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Reddit Strike Has Started

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Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#531

Post by CamelCaseName »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #449
breadsniffer01 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mods get free API usage. It’s only for 3rd party apps. It seems the Apollo dev has been throwing around some misinformation.

> It seems the Apollo dev has been throwing around some misinformation. Please point out, specifically, where he has done this. Otherwise, STFU. To be clear, it's not like I've been following every one of his posts, so it's quite possible he said things that aren't accurate. So far, though, I've seen nothing but vague accusations against Christian, and when he did call bullshit and brought the receipts to back it up,…

1. He said he spends $166 / 50 million Imgur API requests. He must have a sweetheart deal because I see the prices at $3,333 / 50 million API requests (and if you go above that, it gets crazy expensive FAST)

2. Moderator actions are exempt from the API charges... But I think this decision was made after things had blown up.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#532

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

karaterobot wrote: post #304
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They of course know (at the time of the mass Digg exodus Reddit specifically changed their alien icon to welcome Digg refugees), but the difference is that they are betting on the fact that right now there is no immediately obvious alternative, like Reddit was to Digg a decade ago.

Another thing they're betting on is that most users could care less about this, if they're even aware of it. Some very popular subreddits are going dark, and I'd bet as many users get angry at the mods of those subreddits than get mad at the C-suite of Reddit. In any case, most will just come back later after this is all done.

Don't agree with that. While people may have been unaware, the news is literally plastered all over reddit at the moment - it's impossible to miss. Most people may not care about it that much, but the "zeitgeist" if you will of general anger at reddit management permeating nearly every subreddit is impossible to miss. Just one example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/145jqcl/the_vote_is...

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#533

Post by WalterBright »

GolfPopper wrote: post #167
wpietri wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to the head of product as the defense against the dark arts teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets). Many of their failures have been trying to graft on something irrelevan…

I think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit businesses. They're of great value to those who use them, and indirectly to society as a whole. Yet there's no good way to monetize them (nor does there need to be monetization), and trying to do so damages the functionality of the network. Both Twitter and Reddit would likely be better off (from the POV of the…

Non-profits still need enough revenue to meet expenses.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#534

Post by kbenson »

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.

They're offering paid API access. Do you think they're only expecting non-profits to use it?

If nobody can make your pricing work and offer a product, then you're losing out on that revenue. I'm not saying they should be allowing API access at a loss, but if they've priced every API user out of the market and they aren't pricing at cost or at their actual expected revenue per user internally then that means they're taking actions that are net negative with regard to profit.

I, like many others, think that their pricing is nowhere near the actual per user expected revenue, so either they're doing something incredibly stupid and shutting out a source of profit, or the goal of this was never really to monetize the API, and instead to kill third party apps while attempting to give themselves some cover from the negative publicity of those actions by reframing it as asking for the third party apps pay for the cost of their previously free access.

I think the latter is more likely, but you know what they say about attributing malice...

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#536

Post by throw_a_grenade »

bookofjoe wrote: post #489
jcims wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mark Zuckerberg described Twitter as "A clown car that fell into a gold mine."

Now let us remember how Zuckerberg descibed his first batch of users...

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#537

Post by jazzyjackson »

antonjs wrote: post #324
kitsunesoba wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would not only be reasonable, it's a model used by other services offering APIs. Spotify which gates API access with a premium subscription comes to mind. That's not interesting to Reddit however, because Reddit wants full control of user experience so they (theoretically) have more opportunities to monetize both users (including premium users) and their data, which probably looks better for a prospective IPO.

I wonder if this could also actually work against reddit's interests. I'm guessing that a lot of the power users / mods have the highest API load, by doing things like taking large mod actions. You'd effectively be charging them more for the privilege of working.

Large mod actions? Like nuking a thread? I sincerely hope the API includes bulk actions so it only takes one call to delete a list of comment ids

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#538

Post by antonjs »

dotnet00 wrote: post #317
bottlepalm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>ready to sell out and shut down for $10 million. He wasn't literally offering to sell out for $10 million. What he was saying was that if Reddit was being honest with the claim that Apollo was costing them $20 million per year in server costs, the obvious business decision would be to offer to buy him out first, thus bringing in those users with much less friction. The fact that they're instead choosing to be manipu…

I don't think he was even saying they were paying $20M in server costs. He was saying that if their claim that they're missing out on $20M in potential revenue from those users is correct, they should buy the app for $10M and make a 2x return on investment in one year.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#539

Post by shagie »

CSMastermind wrote: post #184
atleastoptimal wrote: post #16

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

I've long thought that the only way to make a sustainable social media platform is to have it be controlled by its contributors. Governance is human problem and not a technical one. We have a few millennia of experience organizing and governing human effort, yet the control structure of every subreddit is akin to some kind of Oligarchy with unelected moderators wielding considerable power. These moderators in turn ar…

> Here I think Reddit fails by having a global karma count instead of one that's localized to the 'state' and subreddit you're on.

This information exists and is maintained on the backend.

Pull up your profile on old.reddit and click on "show karma breakdown by subreddit".

Note that this isn't publicly available (/u/johnsmith1234568 has 1k karma in /r/someIdeoligcalSub - they're banned from participating here).

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#540

Post by tiedieconderoga »

wpietri wrote: post #87
jcims wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Twitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to the head of product as the defense against the dark arts teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets). Many of their failures have been trying to graft on something irrelevan…

>But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos.

I dunno, look at private equity buyouts, which Twitter kind of resembles—Musk somehow convinced banks and Twitter itself to foot most of the bill for his purchase.

The whole point is to avoid putting money into the prey company by saddling it with debt, while you squeeze every last cent of value out of its living corpse. It can take a long time for companies to die when this happens: Sears is a solid case study from recent times.

https://ivyexec.com/career-advice/2018/sears-case-business-f...

Considering how little of his own money Musk spent on the deal, I wouldn't be surprised if he was just having fun lighting a huge pile of other peoples' money on fire. He's obviously gotten bored with his car and spaceship toys.

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