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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

#601

Post by witchesindublin »

HansHamster wrote: post #210
Zetice wrote: post #162

I blocked the reddit.com domain from all of my devices a few weeks ago, because until recently I didn't feel like I could keep my finger on the pulse of "The Internet" without Reddit. That's no longer the case. Google's "For You" gets me my niche subject-specific content, Google News/Memeorandum (and its sibling sites)/Apple News gives me the mainstream media perspectives, HN (and maybe Bluesky occasionally) my urge…

> but what they've left Reddit with as a differentiator are the communities And I'm honestly not very fond of how the communities on reddit work. Sure, there is some overlap between the peoples on different subreddits, but there is little 'community' across subreddits and it feels very different to the 'good old' discussion boards that cover a very general topic and then have many more specific subsections. I'm espec…

I still find that there is no advantage to Reddit over the old forum culture now that the moderation has gone full steam off the cliff into the ocean. If all you are doing on Reddit is barricading yourself into niche subreddits then what is the point of Reddit over forums? On forums you do not have to deal with upvotes/downvotes and the posts are chronologically ordered so you don't have to worry about responding to comments immediately - and discussion can be for as long as you want them to be.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#602

Post by azemetre »

pembrook wrote: post #308
azemetre wrote: post #150

Earlier 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/

> Ever since learning the phrase "enshittification" [1] from Cory Doctorow it becomes more apparent when it happens around you. This is just the natural lifecycle of all things involving humans. Why people want the same stuff to remain dominant forever is baffling to me. I can imagine nothing worse. Reddit dying off to leave space for something new and fresh is a good thing. Social media sites do seem to go through t…

I highly disagree. There are many aspects of human life that don't devolve into the enshittification lifecycle. Public parks are one, eating with friends another, debating with people about various topics.

It's more about the business side than the human side, the social need will always be there but the business aspect taints it. At least the modern corpo "let's IPO and become billionaires, fuck the people, and chase endless growth" taint it more so.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#603

Post by gaudat »

ipaddr wrote: post #547
gaudat wrote: post #480

I 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…

Soon another 3rd party client will be made that hammers the new site. That gets blocked and the circle goes on

You get it. Or unless you outdo the 3rd party ones in making a good client.

Nothing online is forever unless you attact the data hoarders.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#604

Post by drozycki »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #454
danijelb wrote: post #327

The web went in the wrong direction when we abandoned the initial concepts of user agents, which was that the browser has the ultimate choice of what to render and how. That concept, transferred to today's world of apps would simply mean that any client like Apollo is essentially a browser locked on Reddit's website, parsing HTML (which has the role of an API) and rendering the content in a native interface. As long…

> Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly It works the other way: with today's SPAs the API (that powers the frontend) is exposed for us to use directly, without going through the HTML - just use your browser's devtools to inspect the network/fetch/XHR requests and build your own client. ----- On an related-but-unrelated note: I don't know why so many website companies aren't allowing…

They sort of are allowing users to pay to use their own client by charging for API access. It will be interesting to see how Apollo adapts to this new reality.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#605

Post by [deleted] »

donmcronald wrote: post #382
yojo wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Which is honestly kind of stunning. Reddit is presumably much less than that, but they might be reasonably gunning for a number better than Pinterest, with an ARPU of ~$1.50[1]. To put the pricing post into the same context, we're talking $7.50 per Apollo user/quarter, which is closer to what Facebook makes per user than Pinterest.…

> Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that? My first though was that maybe 1% of users buy something in a given year, but that's $24k to acquire…

[deleted]

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#606

Post by halJordan »

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…

If you go into that thread there are people begging Selig to charge them 4x what Apollo Ultra costs. And they're begging him to charge it to everyone all the time.

This can't just be laid on the feet of faceless bean counters or old men in the executive suite.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#607

Post by tyingq »

durandal1 wrote: post #598

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.

You have assume both that leap, and also that killing off the free version doesn't stagnate and eventually kill the paid one. Those existing paid users probably started as free users. The API is also not his only cost. For example, he doesn't actually get $5/month, but something like 70% of it...$3.50.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#608

Post by dimgl »

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…

It's truly depressing. Reddit's usefulness as an aggregator is what's kept me around for so long. But the sheer extremist views I see on a daily basis are so off-putting. My wife jokes about how I say every other month that "I'm going to quit Reddit".

It's so weird to me that they've let the mods go absolutely bonkers. I've gotten banned from so many subreddits simply for having a different opinion.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#609

Post by Cheezewheel »

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…

>Your premise is based wholly on the belief that you know more about Reddit users than Reddit does. That seems dubious to me.

I know that their UI and native application are absolutely bullshit.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#610

Post by dimgl »

dahwolf wrote: post #595
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…

> Give it time and far-left will dominate as moderates silence themselves out of fear.

This is already happening across the board.

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