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Reddit Strike Has Started

reddark.untone.uk

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Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#491

Post by WellThenGood »

JJMcJ wrote: post #480
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.

Uh doesn't Reddit owe its community 10% per sama's Series B article https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit ? "So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time." Whatever happened to this? Will we end up getting it before or after sama gives us UBI, open AI, and fusion completely altruistically?

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#493

Post by shagie »

_djo_ wrote: post #475
pests wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

At "just a couple hundred thousand per year" and a $5/month subscription for "Apollo Ultra Monthly"... ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 ). Apple's cut of that is 30% for the first year and 15% for all following years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

> Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month.

That's half of what the subscription costs... though he could update the subscription.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252

> Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the price of a subscription without interrupting service only under certain specific conditions. If the increase does not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may change the price without interrupting service. Developers may do this no more than once per year.

> If the subscription price increase is above the thresholds, exceeds the annual limit, or occurs within territories where the law requires it, you must opt in before the price increase is applied. If you don't opt in to the new price, the subscription will not renew at the next billing period. You can subscribe again within the app or on the Manage Subscriptions page.

He could have limited free use and turned off push notifications or drastically cut down on the polling rate ( https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13... "The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user") and increased the price.

The full passage is:

> For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server costs.

Note that the claim of the average user 344 requests per day and the polling rate of 600 requests per hour per user do not seem to be in agreement and may significantly contribute to the API pricing quote.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#494

Post by mbrameld »

yanderekko wrote: post #126
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.

>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. You go there for the user content, not the mods. You can say mods cultivate communities, but to say that they deserve credit but not the admins or platform itself seems untenable. Furthermore, insinuations that the API changes will lead to a…

Tell me you've never moderated a sizeable online community without telling me you've never moderated a sizeable online community.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#495

Post by hombre_fatal »

TX81Z wrote: post #272
oilchange wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... People have been saying this for 10+ years. No reddit alternative has proven to be viable. So the people at reddit know that "mass migration" is an empty threat. Where will you go instead? That's right. No where. Rather than quickly bleeding out like digg, reddit has simply achieved a stable stagnant equilibrium. It doesn't grow, it d…

Necessity is the mother of invention. A CRUD app with a UX so bad people feel the need to use third-party clients isn’t exactly a moat. Half the people here could scaffold a Reddit clone in a week or less.

The moat is that it has users, not that it’s impossible to clone.

Though developers vastly underestimate the difficulty in cloning something as well. As someone who thought it would be trivial to clone phpbb, it’s a lot of work to reach just feature parity. Your clone isn’t even going to have users to motivate you beyond the first 0.1% of the work.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#496

Post by pests »

_djo_ wrote: post #475
pests wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Eh, even if we can agree on it being fair I still don't see anything wrong with what Reddit is trying to do. While the profit might be minuscule compared to what Reddit is looking for, its still currently more than reddit is making.

I don't think a person using a third party app necessarily implies they are a power user or better at moderation. Hell, in the beginning reddit didn't even have a mobile app and the only options were third party apps.

> They generally have extremely low overheads though, with nearly all being the work of just one or two developers

Hmm, I wonder how they can provide that with such low developer counts - maybe because Reddit as a service is subsidizing the majority of the value the third party apps are capturing.

Its entirely within reason for Reddit to want to capture that value instead of giving it away to free to third party apps.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#497

Post by pests »

shagie wrote: post #493
_djo_ wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At "just a couple hundred thousand per year" and a $5/month subscription for "Apollo Ultra Monthly"... ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 ). Apple's cut of that is 30% for the first year and 15% for all following years. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca... > Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost…

> average user 344 requests per day and the polling rate of 600 requests per hour do not seem to be in agreement

I don't think the app is making those 600 requests 24/7.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#498

Post by moomoo11 »

Hopefully this starts a "battery" approach to dealing with APIs, 3rd party apps, keys and a way for end users to quickly and seamlessly sign up to use services via 3rd party apps.

Why not..

1. User installs 3rd party app

2. You accept reddit TOS, an API key is attached to your account. It could even be integrated into apple/android keys or user subscription models. You pay either directly to reddit or via your payments to the 3rd party app service fees

This could work for so many use cases. Why should developers need to do think about all this nonsense like key rotation, constantly changing pricing models, using round robin API key rotation because you're hitting limits with one key, etc. Devs should just set up the experience so users can bring their own battery and plug in to start playing.

Just provide the backend. Let devs build cool 3rd party apps around it. Each user can just get their own API key that's tied to them, either simple case like the reddit account, or its part of the apple id subscriptions + keychain.

Everyone makes money. Everyone gets to learn programming or whatever the fuck makes them make 3rd party experiences. Everyone can just be happy.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#499

Post by ayakang31415 »

I feel like one day blackout is going to have an opposite impact as it might give Reddit a false idea that no matter what they do people will eventually come. Instead of one day, if people were doing it for a few months, it will be effective. But we know that is not going to happen.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#500

Post by hax0ron3 »

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.

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