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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

#951

Post by red-iron-pine »

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…

I'm convinced askHistorians is mostly for the same people asking and answering their own questions

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#952

Post by fennecfoxy »

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…

Eh, I think this goes in line with Netflix's recent hardline changes.

Everyone references their Tweet from years ago of like "love is sharing passwords" and bitching about how Netflix has changed & become greedy.

But those people are thinking big enough; Netflix has changed this way because back then, they didn't really have any competition in the space. And now _everyone_ has to have their own fucking streaming platform, so of course Netflix is gonna change policy.

I'm not defending Netflix here, but what I am saying is that people are doing the shortsighted animal thing and bitching about Netflix. Really they should be bitching about all streaming companies and requesting that our democratic governments enact policies that force companies and corporations to be consumer friendly. All of them. Tax the rich. All of them.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#953

Post by fennecfoxy »

eru wrote: post #731
58x14 wrote: post #99

I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase. Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions…

If you want training data for an LLM and are actively talking to some data providers, you'd just ask for a dump, instead of making a billion small requests. (You'd make the billion small requests, if you are doing this on the sly.)

Eh can still just automate creating a bunch of accounts and do it manually. Use one of the many captcha completion services where you pay for people to complete captchas for you. ML models can already pretty much do them anyway.

Then rotate between accounts and put a random time between requests. Restrict certain accounts to browse within certain hours/timezones. Load pages as usual and just scrape data from the page rather than via api.

However, I believe in a company's right to charge whatever they want for their services. But I also believe in the right for people to choose not to use that service and for freer alternatives to spring up.

Just like Tumblr, Reddit seem intent on killing themselves, although these days I'm not so sure. When Elon took over Twitter everyone was saying that all the users would leave and it would die. This is not the case, human nature means that people seek familiarity and will cling on, hmm.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#954

Post by OGWhales »

jdminhbg wrote: post #106
sorenjan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing that you work in the tech industry in the US and makes $100k+ per year? $5 is not an insignificant amount to a lot of people all over the world, including Europe and maybe the US. Especially when every single app and service wants you to subscribe to them now, I've heard plenty of people saying they're going to cancel their Netflix subscription when password sharing stops working. 344 requests per day is…

There’s no reason for $5/month to be what the average user pays. It’s for power users who spend way more time on the app. Netflix has introduced ad-supported tiers where you pay less. That’s the same here, those users can use the website or first-party app.

> There’s no reason for $5/month to be what the average user pays. It’s for power users who spend way more time on the app.

According to the Apollo dev, the average user would cost $2.50/month in API fees. I imagine power users would be substantially more costly, so $5/month would not cover the API + apple tax for just themselves, let alone supporting the regular users.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#955

Post by mrguyorama »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #936
anonred wrote: post #914

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is more popular because it's extremely heavy pushed.

It's more popular because the amount of absolute horseshit people are willing to wade through to get their fix of social media stuff is insane.

Reddit could replace half of the links with gruesome ISIS beheading videos and people would probably just keep scrolling. Only something like a third of all web users even have an ad blocker.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#956

Post by thedaly »

nitwit005 wrote: post #620
rybosworld wrote: post #328

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…

Much of it seems to be people's behavior changing, rather than the company changing. Reddit has subreddits on the right and left that will ban you for disagreeing, or even for having made a comment in a subreddit they don't like. That was theoretically always possible, but at some point people decided such a policy was a good idea. I personally think a misstep of reddit's has been relying so much on volunteer moderat…

Reddit admins did ban a lot of subreddits on both the far right and left ends of the political spectrum. I don't agree with extremist voices, but I think that silencing and pushing people off the platform is bad for discourse overall.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#957

Post by deafpolygon »

Remmy wrote: post #940
deafpolygon wrote: post #927

Did it actually result in a bill, or is that just a click-baity title? > Selig estimates it would cost $20 million a year to keep Apollo running. No, not a bill. Arstechnica is getting worse every year with these type of titles.

Apollo had 30 billion requests last month. It's not clickbait. It's math.

I'm sorry- was there a bill for $20M?

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#959

Post by zmnd »

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…

Why would they buy them out? The main value prop for the client is no ads, reddit wants to serve ads or provide a subscription. So while it was great, reddit provided free infra, that Apollo resold to their users, it's fair to expect it to end. 20M is something like 15-20 dollars per year per user for them, seems fair.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#960

Post by dmonitor »

actuator wrote: post #854
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, moderatio…

twitter experience is a lot simpler. at the end of the day, twitter power users just need to tweet. reddit power users are moderating a forum.
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