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

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#641

Post by throwaway472919 » Wed, May 31, 2023, 11:31 PM UTC

spiderice wrote: post #599

paulcole wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also all iOS users, who are more valuable, and probably harder to use bots/easier to permaban (compared to Android or web). On the other side, Apple will kill your app, maybe without warning, if you don't moderate strongly enough for their liking.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#642

Post by fastest963 » Wed, May 31, 2023, 11:33 PM UTC

kenhwang wrote: post #94

ccooffee wrote: post #26

> 50 million requests costs $12,000 I've never worked on a web platform like Reddit, nor with any per-request priced APIs. Reddit's charge of $0.00024 per request still looks like it is _significantly_ above what their own costs are. Wasn't Reddit's pay-for-API-access announcement originally phrased as a desire to claw back some of the value that LLMs have found in Reddit data? I don't understand how per-request API…

Their pricing likely includes the cost of potential ad revenue that an API call is displacing. There's no easy way to integrate ads into an API, so they just offload the advertising/monetization problem to whoever buys the content.

Couldn't they just return ads from the API? Any apps that don't show them would have their API access revoked.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#643

Post by Devasta » Wed, May 31, 2023, 11:33 PM UTC

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…

The tech isn't the challenge with something like Reddit, even the comically inept Reddit leadership could figure it out after all.

The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted.

Only if they have a solution for that can try going their own way.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#644

Post by witchesindublin » Wed, May 31, 2023, 11:34 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #633

nocoiner wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comm…

Not only that, the posts themselves on /r/popular are mostly Facebook anger bait (/r/LeopardsAtMyFace, /r/IdiotsInCars, /r/whatcouldgowrong) or political anger bait: Reddit leans left so it's all "Look at what the right said." Reddit is one of the largest spreader of US political bullshit unto the rest of the world, turning kids into flag-weaving partisans and fostering a us vs them mentality. It's a low brow dismiss…

I disagree that the community is middle class (at least now). I often write about common middle class tropes that seemingly go down like a lead balloon as if they had never heard of them, and more importantly there is often a distain for middle class people in favour of working class people on Reddit in political discussions.

Outside the US the subreddits seem to be much older as well, not sure about the situation in the US itself.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#645

Post by dehue » Wed, May 31, 2023, 11:34 PM UTC

julienb_sea wrote: post #364

alfalfasprout wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't really agree. The curation on reddit just far, far better outside of the super generic frontpage subreddits. Tik tok is 99% garbage content.

My experience is the opposite. TikTok curation is incredibly efficient at honing in on the content niches that appeal to you. My TikTok feed feels very personal, I regularly interact in the comments and find some truly insightful discussions there. Reddit is a totally random mess of crap that I used to like. The manual curation of subreddits feels outdated and a pain compared to TikTok's ability to "organically" brin…

Tiktok and Reddit give completely different experiences. Tiktok has good video content but I love Reddit for its extensive comment sections where people can write paragraphs upon paragraphs on various topics with links and explanations. There are so many posts with long discussions and opinions on every topic imaginable.

My attempts at commenting on Tiktok with anything informative have failed as the super short comment limit makes explaining anything very frustrating. Tiktok just doesn't have a commenting culture and most people stick to emojis and a few word comments which aren't conductive to interesting discussions.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#646

Post by crimsontech » Wed, May 31, 2023, 11:35 PM UTC

babypuncher wrote: post #543

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…

This is exactly what we've seen on Twitter. The already low bar for quality took a nosedive once they started ruining blue checkmarks and banning third party apps. Twitter still maintains a critical mass of users and corporate accounts, but all the most talented creators (at least the ones I followed) have reduced their Twitter usage substantially or moved on completely. Eventually new readers will stop showing up be…

I haven’t used twitter since they blocked access to 3rd party apps. Twitter, Reddit and HN are sites I really only use on my mobile through 3rd party apps along with Omnivore to save interesting articles to read later.

For me, Reddit and Twitter are simply not worth visiting using mobile web or first party apps because the ratio of crap I don’t want to see (ads and promoted content) is too high vs the content I came to see.

YouTube is going the same way, I use multiple adblock rules to hide “shorts”, “people also searched for”, and “people also watched”. I pay for YouTube premium but feel like a mug for paying for a service which tries to force feed me content I don’t want. I’m on the brink of cancelling the subscription.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#647

Post by RoyGBivCap » Wed, May 31, 2023, 11:36 PM UTC

SkyPuncher wrote: post #386

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.

I found this attitude from Christian really off-putting. Dude, you run an interface to another company’s core business. You cannot make any guarantees about what they may or may not do.

I feel like it's the same thing with people who have a youtube channel.

If you're in a situation where all of your income comes from a company, but you don't have an employer/employee contract with that company. It seems like such a precarious position to me.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#648

Post by gaudat » Wed, May 31, 2023, 11:37 PM UTC

a_c wrote: post #640

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…

An asian one I'm guessing

Send me a PM and I will give you a beer #hoho#

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#649

Post by donmcronald » Wed, May 31, 2023, 11:37 PM UTC

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've always thought it would be neat if there were loosely affiliated communities that host as an API only with a standard front end for the UI.

So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users.

The API side could moderate their own content and restrict access to UIs that play nice and the UIs could refuse to surface content from API sides that suck.

The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#650

Post by RoyGBivCap » Wed, May 31, 2023, 11:39 PM UTC

consumer451 wrote: post #249

Can someone give me a couple reasons why it does not make sense to buy Apollo out, and make it the default iOS app? It is currently maintained by one excellent developer, is featured by the Apple App Store for design... what's the downside?

The downside is that the reason Apollo is great is reddit employees have little control over it. Were they to acquire it I'm sure the enshittification would start shortly after.