Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing • Hacker News Board

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#591

Post by w-m » Wed, May 31, 2023, 10:54 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #557

bigthymer wrote: post #410

He 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.

I don’t think that is necessarily true. There’s two payed tiers of the app, and they seem to sell at least well enough to support the development of the app.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#592

Post by Havoc » Wed, May 31, 2023, 10:54 PM UTC

Seems like a straight attempt to kill 3rd party apps. Just like their ever more aggressive attempts to force browser users to use their app.

Ever since new reddit it's all be user hostile steaming garbage. But they have the user base and their content so the value and network effects are there even with shit UX.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#593

Post by nitwit005 » Wed, May 31, 2023, 10:54 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #564

xavdid wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue That's maybe true as a first-order effect. But, for the ads that everyone else sees to be worth anything, the site has to be worth visiting at all. If your most dedicated/prolific users mainly post/comment using third party apps, then making their experience worse will reduce the quality of the site overall (even if you start getting reve…

If your most dedicated/prolific users mainly post/comment using third party apps... Thats really easy for Reddit to measure. Why are you assuming they haven't? It strikes me as a very shortsighted move. If you stop assuming that Reddit is run by idiots, and you consider the likely probability that they've modelled this stuff in some depth, it's easy to believe that your initial assumption is wrong, and that the users…

Customers knowing more about the effects of decisions than the actual decision makers at a company is fairly normal. There is a reason they send out all those surveys. They're hoping you'll let them know about their mistakes.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#594

Post by gnt_thr » Wed, May 31, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

api_or_ipa wrote: post #346

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 rais…

>The reality is that Apollo doesn't serve intrusive ads

Because they aren't having to pay for hosting.

The only way to replace reddit is with a distributed system like aether: https://getaether.net/

Or if you absolutely want a centralized system, something community run like ao3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own

But given the absolute hostility and hate _users_ of reddit give those two sites for not banning everything they find offensive a site like reddit is just not possible any more.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#595

Post by dahwolf » Wed, May 31, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

rybosworld wrote: post #328

I 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…

I think it's a sign of the times, also replicated outside of reddit, for example Mastodon. I enjoyed a solid 20 years of online discourse that was overall reasonable, and most of it not very political.

Now everything is highly politicized with a hard split across two camps where before I barely could detect the very concept of a camp at all.

There's no detectable reasonable right-wing online, it always escalates into 4chan. Hence, the "civil" people clean the place, and you'll have centrists and moderate-left remaining. Give it time and far-left will dominate as moderates silence themselves out of fear.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#596

Post by ninkendo » Wed, May 31, 2023, 10:56 PM UTC

nomel wrote: post #524

willio58 wrote: post #7

Wow, that price is insane. To me, that's pretty clearly a shot at any competitor apps for Reddit. Purely anti-competitive behavior here, which to me is silly. Let other apps pop up to better serve your users. At the end of the day, they are still your users and you might learn things from the other apps. Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.

> Purely anti-competitive behavior here An app that uses reddit is not a competitor to reddit, it's a client of reddit. No definition of "anti-competitive" applies here.

Except there’s a first party client for Reddit, so they’re both a client and server. Their client competes with other clients, and they use their control over the server to give their client an advantage.

Now, whether this constitutes “anti competitive” in the legal sense is probably not going to fly in court: it’s unlikely Reddit can be compelled to offer an API at any particular price. It’s their service, they can do what they want with it. Rather, it’s a lesson that third parties should not be developing clients for other company’s services, as it is building a foundation on quicksand.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#597

Post by jlmorton » Wed, May 31, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

rjh29 wrote: post #479

jlmorton wrote: post #198

Here's a much more informative post [1] from Apollo developer Christian on Reddit last month, along with an older post [2] with some additional info. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...

I'm confused as your first link is the same link as this HN post - unless mods have changed it.

Yeah, the post was originally a link to Daring Fireball [1].

[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/05/31/reddit-apollo-a...

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#598

Post by durandal1 » Wed, May 31, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

I don't understand the outrage at all. So he is saying that the average user will cost him $2.50 in API fees/month. Since Apollo users are probably significantly more active than the average reddit user I can only assume that the same user is worth significantly in add revenue per month to Reddit. Apollo could easily be a $5/month app as a premium experience and make money.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#599

Post by spiderice » Wed, May 31, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #557

bigthymer wrote: post #410

He 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.

What makes you think people who use Apollo don't want to pay for things? I literally pay for Apollo

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#600

Post by afterburner » Wed, May 31, 2023, 10:59 PM UTC

philistine wrote: post #580

Eji1700 wrote: post #418

Everyone saying their pricing is absurd had better get ready for the new wave of API pricing. Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze" where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half the customer base. Twitter was one of the first to give access to…

I don't disagree that it's one point of view, but I hardly believe both examples do not have a simpler explanation: both companies no longer want APIs for third-party clients. Elon wanted to turn it completely off and was probably convinced to ban the accounts of all the third-party clients and to try and harass the world's many weather services to pay 42,000$ a month. Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apol…

> Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo.

Do you mean at least one? Because there are many "credible" ones, unless I misunderstand what you mean by credible.