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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

#971

Post by adhesive_wombat »

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.

To the extent that whole subreddits are deliberately broken (no comments load, or the "open in app" bar covers the "next page" button) in the mobile web version, and that's when they're not labelling everything that's not Teletubbies as NSFW and denying mobile access except via the app.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#972

Post by bitsoda »

Building your business on the back of somebody else's API is always gonna be a risky endeavor. Luckily, Apollo is a great client with loyal users, so hopefully Christian can spin off his own backend forum and build from there. Reddit's been making some dubious moves (crypto avatar-things, hostile dark patterns steering mobile web users to their app, more ads, etc) that I wouldn't be surprised if more and more users went looking for an alternative with a similar flavor.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#973

Post by mebizzle »

piva00 wrote: post #845
Casteil wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, please! We need alternatives to the social media giants that are now obviously bent on monetization and other, shadier motives. Moves like this are what caused the huge Digg -> Reddit exodus that significantly boosted Reddit's popularity. People need other places to go when their favorite platform takes this seemingly inevitable path.

I was part of the Digg -> Reddit exodus at the time, I loved Digg until they destroyed it, had a Reddit account for long but never really used it. Now with Reddit trying to shutdown Apollo and other 3rd party clients with this pricing move I can see myself never using Reddit, their official client sucks a lot (it's unfortunate they bought Alien Blue just to kill it, which gave Apollo the chance to rise from those ash…

With the Digg exodus, Reddit was already the strong #2 alternative for a decent amount of time so it was a no-brainer and obviously Reddit has grown exponentially beyond what Digg was.

I have no idea what is out there as an alternative at this point, there just seems to be too much chaff everywhere.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#974

Post by asoneth »

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.

It's certainly a risk that these cuts might be going too deep.

Personally I would have made the process more gradual but who knows, maybe they're running out of runway, or their research gives them confidence that a sufficient number of (profitable) users will stick around.

This is all just armchair conjecture but I suspect that either they'll be fine or that they're screwed regardless -- either way I doubt this decision will sink them.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#975

Post by pokerface_86 »

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…

browsing any major, big subreddit will reveal that it’s users are no better than the average facebook, twitter, or tiktok user. have you looked at /r/all or /r/popular in the past… 3-4 years? it’s all garbage. i think the reality is that an extremely small percentage of people bother setting up a real home page, unsubbing from all the default subreddits, and having a tailored experience more akin to forums is just not what people want anymore- they want a black box “algorithm” to push rage bait and ads at them.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#976

Post by pokerface_86 »

krabizzwainch wrote: post #718
Casteil wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, please! We need alternatives to the social media giants that are now obviously bent on monetization and other, shadier motives. Moves like this are what caused the huge Digg -> Reddit exodus that significantly boosted Reddit's popularity. People need other places to go when their favorite platform takes this seemingly inevitable path.

I forgot about Digg and just went to look at it. Not a single thing is recognizable about it.

i feel similarly about reddit, the site is completely unrecognizable from when i first joined in 2013 looking for a way to keep up with the gaming industry without clickbait youtubers.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#978

Post by robotnikman »

atraac wrote: post #840
robotnikman wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Reddit has reached the enshittification stage as a company

Pretty sure they reached that stage long time ago when they redesigned their UI into an unusable, slow mess of an interface that noone asked for.

True. I guess it started around 2015 then.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#979

Post by thatfunkymunki »

aSockPuppeteer wrote: post #551

Off to Teddit or? https://teddit.net/about Or self host your own. https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit

I kind of wonder if it is possible for an app like Apollo or RIF to use Teddit API as a backend instead of reddit, then the user becomes responsible for funding the API access of their teddit server.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#980

Post by xtracto »

dageshi wrote: post #828
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…

This is very obviously what's going on. The web is in the process of rapidly filling up with AI regurgitated garbage, eventually there's going to be a handful of sites with real usable content on them left, reddit being one of the biggest.

>The web is in the process of rapidly filling up with AI regurgitated garbage

This is already the case. See the oceans of crap SEO optimized "food recipe sites". It's unbearable.

So sad that, BBC back in 199ps and 2000s, there were so many random sites to visit with interesting things. Search engines were of actual use.

Now, it's basically facebook, reddit, pinterest, instagram, stackoverflow , and a couple of counted others, depending on what you like. And EVERYTHING is monetized.

The WWW of today is terrible.

Now

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