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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

#611

Post by chillfox »

yojo wrote: post #248
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…

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.…

Cool, that assumes those users will continue to use Reddit after the third party apps have been killed.

For me, I don’t think that will be the case. I almost exclusively use Reddit on mobile though Apollo and Reddit’s own app is absolutely garbage (unpleasant to use and heating up my phone burning through the battery).

I used to pay for Reddit premium, but I stopped after realising that Reddit wasn’t providing me a better experience for it.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#612

Post by [deleted] »

sockaddr wrote: post #511
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…

Yup. I'd join Apollo if it was substantially similar. They could not possibly make a worse UI than the current "new" reddit web UI so the bar is pretty low.

[deleted]

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#613

Post by ladberg »

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, and many others, have paid for the Pro version of Apollo. Would happily pay more to continue using it over the official app!

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#614

Post by gaudat »

armchairhacker wrote: post #585
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…

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 ar…

>prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan

The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#615

Post by solarkraft »

aembleton wrote: post #529
jamilton wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the math that the dev did broadly accurate? If it is, it seems they could safely charge 10-19x less and get more revenue per-user than they do from ads alone... assuming that even a 10x lower cost would be affordable for third-party clients, which isn't a given.

Those users might be worth 10x as much as the average user though.

They're heavy users, but something tells me that they're also likely to block ads.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#616

Post by renewiltord »

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…

There's free API access with a client of your own. You just can't distribute a single client that intermediates the site: thereby not being a user agent so much as its own site. If you use your own client_id and OAuth2, you get 100 req/min which is enough to browse.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#617

Post by vimy »

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…

Yeah, this is the equivalent of a freelancer quoting an absurd price for a job they don’t want.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#618

Post by dimgl »

slushh wrote: post #465

He will get a better deal. If he has to shut down, he can turn Apollo into a lemmy.ml client and migrate a huge part of his 500,000 power users. Reddit cannot risk that lemmy.ml becomes mainstream.

Please stop trying to make lemmy.ml happen. There is so much spam for this website, and it's marginally better.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#619

Post by paragraft »

miki123211 wrote: post #361

This feels like it's all priced for AI companies, TBH. This per-request pricing makes a LOT more sense if you assume that one particular piece of content will only be requested once in your company's history, saved on a server somewhere and used for training forever. You're not paying for a request being processed, you're not even paying to offset any advertising cost, you're essentially paying for the ability to use…

I feel like the better pricing strategy would be something similar to what the geospatial API platforms like Google Maps do, with their explicit no-caching or time-limited-caching clauses. E.g. you're actually prohibited from retaining results from say a geocode beyond 30 days IIRC.

Amazon made this explicit with their Geospatial API pricing ( https://aws.amazon.com/location/pricing/ - "Places" tab) - where the pricing for being able to store a result is 8x higher.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#620

Post by nitwit005 »

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…

Much of it seems to be people's behavior changing, rather than the company changing.

Reddit has subreddits on the right and left that will ban you for disagreeing, or even for having made a comment in a subreddit they don't like. That was theoretically always possible, but at some point people decided such a policy was a good idea.

I personally think a misstep of reddit's has been relying so much on volunteer moderators. Why are people willing to put in so many unpaid hours of labor? Apparently, the answer is sometimes because they have a political cause they want to promote.

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