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Reddit Strike Has Started

reddark.untone.uk

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Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#471

Post by guyomes »

mattkevan wrote: post #363
jcims wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.

I have a theory, after working for one of the UK’s largest social networks, that no-one who runs a social network understands what made it work or why it continues to work. Therefore they are extremely reluctant to make changes in case they break it (e.g. old twitter), and because they don’t understand it, any large changes they do make are generally negative (new twitter, Reddit). Plus, in my experience , users will…

> It’s their space. Changing anything is like someone’s snuck into their house at night and remodelled their lounge.

This reminds me a discussion with a landscaper. He was wary of landscapers who wanted to go against the flow and who view themselves as painter artists. He explained the fundamental difference between his work and the work of a painter as follows : "a painter makes a work of art for people to see, and a landscaper makes a work of art for people to live in". It's not the same to see disruptive art from time to time, and to live in a city with a disruptive landscape.

A stable environment can also allow people to build other art on top of it. Such as painter artists inspired by a sustainable landscape to create disruptive paintings.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#472

Post by raverbashing »

andruby wrote: post #458

Have the makers of the 3rd party clients considered creating a reddit clone? Technically that’s not too hard. Moreover, these clients have a large user base. Some even have revenue. I guess the most tricky part is content moderation. Has this been discussed or proposed anywhere?

One "easier" middle ground is that if they would work on aggressive caching of requests and then maybe building a "shadow reddit" in the background

You could make your Api usage go really down this way

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#473

Post by sdenton4 »

wpietri wrote: post #390
AmericanOP wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wasted half a decade not building promised moderation tools for the people who create value on Reddit. Instead they were busy running cost/benefit analyses on how aggressive the dark patterns to drive users to the maligned mobile app should be.

I still feel bad for whatever web developer had to check in the "this page looks better in the app" banner.

Pull request description: "Does it really, though?"

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#474

Post by htag »

davemp wrote: post #469

I’m planning to build up an RSS feed or two to stay up to date with the niches I go to reddit for and supplementing with discord when I want to read general comments. I’m actually somewhat excited because the quality of most subreddits has tanked over time.

> I’m actually somewhat excited because the quality of most subreddits have tanked over time.

People have been complaining about decreasing quality of content on reddit since the beginning of reddit.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#475

Post by _djo_ »

pests wrote: post #400
kbenson wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't over one app. Many (most?) the app makers have noted the change is unsustainable for them. One way to look at it is that Apollo, the app you're referencing that was able to charge $10 a year, would have to charge 2.5 times as much just to cover the access fees, and not any of their own overhead, much less allow for profit. The issue here is that the ARPU calculation and assumptions are wrong. Is reddit los…

> and not any of their own overhead, much less allow for profit. Is it fair for a third party app to be profitable before the service itself is? Reddit has to cover the access fees, its own overhead, and try to make a profit itself too.

Yes, it is. Why wouldn’t it be?

Third party apps benefit the platform, especially in the early days. They result in more content from power users and easier moderation, so they contribute to revenue and aren’t only a cost.

They generally have extremely low overheads though, with nearly all being the work of just one or two developers. The profit they bring in is minuscule compared to what Reddit is looking to achieve. Apollo’s profit from annual subscribers, once accounting for taxes and the App Store fee, appears to be just a couple hundred thousand dollars based on the numbers Selig has provided.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#476

Post by dehrmann »

One of the magic things about reddit was it was acquired by Condé Nast very early in its life. They didn't know what to do with it, so it was a bit neglected. That meant most of the time was spent on high-priority scaling issues, and there wasn't time to squeeze it for money. This helped with organic growth because the users were real and engaged. The downside was they didn't have resources to develop good first-party apps, and ended up depending on third-party developers for that.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#478

Post by shagie »

wpietri wrote: post #376
bottlepalm wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of like the Twitter fiasco where in the eye of the storm a lot of loud people are pressuring more people to make this seem a lot bigger than it is. Unless you have some alternative that has Reddit functionality, but can somehow operate without revenue, I'm just going to assume there isn't and Reddit will continue operating as normal. Just doing the math $2.50 seems reasonable if you're going to redistrib…

If Reddit just cared about having the ads, they could have a free version of the API that includes the inline ads. Or otherwise work with API users to blend in the ads for user-facing clients. They could even kick back a share of that revenue to client makers. As far as I know they're not doing any of that. To me it looks like the goal is to wall off all the user-generated content in an attempt to extract maximum dol…

What guarantee is there that those inline ads would be rendered by the 3rd party client?

What incentive is there for the API users to add in ads that reddit serves for the 3rd party client users? Can reddit be guaranteed get a share of the revenue for the IAP of "block all ads?" Is it worth it for reddit to do it when they can't control the price of said IAP ($0.49 for "block all of Reddit's ads")

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#479

Post by Tao3300 »

nologic01 wrote: post #404
jcims wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.

What are the alternatives exactly? Until we get interoperating platforms where people can easily migrate and reward the places that treat them the best we are stuck with the few platforms that managed to create network lock-in. The social media as a prison operating model.

I'm apparently in limbo waiting for beehaw to figure out I'm not Hitler.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#480

Post by JJMcJ »

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.

The joke definition of Web 2.0: You make the content, we make the money.

Well, don't piss off the content makers, or the content consumers.

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