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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

#671

Post by superfrank »

Euphorbium wrote: post #573
superfrank wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg. I think a critical part of the Digg exodus was that most people already saw Reddit as a clear #2 in the space. When Digg fucked up, there was an obvious place for everyone to migrate to. I don't see that right now. Facebook isn't cool anymore, Twitter has a large number of people who won't use it because of Elon, Mastodon isn't mature e…

Reddit is just a backend to apolo, if they make their own backend, a lot of people would switch.

I actually brought up this same idea elsewhere in this thread. Apparently, Apollo is a single developer though, so the main problem I see with this is time. Reddit switches over to new pricing July 1st, so this one person would have a single month to build out a new backend that would need to support tens of thousands of users and I just don't see that happening even if we assume they can hire a team of contractors and scaled it down to just core features.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#672

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

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.

He made a nice frontend for _Reddit_. That's what they paid for and that's what they want. Not some alternative Reddit. And the people that actually install and use a dedicated Reddit app, like this one, is miniscule. It's a self-selecting group and if he actually tried to make an alternative backend then it will just be Voat or worse.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#673

Post by dvngnt_ »

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #652
Nextgrid wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs have nothing to do with it. Someone skilled enough and rich enough to develop and train an LLM is absolutely capable of reverse-engineering your private API or scraping your web UI and defeating whatever protections you have.

And open yourself to potential lawsuits. You can fork any public repo in github too, don't need any fancy resverse-engineering or web scraping. But if you use the content illegally then what's the point.

i think you can only scrape public information, so if everything is behind a login screen then that might cause issues

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#674

Post by brookst »

mdgrech23 wrote: post #503
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 make more money it's hardly BS. There are supply and demand graphs and you can reasonably calculate how many customers you lose/gain from a price increase/decrease.

Those graphs rely on knowing the price elasticity of demand, which is easy to get for commodities like wheat and next to impossible to get for differentiated products, at least without testing various prices on statistically identical cohorts, which is technically difficult and a PR nightmare.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#675

Post by theogravity »

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…

I moved to Apollo a month ago and paid for Pro because the Reddit app kept feeding me the same ad over and over, and it was a really annoying ad at that. Nothing I did including reporting it using various labels / downvoting it would remove it completely from my stream.

I will not be using the Reddit app unless they do something about annoying / intrusive ads on their app.

I'm fine with ads, just stop showing the ones to me I don't want to keep seeing.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#676

Post by tnel77 »

afterburner wrote: post #600
philistine wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Credible likely means “good and successful” in this context

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#677

Post by durandal1 »

thanzex wrote: post #630
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 fir…

Reddit has to make money in order to exist, and Apollo is undercutting them by providing an ad-free experience for less money than Reddit would be making from ads. You don't see the problem?

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#678

Post by tnel77 »

imiric wrote: post #669
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…

Good. It's about time for more people to move on to better platforms. Twitter is a cesspool, and Reddit has some good communities that will be better served from a platform that's not ruled by a greedy corporation that couldn't care less about its users.

What are these better platforms? Genuinely curious.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#679

Post by AndrewKemendo »

RoyGBivCap wrote: post #667
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #661

This is directly related to going public and is completely predictable what will happen next. Investors want to get paid for the last 15 years of waiting… and they want as big of a paycheck as possible and nothing matters but that. All the free labor mods did? I’m sure the board and investors all agreed that moderator labor can’t legally demand anything, meaning they don’t matter. So, I expect Reddit, one of the best…

What? Reddit has been privately owned since 2006: https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/condenast-acquires-re... And it's been a shitshow since they pulled their free speech bait & switch in 2015, so good riddance.

Reddit is going public this year and needs to pump revenue numbers up while they are preparing the filing so that the equity holders get a good multiple from the underwriter.

After that, the activist investors which will certainly look for more margins will demand reddit reduce services and increase revenue irrespective of what that does to the services, so long as the relative cost/benefit is beneficial to quarterly returns.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#680

Post by superfrank »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #502
superfrank wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg. I think a critical part of the Digg exodus was that most people already saw Reddit as a clear #2 in the space. When Digg fucked up, there was an obvious place for everyone to migrate to. I don't see that right now. Facebook isn't cool anymore, Twitter has a large number of people who won't use it because of Elon, Mastodon isn't mature e…

Discord seems the most likely, it matches the subreddit model and a lot of Reddit communities already have a discord. Obviously Discord is chat focused so not a one-to-one replacement but I am not sure that the younger generations will care. Plus there is the possibility of discord adding a Reddit/forum like feature, since they already have the mindshare.

I disagree. A lot of other people are pointing out the discoverability problem (which I agree is an issue), but I think the medium just isn't comparable.

Chat is ephemeral and it there's a certain amount of participation expected, where as Reddit content strikes a nice balance of changing frequently, but not instantaneous and, for most users, it's a passive activity. To put it another way, most people aren't doom-scrolling on a discord server.

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