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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

#881

Post by theshrike79 »

Fnoord wrote: post #848
dacryn wrote: 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.

I'd be willing to shell out the bucks for Reddit Premium if that would let me keep using Apollo.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#882

Post by pb7 »

swozey wrote: post #334

Has anyone stopped using old.reddit.com that uses it and LIKEs using new reddit? I don't know what it is but when I get popped over to new reddit it's absolutely jarring. It looks ridiculous on my 49" monitor because it's middle aligned and horribly padded horizontally. Also it doesn't seem to be doing it right now, or maybe it only does it on mobile but that thing where they only show you a couple of comments then h…

No, it's actually one of the worst sites on the internet that actually has active users. This is the work of the bottom 10% of the industry. Most of the company is clueless.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#883

Post by suddenclarity »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #879
suddenclarity wrote: post #870

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.

I don't know how Apollo works and that's why I lifted it more as an open question.

But my HN client cache the frontpage when you go through the articles so you have to manually press a button to refresh it once you want to see something new. Does the latest scoring from this minute actually matter? Similarly, there's little need to automatically refresh the comments if you go away from a thread and click back within one minute. Maybe you can implement another method for dealing with upvotes/downvotes so they don't require API requests.

It just seems crazy that the average person uses multiple hundreds of API requests per day.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#884

Post by pbmonster »

halJordan wrote: post #606
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…

If you go into that thread there are people begging Selig to charge them 4x what Apollo Ultra costs. And they're begging him to charge it to everyone all the time. This can't just be laid on the feet of faceless bean counters or old men in the executive suite.

40% of reddit posts are marked NSFW. All those won't be able to be accessed from the API.

And those NSFW posts are far from just porn. It's frequently news (especially related to war), the "vice" subreddits (cigars, guns), mental health subreddits, ect.

Also, 4x of Apollo Ultra is probably not enough. After the Appstore takes its cut and the dev pays himself, you're not left with enough money to pay for the API access of the power users you're now inevitably left with. Powerusers, who, again, can't access 40% of posts on your app.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#885

Post by rat9988 »

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 content here is way better than Reddit.

I have to heavily disagree with this. Reddit content is way better in both quality and quantity. The only thing worse is maybe the Signal to noise ratio, and even that is questionable. For example, askHistorians is a gem. Many subreddits are very useful. Moreover, for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. Not once have I needed it to find useful content on hacker news.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#886

Post by mmarq »

shrimpx wrote: post #876
mmarq wrote: post #869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I had the same person tell my girlfriend both things, complaining about our presence in the UK. He started saying that we were living in city center because, as immigrants, we were taking benefits. Then my girlfriend told him how much I was earning (which was 5-6 times what he was making), he stayed quiet for a few days and then came back complaining about foreigners stealing good jobs, gentrifying things and forcing the Brits to work as cleaners.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#887

Post by fooker »

rat9988 wrote: post #885
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 and the content here is way better than Reddit. I have to heavily disagree with this. Reddit content is way better in both quality and quantity. The only thing worse is maybe the Signal to noise ratio, and even that is questionable. For example, askHistorians is a gem. Many subreddits are very useful. Moreover, for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. Not…

>For example, askHistorians is a gem.

Ask about anything remotely controversial, and you'll see how quickly it's an echo chamber.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#888

Post by surgical_fire »

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?

I remember my /b/tard days, in the mid 2000's. I drifted away from it many years ago, but I remember ir fondly.

4chan was horrible and excellent at the same time. A sea of garbage that was also full of gold.

Probably the only online community I ever enjoyed to be a part of. All else was shit.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#889

Post by rsynnott »

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…

The thing is, though, that the value of these APIs is largely driven by the userbase, and the most valuable users tend to use third-party clients.

Now, I'm not surprised to see _Twitter_ doing this, because it's just one of a laundry-list of ideas that Naughty Old Mr Car has to make Twitter worse; it really barely registers. But _Reddit_, I would have thought, would be a lot more conservative in the "massive dangerous change" department, particularly after what happened to Digg (and more generally the history of internet forums). I'd expect that there's a huge danger for them here that the big third party apps will simply endorse a Reddit clone.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#890

Post by PestoDiRucola »

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…

Good thing web scraping is a thing.
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