I shredded all of my comments before I left.
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#682Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Seems like a golden moment to astroturf in a successor with both reddit and twitter sabotaging themselves?
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 conten…
> 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.
Reddit has something like this, but definitely not as intentional,
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.json
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.rss
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.xml
>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.
Old reddit had stylesheets and they could be very interesting. I still prefer that over the current thing they built.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctor…
In economics they call this rent seeking[1] > Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. You can see Reddit as a landlord, owning the land (or website) that the value grows on. They don't contribute value themselves, instead they make money by charging re…
> by charging rent to everyone who wishes to grow value on their land.
That goes beyond rent-seeking into feudalism.
Rent seeking is running an application as a service that could just be a tool you pay once for, and instead have to pay for monthly. Charging people rent for access to a commons in which they provide all of the value is digital serfdom.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#685He 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've paid for the app, the top tier. I am not on the app to avoid ads. The ads on the Reddit app aren't why I hate it. The entire UX is crap. There are zero features on the official app that are usable to me.
I would happily pay for Apollo on its own backend, and more than happily see ads.
All I am asking for is the Apollo apps front end, this app is the only thing that makes Reddit or a site like Reddit usable for me.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#686Everyone 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 use LH on mobile because there is no decent app. When Reddit 3rd party apps stop working I'll just stop using Reddit on mobile. Also on Desktop, only old reddit makes it worth my time. The moment old reddit is turned off Reddit is over for me.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#687Earlier 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…
> Thats really easy for Reddit to measure. Why are you assuming they haven't?
It's a well know historical fact that companies always do the smart move only based on hard facts.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#688The 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…
in my opinion, a good middle ground would be to make third-party apps only usable if you're subscribed to Reddit Premium. That way you don't give the data freely, you could make each API keys provided to the user with limits that won't impact normal navigation but would cripple automated data capture, and you'd solve the issue where third-party apps aren't fed ads by sustaining the platform through subscription.
I am paying too many subscriptions to care. I'll just stop using Reddit on mobile, most kids are on TikTok anyway.
So they are just alienating younger users.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#689Not 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.
And in the replies to the thread, the admin is now publicly back-and-forthing with Christian about the number of requests made by his app and how "other bots and apps" are more efficient.
Honestly a dumb conversation from the admin if you ask me. Let's say Christian is using 3x the requests for whatever reason. That just means he's on the hook for a $6 million bill at the end of the year if he optimizes things. There's not really a big difference here.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#690Something like this at first feels like bad news, but may later turn out to be good. If something hooks me off Reddit and I use my time better, it is a net positive, for me. Unfortunately, Reddit has good parts to which I don't know alternatives. For example, right now I am studying for a certification and there is a subreddit for that. I recently bought an e-bike and there was a subreddit for that. It is useful.
The positives that the majority of people seem to bring up about Reddit could be replicated with the pre-reddit forum culture that had the UX of a pre-forum threaded chat. In fact one would argue that the internet was more diverse during the pre-reddit forum era, and that reddit has capitalised on the growing number of internet users instead. Virtually all of the other aspects of Reddit have been increasingly detested (major subreddits) or are being replaced by other services such as TikTok.