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

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#801

Post by lost_tourist » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 4:38 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #574

58x14 wrote: post #99

I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase. Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions…

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.

lol you can't get in trouble for datascraping or figuring out ways around their anti scraping measures. Good luck enforcing any user agreements the bot has to click through. If they don't want it scraped then they have to not put it on a public facing webpage.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#802

Post by NovaDudely » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 4:41 AM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #554

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…

> As long as the user can access the HTML for free, they should be able to use any application (a browser or a special app) and render the content however they wish. You can see how the end game of this is HTML no longer being free, right?

The worse case vision I have of the future internet in one in which content and advertising is hosted by the advertising companies and rendered via a web assembly system.

Content and advertising cannot be separated by IP and the site content is basically an application that is difficult to parse.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#803

Post by bkishan » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 4:55 AM UTC

$12k for 50M requests, wow. It seems Reddit has taken the twitter way out. If they just wanted to ban third party apps, they should have the balls to do it rather than pull all this stuff.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#804

Post by yoshamano » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 4:59 AM UTC

pyuser583 wrote: post #757

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 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?

4chan will never "get better" because if that happens it'll cease to be 4chan as we know it. /b/ has always been an open pit sewer that the occasional nugget of gold flows through. /trv/ is where I like to hang out, but /pol/ can't help itself and likes to crap-post in there on the regular. /gif/ and it's blue board, "safe for work," version /wsg/ are fun to browse, but the 4chanX extension and some filters are needed to hide a lot of the trolling and truly awful stuff while browsing.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#805

Post by kkarakk » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 5:01 AM UTC

ornornor wrote: post #786

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…

Christian (Apollo’s author, the Reddit app in question) isn’t a paragon of virtue either. The app has been regularly nagging existing paid users, who paid to remove ads in the app, about “amazing” deals to “upgrade” to a monthly subscription to the app to get some virtual stickers and other silly things of dubious value over and over. People complain about it every time they come up on the Apollo subreddit, directly…

This is everyone on the apple ecosystem now - they all want you to subscribe to their app

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#806

Post by holahola1234 » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 5:02 AM 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…

Mmm. Sound like LIHKG

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#807

Post by monocularvision » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 5:04 AM UTC

ornornor wrote: post #786

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…

Christian (Apollo’s author, the Reddit app in question) isn’t a paragon of virtue either. The app has been regularly nagging existing paid users, who paid to remove ads in the app, about “amazing” deals to “upgrade” to a monthly subscription to the app to get some virtual stickers and other silly things of dubious value over and over. People complain about it every time they come up on the Apollo subreddit, directly…

Oh please. I paid for ad-free Apollo a long time ago and the prompts to upgrade to the subscription client are extremely rare and not obtrusive.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#808

Post by stjohnswarts » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 5:04 AM UTC

rybosworld wrote: post #328

I definitely see Reddit going the way of Yahoo! A slow spiral into irrelevance because of lots of small bad decisions. At one point, Reddit felt like a lone champion of free speech and conversation in a sea of buzzfeeds. I think they've moderated the website into ruin. They've put a lot of energy into silencing certain kinds of voices/opinions while promoting others. What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of…

nothing is stopping you from starting conservative versions of things on reddit. Reddit has been since it started pretty left leaning, but they don't stop r/conservative from existing as long as they maintain some decorum rather than act like 4chan or r/TheDonald which was riddled with nuts and russian bots. There are a ton of conservative leaning subs on there, just don't expect them to have thousands of visitors like r/pics or r/memes . You can start r/ConservativeMemes and r/ConservativePics if you like!

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#809

Post by kkarakk » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 5:07 AM UTC

superfrank wrote: post #393

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. 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…

honestly i've been on tiktok/instagram since the pandemic, text forums don't have the same appeal as instantly making a video reply and seeing people react to it. i don't visit reddit/other forums as much anymore - the bot replies and quality of user are super annoying now.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#810

Post by ornornor » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 5:09 AM UTC

monocularvision wrote: post #807

ornornor wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christian (Apollo’s author, the Reddit app in question) isn’t a paragon of virtue either. The app has been regularly nagging existing paid users, who paid to remove ads in the app, about “amazing” deals to “upgrade” to a monthly subscription to the app to get some virtual stickers and other silly things of dubious value over and over. People complain about it every time they come up on the Apollo subreddit, directly…

Oh please. I paid for ad-free Apollo a long time ago and the prompts to upgrade to the subscription client are extremely rare and not obtrusive.

That's the thing with opinions: they're personal.

I get nags to upgrade to something I couldn't care less about, in an app I paid to avoid these ads and nags, every time I open the app (i.e. multiple times per day) on "promo" days (i.e. any US holiday)

These nags have also been disingenuous, because the price will usually go up on "promo" days so that Apollo advertises a "special deal" that is basically the price it's always been before. It's advertised with a full-screen popup upon opening the app (or while using the app)

If it was no big deal and nobody minded, there wouldn't be a slew of posts complaining about it every time, and the app's author wouldn't consistently ignore these posts and comments as he has done every time while always answering praise and positive comments in the same threads and subreddits.

Selling me something to remove all ads and then showing me your own ads anyway is dishonest. Either mention this at the time of payment, or make it opt-in like virtually every other company I deal with (aka "do you want our marketing material?")