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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

#871
post #638

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…

Ideological conformity is their product? Uh, anything to back that up?

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes! Of course! How couldn't anyone think of just increasing the price, no, double it and make it a subscription just to be sure we're making tons of money! Surely people will flock to our app now, a 60$/Y subscription to browse a social media platform where people tell each other off and meme. This isn't the problem, if you're willing to just shed 95+% of you userbase, then sure, make everyone pay and have a fir…

Reddit has to make money in order to exist, and Apollo is undercutting them by providing an ad-free experience for less money than Reddit would be making from ads. You don't see the problem?

The problem is that many, many 3P app users are some of the most active and engaged on the platform. For example, mods of literally thousand of the top subreddits use 3P apps for moderation.

Any new user would just use the official client, but the fact that so many alternative ones exist and so many people use them is telling of the unusable state of their app.

I use reddit every day, only because I don't use the official app, because of that it's become my go-to site to look for things, even on a computer.

If I lose access to my 3P client, which is tens of times faster, not clunky, customized to my liking, has all the shit sub filtering set-up and is generally a joy to use ( mind you, it has ads too) I will simply not bother anymore.

So, people that use 3P apps usually engage more because otherwise they wouldn't bother, this change is going to royally piss off every single one of them. In the short term maybe some users are going to switch, but in the long run I think the platform is going to lose lots of people that actually engage in the community.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#874
post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy? One of the devs of Lemmy posted this on Christian's thread on Reddit. https://r.nf/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_re...

Last time I checked Lemmy, it was just full of communist propaganda.

Which instance did you check? There's more than one as far as I know.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#875
post #848
post #846

Is 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…

> The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates.

This feels the most fair to me honestly. Using RiF subverts reddit income by not showing ads. So just let me the user pay a bit to use third party apps. Considering how much time I spend on it a couple bucks should be reasonable.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#876
post #869

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…

> What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of the seemingly worst ideas from the left are stated as fact and voicing a dissenting opinion can quite literally get you banned. A friend of mine is moving to Canada, another to Germany, both went to Reddit to ask for help, and what they got back was anti-immigration tropes of all kind (from "go away you cheap labour, you are stealing our jobs" to "go away you rich…

> "go away you cheap labour, you are stealing our jobs" to "go away you rich tech worker, you are gentrifying my town"

It's pretty funny how these two quotes express similar sentiment (NIMBYism, in-group protectionism, deep-seated fear of disruption) yet are often placed on opposite ends of the spectrum (anti-gentrification vs. anti-immigration).

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#877
post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy? One of the devs of Lemmy posted this on Christian's thread on Reddit. https://r.nf/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_re...

Last time I checked Lemmy, it was just full of communist propaganda.

So is Reddit. And also neolib propaganda, capitalist propaganda, libsoc propaganda, ... should I go on?

Also, it's federated. You don't have to get even close to a server with the kind of propaganda you dislike the most and just keep to your favourite propaganda bubble.

You can also just run your own server and forbid the "wrong" kind of propaganda, whilst allowing the "right" kind.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#878
Does anyone know if other Apps (like BaconReader for Android) have similar volumes and so have similar pricing issues ? There are a good number of options on Android for reddit clients - though I would assume the user base is more fragmented across multiple clients and would not have the volumes of Apollo..

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#879

7 billion requests last month with the average user making 344 requests per day. Crazy numbers. Is there no way to optimise and cache some of this?

What kind of thing are you thinking of caching? Because when I visit a page I expect to see the latest posts, with their current scoring.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#880
post #878

Does anyone know if other Apps (like BaconReader for Android) have similar volumes and so have similar pricing issues ? There are a good number of options on Android for reddit clients - though I would assume the user base is more fragmented across multiple clients and would not have the volumes of Apollo..

Reddit Is Fun developer has received a similar ultimatum: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_de...
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