751–760 of 1001 posts
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 is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
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Yeah, but I may be wrong, but isn't it quite hard for Reddit clients to handle this? They'd have to project how many API requests their users are going to make and if they underestimate it's potentially costing them millions. Also, it's difficult to modify app subscription prices constantly, especially for existing subscribers? They could offer in-app purchases of API requests, but that results in quit a bad UX. If R…
> If Reddit should charge for API access, why not make it part of Reddit Premium? Wouldn't this be the worst of both worlds for the 3rd party app developers? In the current model, the developer of Apollo could charge $2.99/month and pay themselves $0.47/month/user. If we assume 80k paid users, that's $450k/year - not bad for a passion project! If Reddit instead took it out of developers hands and made users of Apollo…
If you start out at $5/month. $2.50 goes to reddit. $1.50 goes to apple. That leaves a buck a user, 960k earnt. The first tax calculator I found for novia scotia estimates $489,203 tax owed on that. So that's $470k/year. (Ignoring the difference between CDN and USD, because it makes relatively little difference to the tax due.)
I'd be curious how many users you could keep migrating from $5-once to $5/month.
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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…
Vine shutting down may be one of the top ten stupid decisions in business history.
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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.
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…
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Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
I stopped visiting reddit after too many mods censored me and others that don't conform to the left's ideology. Twitter is where I get content now. And I'm a liberal.
There's a good number of people saying this strike is meaningless and reddit's API change will only affect a tiny % of users. I want to explain why I believe they are wrong. Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a small subset of users. I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or something like RES, you are more than likely a powe…
Most of the content is also modded by a small subset of mods—literally dozens. You've got maybe a hundred mods who are "power mods" that control the vast majority of large subreddits, and these are the ones "protesting". They don't own the subreddits. They have no rights to them, but they like to pretend that they do. Their moderation has, in many ways, become oppressive to the userbase. You don't hear about it becau…
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Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
I stopped visiting reddit after too many mods censored me and others that don't conform to the left's ideology. Twitter is where I get content now. And I'm a liberal.
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If they hadn't blatantly tried to slander him personally and had given a reasonable price or timeline for the price changes, people wouldn't be nearly as upset. All of this has left a sour taste in their mouths. They also see the writing on the wall; they'll shut down old.reddit.com, push more ads via the official app, and continue to milk as much money as possible. The claim that it's not profitable seems kind of cr…
I can answer your last question. Very few reddit users (as a % of the whole) actually subscribe to advertiser-valuable subreddits. Any targeted ads on Reddit have tiny tiny inventories. The rest of the ad inventory is more or less anonymous and gives very poor roi to spend ads against. That's why Reddit has a total revenue of like $100m vs $50b+ for facebook.
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You are fighting a straw man you yourself erected. Nobody believes they have a right to reddit but nor does reddit have a right to viewership. They are trying to leverage the value their communities bring to the platform. There is nothing morally wrong with this.
>Nobody believes they have a right to reddit When people castigate the mere idea that Reddit should be trying to guarantee a return to its investors - and I can point you to examples of this if you wish - it's hard to interpret this as anything other than people saying that their interest to unfettered API access is more important than the interest that investors have in a positive ROI. I guess you could say that thi…
Anything that would take functionality or access away isn't "evil" it merely decreases the value proposition potentially putting it below a threshold where its not worth bothering to provide the content that make's reddit worth visiting leaving the shell of reddit owned by its corporate overlords worth little.
The protest is demonstrating to Reddits CEO that it is in fact a negotiation because while they have no right to tell Reddit how to run its ship they don't have to join they voyage much less act as crew.
It's not their job to make Reddit profitable. If they wanted reddit to be profitable they could have not spent years adding negative value to the platform and wasting expensive developer hours. Alternatively they could have made third party app access a paid feature instead of asking developers to predict and then pay for usage.
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-part…
They bought a good third-party app, turned it first-party, and destroyed it. Seems that they had resources enough to do that.