Another reason why Nostr is the future.
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
841–850 of 1001 posts
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#842How can companies not be liable for data that they are now “selling access to”?
I mean I could never get my head around how they could circumvent liabilities by simply saying oh this is user generated content but still copyright it and now sell it? Seems like the greatest scam social networks have been able to pull off.
Also if this data is public, what stops people from scraping it?
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#843I 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…
> Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)
You’re describing Reddit ten years ago. There’s not really a “typical Reddit user” at this point it’s so big. All kinds of people are on it and most of them are not techies with a particular ideological bent.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#844I 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…
Yes, please! We need alternatives to the social media giants that are now obviously bent on monetization and other, shadier motives. Moves like this are what caused the huge Digg -> Reddit exodus that significantly boosted Reddit's popularity. People need other places to go when their favorite platform takes this seemingly inevitable path.
From a comment : >They’re trying to overvalue their services before going public. Execs want to cash out and move to a tropical island. I can’t wait for this cesspool to fail.
This is their real motivation. You can’t fight that honestly. Greed is good for these folks.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#845I 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…
Yes, please! We need alternatives to the social media giants that are now obviously bent on monetization and other, shadier motives. Moves like this are what caused the huge Digg -> Reddit exodus that significantly boosted Reddit's popularity. People need other places to go when their favorite platform takes this seemingly inevitable path.
I was part of the Digg -> Reddit exodus at the time, I loved Digg until they destroyed it, had a Reddit account for long but never really used it.
Now with Reddit trying to shutdown Apollo and other 3rd party clients with this pricing move I can see myself never using Reddit, their official client sucks a lot (it's unfortunate they bought Alien Blue just to kill it, which gave Apollo the chance to rise from those ashes), if Apollo dies... I will simply not use Reddit as much, the only other way I can use Reddit right now is through old.reddit.com, that sucks on mobile browsers without RES.
It seems I will soon experience a repeat of Digg with Reddit, slowly use it less and less because the experience is broken until the moment I forget it exists.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#846Is it so unreasonable to charge 12k for 50mln requests? I don't know.
Is it so unreasonable to charge 20m/year to a super popular iOS app? I don't know.
Does apollo make money from this? Do they take advertisement income? But I imagine, if you are the most popular app, on the most popular mobile platform, of a very popular site like Reddit, there has to be a lot of money floating around no? They definitely have income, and definitely have expenses (development isn't free). Curious to actually see the balance of these.
But if reddit want people to use their own app, I don't see why they would support Apollo for free. I also don't know that the actual cost towards reddit would be. A reasonable price is probably somehwere between 0 and 12k.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#847Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their pricing likely includes the cost of potential ad revenue that an API call is displacing. There's no easy way to integrate ads into an API, so they just offload the advertising/monetization problem to whoever buys the content.
Couldn't they just return ads from the API? Any apps that don't show them would have their API access revoked.
The tricky bit with ads is that someone is paying for a user to see it, so if the user never scrolls to it, or perhaps scrolls past too fast, you probably need to know so you don't bill for it. If the user taps on it you definitely need to know that, regardless of whether the ad link is working, but you can't redirect and slow down the ad link.
You need highly accurate data about user behaviour around the ads, and highly optimised display and linking.
I've built a similar system, albeit not for ads, for recommendations, based on viewing items in a feed. With a simple model, across web and app, all developed in-house, it was still hard and required a lot of care to get good ML signals and signals that people really understood.
Doing this across third party clients may be prohibitively difficult. I'd like to see attempts, but so far I've not seen any.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#848Is it so unreasonable to charge 12k for 50mln requests? I don't know. Is it so unreasonable to charge 20m/year to a super popular iOS app? I don't know. Does apollo make money from this? Do they take advertisement income? But I imagine, if you are the most popular app, on the most popular mobile platform, of a very popular site like Reddit, there has to be a lot of money floating around no? They definitely have incom…
That's not how the deal works though.
The deal with WWW is as follows:
You provide a website on the server. The client downloads it and decides how to render it. An API is going to be more efficient than HTML plus all the bells and whistles. But if you don't provide a reasonable API we go back to the stone age of HTML clients which parse and scrape. It is going to be more nuisance for client and server. Load is more intense and it requires more bandwidth at the cost of user engagement. And you'll get barely more advertising income.
The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#849Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#850I have seen a lot of "wow, Reddit is over" comments here and on reddit. There will absolutely not be any meaningful exodus from Reddit. Unfortunately, we as a society are pretty bad at organizing and of course prone to overestimating outrage. In any event, this is clearly absurd pricing. Its tough to tell if this is deliberate to simply kill appollo and cater to a usecase that makes them some money at the same time,…
Personally, if Apollo goes, I will stop visiting Reddit. Especially if old.reddit.com goes too, which is likely.
To be honest, I'll be happy to cut Reddit out of my digital habits. There's a few things I'll miss but HN, Slashdot and e-books will easily replace that gap.