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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

#691

Post by scarab92 »

Devasta wrote: post #643
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.

Several popular reddit clients could team up, launch the site but require a small monthly subscription fee (which these clients already collect).

Even $1 per month is enough to keep a lot of the outrage junkies out and you can use the revenue to pay for moderation of the smaller group of power users that remain.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#692

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

> the browser has the ultimate choice of what to render and how

Fundamentally you're advocating for a web that doesn't rely on ad money. I'm totally with you, but the discussion should probably expand beyond the web and to why our society generate so much ad money in the first place.

What should we do to free our societies from ad money ?

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#693

Post by witchesindublin »

idiotsecant wrote: post #212
Zetice wrote: post #162

I blocked the reddit.com domain from all of my devices a few weeks ago, because until recently I didn't feel like I could keep my finger on the pulse of "The Internet" without Reddit. That's no longer the case. Google's "For You" gets me my niche subject-specific content, Google News/Memeorandum (and its sibling sites)/Apple News gives me the mainstream media perspectives, HN (and maybe Bluesky occasionally) my urge…

What do you do isntead of appending 'reddit' to google search? I could imagine dropping everything else but search is terrible for a lot of things without it.

Reddit is rarely the best source for anything except maybe a discussion on a news event around 2015. Quora was always a little better but has gone down the drain as well. But never I have added "reddit" to my searches.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#694

Post by bigthymer »

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.

You have a point. He has a lot of power users and many don't want to pay. Many others may be willing to, but I don't think paid users alone is enough to sustain a site.

However, of all of the Reddit alternatives that have popped up and failed, this one seems promising because there is a broad base of users that are all angry at once. In the past, it has always been fringe groups that have been banned and sought another site. Because of that, the subject matter of the new site always had challenges getting site hosts and advertisers on board. This is different. Having power users hurts on ad revenue but potentially helps on site quality. I don't know what will happen but this is a uniquely promising opportunity. We'll see how it goes.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#695

Post by miki123211 »

paragraft wrote: post #619
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 prici…

This really doesn't work in the context of AI training though. Sure, it would make reuse between models a lot harder, perhaps, but the general idea still holds, once a model is trained, the model is for forever.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#696

Post by newsclues »

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…

"One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg" To burn capital on another platform before the next exodus?

We need to figure out sustainable online communities.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#697

Post by makeitdouble »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #672
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.

You're right that it's a minuscule part of Reddit, but I'd disagree that most of those who chose Apollo are deeply stuck to Reddit.

I think most people going out their way to pay for an alternative Reddit client have a beef with Reddit in the first place, and it's the client that keeps them on the platform.

Would they be happy with Reddit alternatives ? who knows. But they'd probably give a fair shake at it to see if it fits their needs, and not just dismiss it at first glance. Also would such a service be profitable ? depends if service such a minuscule group is done efficiently enough to keep the running costs low.

IMO Apollo users probably aren't on Reddit for the mainstream stuff, Mastodon or Bluesky could probably take that role. Niche communities could probably move on to smaller services and their users would follow.

PS: Voat was positively horrible, but I'd argue the circumstances that led to its conception where wildly different. This time we hopefully wouldn't have some "free speach" narrative baked into it, except for the NSFW bits perhaps.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#698

Post by nerdix »

This is basically a long con. The free and open access to an API was a selling point for reddit and they benefited greatly from it -- especially in the early days of the smart phone revolution before they had an official mobile client. The presence of many, high quality third party reddit mobile applications helped them ward off would be mobile first competitors.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#699

Post by naru_s »

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…

Sounds familiar to me :o)
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