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

Reddit Doubles Down

platformer.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 462 posts

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#371

Post by actionablefiber »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #281
lokar wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don’t cost much. Getting the activity scaled ad rev from these users won’t make them profitable.

Cost is a red herring here - the real metric is opportunity cost. These are users who spend a lot of time on reddit and give up a ton of data, so they can almost certainly get a much better CPI from these users, and give them a ton of ads.

It is a gamble. I am a Reddit power user in part because of the superb unobtrusive experience of old.reddit and Apollo. If you shove it full of ads, it’s no longer the experience I got addicted to. At that point I’d rather leave.

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#372

Post by [deleted] »

jrm4 wrote: post #275
extr wrote: post #38

I don't really understand why it had to be this way. It's so easy to think of other ways this could have been handled. Even just announcing the same change with 6 months of lead time rather than 1 month would have gone over better. Or boil the frog and gradually introduce API restrictions. It's as if the CEO is purposefully being as belligerent as possible to rile people up.

I don't understand why the users aren't just leaving? Surely the software/infrastructure can't be that hard to replicate, especially on a "subreddit" level? Why don't a few big mods just go this route and tell everyone else?

[deleted]

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#373

Post by whywhywouldyou »

scubadude wrote: post #324
afavour wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I think that this is a turning point for Reddit but not towards failure: they’re ditching the hardcore nerd audience that made them. But they’ve long since outgrown that audience and will likely (as a company) do just fine without them. As a community there will be a notable loss.

I think that started with the redesign. It's so weird looking at some of the default subs, just pure trash imo, yet there are still the incredibly diverse, bespoke communities ranging from knitting to woodworking. Users in those subs are the real losers out of this.

Those "incredibly bespoke communities" are almost entirely people posting images of a professional/elaborate project, and then asking for feedback in the form of "hey you guys this is the first thing I've ever made please give me some feedback but go easy on me OK?"

It's a massive circle jerk and echo chamber of regurgitated opinions. So in other words: exactly like the rest of Reddit.

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#374

Post by redsaber »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #306
bshipp wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit management already did this when they began self-hosting all images and videos. It's pretty disingenuous to complain about excessive API call costs when you voluntarily decided to pay for hosting and streaming Petabytes of video and images.

And their hosting is REALLY bad. Videos have NEVER worked right for me on Firefox and it's been years with no progress. The redesign is basically unusable for me. And it's astounding how much data it has to pull down compared to old.reddit.com even with ads blocked just to load a page. Like, it's just really shoddy work from the ground up. If hosting really was the problem, there's a LOT of lower lying fruit for them…

I did try to watch videos on the official app and it was bad, I tried changing to 3rd party apps and I was blown away that you could actually watch videos with it.

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#375

Post by chefandy »

tensor wrote: post #222
chefandy wrote: post #156

> a commenter let me know that some members had already set up shop on Kbin, a decentralized Reddit alternative that is interoperable with Mastodon and other services on the ActivityPub standard. While the interface is rough even by the standards of Reddit, it works just fine. Works just fine for who, though? Not for non-technical people. The FOSS community, especially the Fediverse community continually disappoint m…

I am very critical of mastodon when it comes to UX. Kbin on the other hand was no harder to sign up for than Reddit, and it was equally as easy to find subreddit equivalents. Your post cites no specific reasons why Kbin is worse than Reddit from a UX perspective. Have you even tried it?

Nope. I was basing what I said entirely on the article. Based on my extensive experience in open source projects, I think that's entirely reasonable. If a tech blogger thinks the experience is 'rough'— which includes a whole lot more than user flows in sign up and resource discovery— you can be quite sure it's going to look a whole lot worse to your average person.

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#376

Post by avaloneon »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #288
jrm4 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why the users aren't just leaving? Surely the software/infrastructure can't be that hard to replicate, especially on a "subreddit" level? Why don't a few big mods just go this route and tell everyone else?

What gets me is if all the third party apps had banded together and said 'july 1st, we all pivoting to support a new platform', that would have been enough of a network effect to effectively cold start the network effect on whatever they targeted. It would have been dig all over again, and this time reddit would have been in the dust bin.

This is something I've been investigating. If one had a gateway that spoke Reddit's API, the apps wouldn't even really have to pivot, just change the API base URL.

And in theory not even that. As long as the traffic can be redirected to a different server it should still work. In practice, however, at least Apollo has some server-side components so it wouldn't be totally plug-and-play without developer support.

Sadly, I'm not sure how to get in touch with the developers/users who may be interested.

(I've also heard that someone's working on a Reddit/Lemmy gateway, but I don't know who they are or how far they've gotten.)

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#377

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

was8309 wrote: post #344
wolverine876 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's as if the CEO is purposefully being as belligerent as possible to rile people up. The CEO is following the new leadership playbook, which you should recognize by now, as it's used by Musk, crypto leaders, Zuckerberg, and many more inside and outside of tech. * Fundamentally it's just following the social (media) trend: Demonstrate brazen, over-the-top arrogance, disregard for consequences, and no empathy. I'm…

I'm very interested in the recent origins of this playbook. 'never apologize, never explain' is really old, but it seems to be a thing now

I think it's always been a common playbook. It just doesn't come across as a playbook at all when it works; either you assume the issue must have been minor or you never hear about it at all. (How many people remember the Starbucks strikes in November and December 2022?)

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#378

Post by nocoiner »

shagie wrote: post #362
nocoiner wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so whatever numbers you want to use, whether it’s $2 in direct Reddit api access charges or $5, same order of magnitude, probably neither moves the needle that much relative to the other. But I think there’s a huge difference between that charge being 20 cents and $2 (or 50 cents and $5).

From the API calls that you'd need to pass on to the user, this is a difference of $2/month for no push notifications (9000 calls) vs $10/month (9k calls + 30 * 1.4k calls is about 50k calls). Add on top of that a 30% Apple subscription cost (15% after a year), and we're to $3/month and $13/month and a bit of padding and a slim profit and you're at $5/month and $15/month. If Reddit is saying "it's $2 for the 300 call…

I think we are possibly just completely talking past each other, or perhaps just merely in violent agreement with each other.

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#379

Post by Prickle »

refulgentis wrote: post #339
a2tech wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a $4/month product ALL ready that removes ads and gives you more features. Making that a requirement to use the API is by FAR the simplest and most profitable option. Its also more profit then they're proposing to get from their API charges

I don't understand the Apollo side of this --- that's literally what he's being offered, by his own math. $3/month/user. Fairs fair. He has enough users to make millions a year: their servers aren't his for free forever. People are tying themselves into knots turning Reddit into either near-bankrupt or evil. Or hyper-focusing on particular elements that are just disputable human interactions, like most (i.e. suggesti…

This is an incredibly disingenuous take.

First, no it is not 3$. Apple takes a 30% cut, and requires a yearly fee to keep the app on the store. There is also a separate server cost, and a cost associated with paying an engineer. The actual cost is 5 dollars.

Second, there is only one single month to make all changes. Pricing was announced only 30 days prior.

That means payment setup, subscription changes, app update and payment approval requests, etc all need to happen within 30days. This is literally impossible.

Third, there are people who have paid a for a yearly subscription. (10$ total) Those funds either need to be refunded in it's entirety, or be allowed to run out first. Both will not occur within 30 days. That is literally impossible for apollo dev to do. That's just an issue of how refunding works and timelines.

If it is the latter, the dev will be incurring ~50,000 usd in costs every month. This is impossible to sustain.

Either way, there are app store rules that must be followed first. Reddit's timeline is incompatible with them.

And finally, regardless of API costs! reddit has on multiple occasions, defamed Apollo dev. Why would he continue working with a company that makes false blackmail accusations, then doubles down after evidence is provided?

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#380

Post by bshipp »

yanderekko wrote: post #370
bshipp wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an aggrieved moderator, but I am someone who has moderated in the past and used the third-party tools and bots that allowed a subreddit to remain focused on a specific topic. I don't think you recognize how much random spam and troll submissions are caught by filters and cleaned up automatically in even small subreddits. Having given up moderation ages ago, I have no dog in this fight. I'm sitting on the side…

Well, there will still be some anti-spam tools, right? If there's a detailed argument saying that basic moderation (eg. obvious spam removal and not "I want to ban everyone who's ever said anything nice about Trump") will take say an order of magnitude more human effort without 3rd party tools I'd be curious to see it. If there's a persuasive claim along these lines I'd shift my beliefs, but I haven't seen it so far.

For sure, and I haven't moderated in a few years so perhaps the internal reddit tools have improved since I last used them. They used to be pretty basic and cruddy. The moderation team I was a part of relied pretty heavily on the moderator toolbox:

https://github.com/toolbox-team/reddit-moderator-toolbox

I don't know if the proposed API changes will affect this specific tool, but I doubt moderators would be nearly as up in arms if their tools were going to keep working the way they had in the past.

Post reply on HN