Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit Strike Has Started

reddark.untone.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 1001 posts

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#291

Post by rchaud »

low_tech_punk wrote: post #256

Thinking on how to forward from here. Is the missing ADs revenue the crux of the problem? Instead of raising API price, what if Reddit injects ADs as real content for non premium API calls, so those API free riders/crawlers would get ADs indistinguishable from content. Well intended apps like Apollo could allow users to provide their premium identity and get AD free content. If this works, Reddit could even lower the…

> Is the missing ADs revenue the crux of the problem?

No, it is the whole shebang which is why Reddit is forcing this extinction event for 3rd party apps.

I use the Now for Reddit Android app and Reddit Enhancement Suite extension on desktop. With this combination, Reddit has stayed visually identical for the past decade. I never saw things like NFT avatars, RPAN livestreaming or any of the things Reddit has added to make it something other than an old school messageboard.

Users like me are a disaster for Reddit because I treat it like a PHPbb forum from 2010. There is no hope of upselling me into something I would pay for. Reddit's owners however believe that they should be multiplying their wealth many times over for running a bigger Phpbb instance. That is the crux of the problem.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#292

Post by nomorewords »

joobus wrote: post #110
rany_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides this boycott is at best useless, most are only going offline for 48 hours; it should be permanent until they reverse the decision if they were being sincere.

The third-party apps shutting down on July 1st will be the real test. If Reddit notices a significant drop in traffic on that day, they will probably start walking back the change. I agree that this boycott, while the intention is good, won't do much.

I don't think Reddit is doing anything based on that day's data. I suspect that they will wait for a month before starting to rely on the data for any long-term prospects.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#293

Post by TX81Z »

cragfar wrote: post #245
atleastoptimal wrote: post #16

Is the inevitable fate of any social media site to be antagonistic to its most dedicated users?

This is 99% manufactured drama by the power mods wanting to be able to keep modding 100+ subreddits with their 3rd party tools and AI companies wanting to mine reddit data for free. The fact that Spez has let them do it for this long has probably put him in the hot seat.

The fact that he isn’t keeping his free labor force happy is the problem. Other companies put hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of staff into moderation. This moron has people doing that FOR FREE and he’s pissing them off.

Seriously, do you have any clue how much just YouTube alone spends on content moderation? Or Facebook? These are absolutely massive investments.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#294

Post by [deleted] »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #202
WXLCKNO wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found out yesterday that they have 2000 employees. I realize most of these people are not engineers but what in the hell have they been spending their time on. Terrible

Normally I'm the one saying "well there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than you know". But in this case: yeah it's bizarre. How the hell are their official apps and mobile site and new desktop website so fucking awful, when solo/small team app developers can actually provide a good experience working on the outside with a fraction of the resources? I've tried to switch from old.reddit to new.reddit a handful…

[deleted]

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#296

Post by goykasi »

oilchange wrote: post #150
lordnacho wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics. You probably also want to make it a bit more modern, supporting images and video, or those subs won't come here. Plus scaling is not trivial. There's a gap between being the nerds' text-only board and the board for everything.

> You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics. People forget that reddit was popular and succeeded during the digg migration because it was pro free speech and minimally moderated. It was one of the reasons people migrated to reddit instead of here. The first 10 years of reddit, the community and the company prided themselves on being a "free speech platform."…

Wut? People migrated to reddit, because it was one of the few similarly featured platforms at the time. HN was (and still is more or less) a niche forum revolving around startups and SV. reddit was literally the only centralized place on the net that was positioned to handle the posts, discussion and users.

Two completely different platforms that were never in competition with each other. I think you dont know what youre talking about.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#297

Post by poisonborz »

ChocMontePy wrote: post #285

I have to hand it to those app devs. The way they managed to dupe millions of Redditors into protesting was masterful. They didn't produce any good evidence that the new API price is excessive (some cherry-picking here, a deceptive comparison there) but they still managed to convince 99% of Reddit that it was true anyway. Bravo! It was a beautiful exercise in propaganda and the delusion of crowds.

It has nothing to do with the amount of the price, the scheme (charge per request, not /user/month) makes third party apps impossible on purpose. Not to say that this abrupt and unannounced dumping of beloved community apps is just the latest misstep of a long string of anti-user moves from Reddit. They had it coming, but their estimation is that a large majority will keep silent. Let's see - Twitter had also not truly crashed yet on their grand way to profitability...

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#299

Post by Someone1234 »

bottlepalm wrote: post #32
wpietri wrote: post #11

Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit. The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.

Reddit wanted 2.50/month/app which is like $30 ARPU, Facebook is $200 ARPU in the US. The app they’re burning down Reddit over is already charging $1/month and was ready to sell out and shut down for $10 million. Correct me if I’m wrong, but we usually don’t give out API keys to allow users to wholesale reproduce, redistribute, resell our data for free.

Reddit announced this price 30-days before they planned to enforce/charge it. If there was any doubt at all that Reddit wasn't trying to ban third-party apps with deniability, then that should settle it. That isn't reasonable.

Plus $2.5 to Reddit, means that apps need to charge $3.60 before 30% App-Store fees. But the app developer also needs new infrastructure to handle the billing, payment, and tracking, between end-users & Reddit along with their existing overhead. So the current $1/month aka $0.70/month after fees they're operating on likely isn't sustainable.

So now we're looking at $3.60 to Reddit + the existing $1/month = $4.6, but also all this new payment/billing infrastructure. Could easily exceed $5/month which frankly nobody is going to pay, and then get all this done in just 30-days even though that date is completely arbitrary from Reddit's end.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#300

Post by rchaud »

TX81Z wrote: post #283
low_tech_punk wrote: post #256

Thinking on how to forward from here. Is the missing ADs revenue the crux of the problem? Instead of raising API price, what if Reddit injects ADs as real content for non premium API calls, so those API free riders/crawlers would get ADs indistinguishable from content. Well intended apps like Apollo could allow users to provide their premium identity and get AD free content. If this works, Reddit could even lower the…

The age of adtech as the dominant technology revenue model is drawing to a close and Reddit missed out on the golden age. Trying to make ads work now, when it’s clear the future is subscriptions and the like, is just dumb.

Only Google and FB figured out ads, and they were planet-scale companies. Twitter pulled in ad revenue but couldn't make a profit. Reddit's audience is extremely hostile to ads, and they've never managed to attract big advertisers anyway.
Post reply on HN