a month or $10 a year, so presuming the same profit the cost would have to jump to a bit more than $5 a month or $53 a year. Apollo also had a lifetime tier that would have to go away, because it was priced without knowing that future costs would be so much higher.

This also entails getting rid of the free tier and imposing usage limits on the remaining subscribers since a few people could easily blow out the average and drive up costs.

There are definitely people willing to pay those costs (I count myself as one of them, as well), but the lack of apps like Apollo being successful at that price point probably means that it is not a sustainable business.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#345

Post by alpaca128 »

s1k3s wrote: post #200

Reading the comments in their announcement thread[0] reminds me of the "I'm leaving to Canada" from the Trump era. I'm sure they did the math and I'm sure Reddit will be just fine. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

Switching to a new trendy online platform is very, very different from migrating to another country and all that comes with it. It takes a few minutes at most.

Imagine where Meta would be now if it hadn't just bought up all competition from WhatsApp to Instagram.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#346

Post by api_or_ipa »

The reality is that Apollo doesn't serve intrusive ads, and thus, every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue. Unfortunately, reddit is in that late stage monetization step where they need to prove they are capable of big revenue to justify a high IPO share price.

One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg. So far, reddit has been very careful raising the temperature so as to not scare the frog before it's dead.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#347

Post by bongobingo1 »

flutas wrote: post #104
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has seemed rudderless for a long time. Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all. Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.

> Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate. I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy, and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting a 3 day ban. I'm out.

I reported a bot for spreading links to malware.

I got banned for false reporting.

Clicking the link through to the reported comment showed ... a deleted comment from a deleted account.

Lesson learned!

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#348

Post by t_sawyer »

Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 wrote: post #13

Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase their revenue, they're doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened. Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to thi…

Reddit wants to make money on the backs of their unpaid mods. I really don’t like them, but: Reddit has a ton of infrastructure costs they need to cover due to the centralization of these communities.

I do not like telegram or discord communities due to history issues. Same with Facebook. Reddit posts popping up on Google searches is really great.

I really wish we could go back to forums. The thing Reddit gave us was a central place to find communities as well as a unified login and feed. I feel like an aggregator of forums could help with finding communities. Forums that support oauth and rss would help bridge the gap of unified login and a central feed. The nice thing about forums is that their infra costs only need to scale with their community.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#349

Post by kenhwang »

fooey wrote: post #227
kenhwang wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I think the price is damn steal. If Apollo's numbers are to be believed, Reddit is willing to sell its traffic at ~$2.50/user/month. That's half the value of a pre-Musk Twitter user and a third of the value of a Facebook or video streaming user. So, if you already have a sophisticated ad tech and sales team, you'd be able to pull 50%+ profit margin without having to worry about running the infrastr…

none of the 3rd party apps are real companies with resources they're passion hobby projects that'll disappear rather than turn into a job

You're still allowed to use the API for passion/personal use. They're "passion hobby projects" trying that collect revenue by selling the app to other users. It's disingenuous to pretend they're not also a business.

If you're building your business to be completely reliant on another unsustainable, unprofitable business, don't be too surprised when they ask you to help row or get off the boat before it sinks.

For API restrictions, Reddit has been in a doomed if they do, doomed if they don't situation for a while now. I think there's about a thousand other better decisions they could've made before being forced to make this one about API usage, but I also don't see their numbers and their time simply might've already run out.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#350

Post by SlimyHog »

martin8412 wrote: post #47
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has seemed rudderless for a long time. Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all. Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.

A lot of subreddits blanket ban you if you've posted in other subreddits that the mods don't like.

I got banned from some subreddit that I've never visited for making fun of someone in /r/conservative, just because I posted there.
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