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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

#851

Post by DiscourseFan »

Someone in the thread where the OP linked directly to the Reddit post[0] suggested that perhaps Apollo would just create its own Reddit-like website under the name Apollo, republish it on the app store and then all the users would flock to the new social-media app instead of Reddit. The whole thing is really Reddit's fault: instead of offering to buy-out Apollo and make it official, they are relying on their ultra-shitty interface that nobody wants to use and hoping they can make an extra buck on the few third-party apps that will remain.

I'm not sure what they expect...we've all seen it happen with social-media, it starts out all open and free, and then investors get involved and soon enough people have already moved on to the next open and free alternative. 4chan is the only exception to this rule. But if 4chan somehow got transformed into a for-profit service, then things have already gotten very bad.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083#36144800

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#852

Post by darreninthenet »

We had a great "forum" solution back in the day - Usenet.

You picked the server you joined but the benefit of this over something like Lemmy is that you don't get the split community/discoverability issues that impact the average user as everyone was reading and posting to the same newsgroups but from their chosen NNTP server.

Let's have something like NNTP implemented in ActivityPub (is this possible? I'm not familiar enough...) where the news servers are decentralised and users pick whatever one they want but the newsgroups themselves are the same across all the servers.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#853

Post by Seattle3503 »

duskwuff wrote: post #10
jmclnx wrote: post #4

I think it has all to do with AI accessing sites for "training", you can't blame reddit for wanting a piece of the action. Is the price high ? To me it is, but for a large company doing AI, probably not.

If it was about restricting access for AI training data, I'd expect them to give developers of actual, well-known client apps a break.

You could enforce per-usdr API limits rather than per-app limits as well.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#854

Post by actuator »

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…

There is also one more story on the other side of it.

Twitter used to have a vibrant ecosystem of clients, most of them working better than the official app both on web and mobile. Twitter was able to kill their third party app ecosystem with their paid API changes and lived to thrive as a company till recently.

The reality is, you need a good cohort of content and users to move who can sustain the content, moderation and discussion. Just moving Apollo users doesn't ensure that. There are other good third party clients like Relay etc as well

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#855

Post by nicce »

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.

Youtube also relies on the user-generated content to be fair. However, the difference is that you might get paid from that.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#856

Post by hardware2win »

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 believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the

What? Id say max 50k

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#858

Post by atraac »

paulddraper wrote: post #87
raydev wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them. Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them. If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features. Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party c…

Exactly. Same reason why Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. don't have alternative clients. Nothing unusual. Reddit is proceeding along the well-trodden path to monetization optimization.

I feel like there's a major difference here. Services you mentioned never really had any third party clients, while Reddit has pretty much built itself upon them.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#859

Post by alwayslikethis »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #851

Someone in the thread where the OP linked directly to the Reddit post[0] suggested that perhaps Apollo would just create its own Reddit-like website under the name Apollo, republish it on the app store and then all the users would flock to the new social-media app instead of Reddit. The whole thing is really Reddit's fault: instead of offering to buy-out Apollo and make it official, they are relying on their ultra-sh…

The interface is "shitty" for users, not for Reddit. Reddit just wants ads and the inability for users to filter out stuff they don't want to see, such as ads or moderation, in order to market themselves to the highest bidder that needs to spread propaganda. Having any user control of the content distribution is harmful to this goal, and must be destroyed.

In general, all for-profit social media or similar operations will have the same fate. The term for this is "enshittification". While HN is owned by a company, it isn't being used as a profit generating service, even though it technically has some job ads, so it is (so far) immune from this.

We must find a solution to sustain non-profit user-generated content operations to continue enjoying the benefits of an open online community. Forums went of fashion as they required too much technical expertise to operate and to a lesser extent to use, so they got displaced by reddits and discords, both of these are distinctly worse from a data sovereignty and user freedom perspective. In the age of smartphones, density of information (esp. text) seems to be frowned upon.

I'm not sure what's the solution is. "Making your own platform" doesn't work because people's time is limited, and they inevitably gravitate toward the biggest platforms, taking all the attention and mindshare with them. Is federation the answer? Perhaps, as it seems to bring down the operation costs to a reasonable level, but it seems to pose other problems with content curation, which is a hard problem.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#860

Post by ymolodtsov »

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…

Unfortunately, the value of Reddit is in all the existing communities and the content. It'd be hard to move it, and while this might be a big news on Hacker News, most Reddit users probably have never heard about alternative clients.

Most forum have gone into demise, unless they focus on some very small niche (so they're small already). People prefer apps, otherwise they forget about things unless they're enormous.

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