Funny how Reddit allows this post to be on the front page
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
581–590 of 1001 posts
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#582Disappointing. Sad to see such a wonderful app likely meet its end. This is to be expected when you pin your existence on the good graces of a for-profit company. Reddit wants IPO. Badly. They want to show potential investors that they're solvent. To this end, as Google did nearly two decades ago, they will monetize every inch of their user base and application -- that includes access to their data. But Reddit is on…
I think there is also value to the general online/web community, in keeping the reddit community on reddit.
Reddit is too big for there to be a “Reddit community”… any other online community (like HN) is probably already full of people who also frequent Reddit.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#583I definitely see Reddit going the way of Yahoo! A slow spiral into irrelevance because of lots of small bad decisions. At one point, Reddit felt like a lone champion of free speech and conversation in a sea of buzzfeeds. I think they've moderated the website into ruin. They've put a lot of energy into silencing certain kinds of voices/opinions while promoting others. What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of…
This is really well stated. Sometimes out of morbid curiosity, I’ll read one of the /r/all posts on a topic where I know the discussion is going to be reductive and generally uninformed (the example that comes immediately to mind is anything involving the energy industry - there’s not much to find beyond “hurrr durr Exxon bad thorium good”), and every single time it’s the same type of self-satisfied navel-gazing commentary totally untethered from the real world.
I still read it most days (through Apollo) but when/if this kicks in, that’s the end of it for me.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#584He should seriously consider starting his own Reddit alternative. He has a sea of enthusiastic supporters that potentially have enough critical mass to get it started. Unlike attempts to create Reddit alternatives in the past, this group isn't full of racists and others who were kicked off the site for engaging in reprehensible topics.
His group is instead full of people who don’t want to pay for things and who don’t like ads. Good luck bootstrapping the next Reddit with that.
Counterpoint - most of that group paid him money for Apollo…
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#585I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language. About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market. Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and…
This is such a good idea even without Reddit's monetization and potentially blocking NSFW content. To me it seems obvious. It's also something that's actually likely to succeed and within the community's control, unlike getting Reddit to change their stance. Like, there's nothing stopping this from developing right now.
- "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users are more than enough, especially considering most of them are power users. I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit.
- "Making a social network is hard." Yes, but it's not too hard. Scaling is hard, but we're not scaling to Reddit's size (100+ million); and Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks). HN runs on 2 servers and uses a LISP dialect (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); even though HN is text-only and Apollo would have images or videos, I'm 100% certain there are enough dedicated Reddit users who can make this a reality.
- Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)
There's absolutely going to be an exodus if Reddit does anything non-negligible, the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#586I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase. Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions…
Yes it's this. This has nothing to do with 3rd party app operation and everything to do with generally closing the gate to the data garden.
The value of reddit's content to non-reddit entities is rapidly increasing as its monetizable use shifts from a set of signals on which to build first-party ad targeting (which they never really figured out) to generally useful llm training data.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#587I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language. About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market. Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and…
This Tapatalk by chance? I only remember it because it would sign your posts with a little ad.
Nope, the forums are not in English. The new forum's app/favicon is a yellow smiley face.
I thought Tapatalk is more like a generic mobile client addon to forum wares than being a forum itself. I remember that nagging banner when I was on XDA years ago...
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#588I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase. Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions…
Can't they pull the data from archive.org?
Archive.org is a non-profit without the capacity to serve that many requests. An excellent resource for people to use carefully, but not a treasure trove for bots to scrape down to the last bit.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#589Without 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 t…
It's a tragedy, because reddit is the last source of publicly available truth on the internet. I can search for anything with site:reddit.com and see actual human beings' opinions on the matter. All other truth is locked down in unindexed chats, and all other search results are SEO'd AI written articles shilling referral links.
Reddit stopped being the "truth" when the moderation became too extreme. It created echochamber that were mass market and strongly biased to the far-left, and with that the echochamber also resulted in a very strong bias towards American users - most international subreddits are utterly stupid because they are dominated by American interests.
Quora used to be more centrist. And it had a major boarder appeal globally. But it too has been turning towards a Reddit style moderation within the past few years.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ever since learning the phrase "enshittification" [1] from Cory Doctorow it becomes more apparent when it happens around you. I wonder if there is a "fediverse" for something like forums? I can never get into mastodon because it's not like forums and conversations between people are quite hard if you don't follow them. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
enshittification might be more like the ship of theseus. The original reddit was started by an interesting group of people with different ideas and ideals than who is there now. The people making up reddit might have been replaced with completely different people - with different motivations, behaviors, and expectations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
Not in my view. Enshittification is more about the business cycle of sucking everything dry for the pursuit of money. Users be damned. At least that's how I read it, ship of theseus is more of an interesting thought experiment but not exactly related.