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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

#751

Post by Thorrez »

qball wrote: post #638
armchairhacker wrote: post #585

Earlier 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…

>the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care No, they're just flailing. The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity ; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subredd…

>And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money

Why? I would think it's the much simpler "having a ton of users is worth a lot of money".

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#752

Post by SamuelAdams »

Kibae wrote: post #629
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.

A lot of user generated content is recycled though. Take a look at the top twitter subs /r/whitepeopletwitter etc. notice the dates on the screenshots of tweets. Notice how they are 3-6 months old or longer.

Then notice how many posts in /rAskReddit are recycled from 6-12 months ago.

It’s gross, but honestly I kind of respect it. Reddit has recreated modern day TV for mobile phones. And it works because people can’t be bothered to retain what they’re consuming, so waiting 6 weeks for the news cycle to restart makes it all feel like a whole new thing.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#753

Post by pabs3 »

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…

Which forums is this story about? Are they public?

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#755

Post by searchableguy »

dang wrote: post #743
armchairhacker wrote: post #585

Earlier 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 believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million HN has about 5M unique monthly users depending on how you count them.

Really? How many users perform any writes monthly?

I only see a couple thousand people actively comment or vote.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#756

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

philistine wrote: post #580
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…

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

Tell me you only use iOS without telling me you only use iOS...

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#757

Post by pyuser583 »

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 don’t do 4chan, but I know people IRL who do. They seem to think it’s pretty good.

Is there a chance it’s getting better?

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#758

Post by pyuser583 »

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.

Honestly I think the tech is an issue.

Most web development is downloading. Social networks have massive uploading and frequent changes.

Twitter literally invented microservices because of this.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#759

Post by josephg »

tornato7 wrote: post #657
Devasta wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It became a lot more possible this year to start doing AI content moderation. It won't be perfect, of course, but human mods are probably worse. and yes, I've used content moderation AIs in the past (like Google's Perspective API) and they're not really usable. OpenAI moderation endpoint, embeddings classification, or even just gpt3.5-turbo would work marvelously.

This is a great idea. The first version of this could be a human-assisted AI, where an ai makes moderation choices (with a confidence interval) and the choices it makes can be supervised and overriden by human moderators when it gets things wrong. Over time the AI can be retrained to make better choices. Kind of like a spam filter with more knobs.

The hard thing early on might be getting getting started with good training data. But chatgpt might already be good enough to make reasonable choices today with a good system prompt.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#760

Post by folkrav »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #740
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. Ooof. I mean, if you're only an iOS user, maybe?

On iOS Apollo and Narwhal were both good options last I tried them. Android has a lot more going on. All of Infinity, Joey, Sync (my choice), RiF, Boost and Now are pretty solid. Pretty reductive indeed to say Apollo is the only serious contenter...
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