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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

#621

Post by saagarjha »

lapcat wrote: post #164
saagarjha wrote: post #64

Not to go all “I told you so” but I do recall Christian talking about how Reddit would never do anything like this and how much trust he had in their developer relations team now, oh, sometime earlier this year. Hope he took the suggestion to have a backup plan seriously…relying on the whims of a single company is a hard way to make your income. Doesn’t mean you can’t try it but it is fundamentally pretty risky.

Everything in life is risky. Show me the 100% reliable path to financial prosperity and happiness. You could get laid off tomorrow by your current employer. The stock market could crash, and any investments you made could amount to nothing.

Nope, you don’t understand. You make apps for macOS. I understand that there is risk there. I’m not one of those people who go around telling you it’s your fault when Apple pulls the plug on you, because you understand the risk you operate in and I think it’s fine for people to do this.

Now, if you paraded around telling people you trust Apple and that they would never hurt you in any way, and that you had conversations with their management and they want you to succeed, now we have a problem.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#622

Post by ccooffee »

bink wrote: post #213
robbiet480 wrote: post #17

Reddit has posted their own announcements now https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda... and https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...

Did they really remove their own post describing the changes? I haven't seen that before.

Someone at Reddit has since restored the linked post[0]. I think the content is unchanged, but it may have been subtly edited while it was "[removed]".

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#624

Post by Goronmon »

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.

Reddit itself was bootstrapped with that.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#625

Post by bellowse »

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…

I'm dying for this, and would happily throw in some free dev work. HN is the only community I still actually enjoy, social media is a cesspool. I'd love a "Lichess of social media," something centralized but robust and user-respecting, and for communities other than tech.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#626

Post by gnopgnip »

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…

A another way to estimate how many conversions is looking at the average price, at average conversion rates. Right now average cost for 1000 impressions is about $10 based on revealbot, for the US. If the conversion rate was 0.1%, $240 a year revenue per user means 24 conversions per year, that the average US facebook user is buying two products per month. 0.1% is on the low end

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#627

Post by witchesindublin »

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…

One thing I want to point out is that political culture, and defines right and left, varies globally. This is key to understanding why Reddit is so unbelievably US centric even in the international subreddits - the moderation has had the effect of creating echochambers that don't make any sense in the local political discourse.

I think moderation on Reddit had the effect of cleaning out centrists as well, since it was a comment that got you banned from reddit and not your political position (e.g. a post which was positive towards a trump policy would get you caught up in the post-2016 moderation sweep).

You can see the effect on Indians. Quora was popular with Indians because it was intellectual and centrist in the western political spectrum, from a culture that has the right-wing as being Hindu-leaning and the left-wing as being Muslim-leaning. Indians are absent from Reddit comparatively.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#628

Post by m-p-3 »

SSLy wrote: post #509
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…

was it taptalk?

It is (or was) a kind of proprietary addon that forum admins could install which would act as an API that let a the Tapatalk client interacts with the server. It mostly showed up at a time when web forums weren't responsive or a mobile UI and phones weren't as powerful as today and struggled to render complex webpages.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#629

Post by Kibae »

asoneth wrote: post #419

Many people are pointing out that they're going to lose a huge number of users over this, but that seems to be the point of the "cutting" phase of bulking and cutting. (By bulking and cutting I mean eating a calorie surplus to gain muscle and fat followed by a calorie deficit to reduce fat while hanging on to as much muscle as possible.) Reddit, Netflix, YouTube... they bulked their user base by subsidizing products.…

Reddit relies on user-generated content so cutting the "unprofitable" users makes the product less useful for the "profitable" users.

This could lead to some initially profitable users into leaving the site and as a result make it less useful for the remaining users. This could lead to a negative spiral until Reddit is left with a fraction of its' user base.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#630

Post by thanzex »

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.

Ah, yes! Of course! How couldn't anyone think of just increasing the price, no, double it and make it a subscription just to be sure we're making tons of money! Surely people will flock to our app now, a 60$/Y subscription to browse a social media platform where people tell each other off and meme.

This isn't the problem, if you're willing to just shed 95+% of you userbase, then sure, make everyone pay and have a first seat view of your app slowly dying.

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