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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

#911

Post by haswell »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #850
wand3r wrote: post #837

I 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.

I’m in the same boat.

I’ve been on Reddit since the early days, and I think the thing that keeps me going back is habit more than enjoyment these days.

Comment threads for any even moderately larger sub have turned into cesspools of sniping ad hominem attacks and every form of fallacious argument under the sun.

And that same mindset is slowly creeping into the smaller niches that are the primary reasons I go there. This growing ooze invariably puts me in a worse state of mind, and I tried deleting the Apollo app just a few days ago to see how it impacts my mental health.

This API nonsense will easily make this a permanent experiment at this point.

It’s sad, but seemingly inevitable.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#912

Post by anonred »

LikesPwsh wrote: post #900
faeriechangling wrote: post #895

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to think a fairly small slice of users are using 3rd party clients. I know almost nobody uses old.reddit.com anymore. I don't see any of the moves Reddit is making as unsustainable, they just have a lock on their niche. Sure Apollo could clone Reddit, but why continue to use their app that that point when it would be better to switch to the official app which will see maybe 100x+ more usage?

Reddit power users are overrepresented as users of third party clients and old. They have an outsized influence as content sharers/creators rather than consumer, so annoying them is worse for reddit than it might appear.

Source? It’s plausible that most third party client users are power users, but certainly not the other way around.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#913

Post by kitsunesoba »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #903
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…

Apollo charges a fat subscription for their app so the reality is that they’re just mad they’re losing their income. The numbers they posted suggest they could still easily be in profit with these charges, they just wouldn’t be making 20m profit.

Apollo is free to use. There’s a one-time fee for some frills like choice of app icon to show on the Home Screen and subscription for features that cost money and require maintenance of a server (notifications mainly), but they’re both optional. So many of its users aren’t paying anything currently.

The subscription currently costs $0.99/month or $10/year. With the new API pricing, he’d have to pay around $2.50-$5 per month per user. This means not only would the subscription have to become non-optional, but that he’d probably have to bump its price to $5/mo to just have API and server costs covered. Factor in super heavy users, the App Store cut, and a bit of margin to live off of and you’re looking at $7-$10/mo.

A few users will pay this much but I’d bet that most will not. It’s as much as a streaming service costs for a free service. The user falloff would be immense, and this is exactly Reddit’s goal: they want to herd users into its official app and site where they can be subjected to ads, data harvesting, algorithmic feeds, and incessant A/B testing to juice “engagement”. Whether that happens by way of third party app devs throwing in the towel or from users being priced out of using them matters not.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#914

Post by anonred »

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…

> ultra-shitty interface that nobody wants to use

I don’t want to sound dramatic, but the official Reddit app works just fine and is much more popular than any third party client in terms of usage.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#915

Post by [deleted] »

rgbgraph wrote: post #775
Nifty3929 wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what everybody thinks, until they grow large enough to care about the amount of money they’re burning and get tired of it. Then they try to not lose so much money, and their loyal users turn out not to be so loyal.

All reddit is doing is storing text and serving it to people. This not expensive or a hard problem. You grab a bunch of servers, you set them up properly, and then you write your app properly. No resume-driven bullshit; no hype-driven bullshit; no “we need to be galaxy scale now ” bullshit. No email notifications, besides basic “thanks for registering, here is your login” and “here’s a password reset link.” No cloud-…

[deleted]

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#916

Post by gaudat »

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…

Or scrape the HTML directly instead of using an API. I'm pretty sure the clients I mentioned in the post scraped the old forum. APIs and SaaS wasnt a big thing a decade ago.

And I recall in my case there is not a big exodus but people slowly moved over with die-hard fans on both sides.

As a comparison, with 20MM the devs can probably build the new thing, serve media over CDNs and out-SEO reddit with some to spare.

I think moot and hiroyuki did try to monetize 4chan but with mixed success. See the 4chan pass and splitting of the SFW boards into a separate domain.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#917

Post by sschueller »

I guess these clients just need to scrape the websites and make post request via website with fake user agents etc.

It's a lot of work but for a small fraction of 20m a year you can hire a team who only work on that.

Didn't Digg primarily die from a redesign? Why has the web become so forgiving these days? People don't seem to give a shit anymore. "Oh OK, I'll use the official reddit app filled with ads, OK I will watch your 30 second pre-roll. OK I will give you may data for free". /s

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#918

Post by _fat_santa »

jethro_tell wrote: post #798
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…

This kinda assumes that people won't leave in mass. Digg migration took like 60 days. I think especially in a forum where people tend to be semi anon. This isn't staking out a facebook name and keeping up with highschool friends. I know a few user names by sight on reddit but I really don't care if I hear from them again and I don't expect they care about me. Makes leaving to anywhere that can put together a decent U…

I feel like Reddit sees their userbase as two types of users: casual users that browse /r/pics or something like that on the official app / web and power users that are subbed to niche subreddits, use 3rd party apps and likely still use the old.* subdomain.

For the longest time Reddit was predominantly the latter group of power users but in recent years Reddit has had a mass influx of the former casual group of users. I think the bet that Reddit is making is that the latter group is much smaller than the former and cutting off API access won't make a significant difference. But if they are wrong, this could well be the end of Reddit, going just like Digg went. It will likely still exist, but as a shell of it's former self.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#919

Post by codeslave13 »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #850
wand3r wrote: post #837

I 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.

Same. 12 yr reddit user. If apollo and old are done then so am i. My usage is down anyway so it wont be that big of a deal
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