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The Reddit blackout will continue

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Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#111

Post by hrrsn »

paganel wrote: post #85
jampa wrote: post #22

It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one, he could compromise a bit by at least expanding the deadline on the pricing changes, but instead he decides to provoke and double down. The leaked internal memo, which is obvious that would leak (after all it is a 2,000 person company) is a clear provocation: > We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as…

> It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one You don't negotiate with blackmailers, because this is what this is now, blackmail. If things continue like this I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods.

Remove the mods, and replace them with who, exactly? They've pissed off everyone that was offering free labour.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#112

Post by TeMPOraL »

jampa wrote: post #22

It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one, he could compromise a bit by at least expanding the deadline on the pricing changes, but instead he decides to provoke and double down. The leaked internal memo, which is obvious that would leak (after all it is a 2,000 person company) is a clear provocation: > We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as…

I love this bit:

> While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.

What is the term for when there's a worker strike and instead of engaging with organizers/union representatives, the company approaches some individual workers and teams, trying to convince them to get back to work (or at least make it seem like those workers are likely to break rank), in order to start an inner conflict between the workers and have the strike collapse on itself?

Because that is what they're doing here. Explicitly ignoring the "union reps", and driving a wedge between rank-and-file "workers", under a guise of caring for accessibility.

--

EDIT: and it's pretty clear to me this memo was meant to be leaked, and it was carefully written to address the subreddit moderators and users. It says, "meh, this is just a regular Tuesday nothingburger drama, it's pointless and will blow over - but hey, someone has a good point about accessibility, and we care and listen, so we're now actively working on it; we ain't talking with Apollo and RiF devs because they're being unreasonable drama queens, and for the love of $deity, don't be unreasonable like them; we're actually afraid some of you may rough up our employees - is that really who you want to be?".

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#113

Post by larksimian »

abhibeckert wrote: post #49
est wrote: post #11

Could the 3rd-party apps allow users to config API keys? That would distribute the cost.

The cost is something like $500 per user per year. People just aren't going to pay that much.

I know you're not saying this, but just to point out how absurd this price point is:

> Reddit generated $350 million in 2021, primarily from its advertising business

> Reddit has 52 million daily active users and approximately 430 million users who use it once a month

Are we really supposed to believe that Reddit is losing $500 * 400 million per year? Their total cost per user is probably something like $1/year. Twitch.tv which streams 1080p video prolly has costs of like $50/user/year. Insane pricing decision by Reddit.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#115

Post by onion2k »

paganel wrote: post #85
jampa wrote: post #22

It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one, he could compromise a bit by at least expanding the deadline on the pricing changes, but instead he decides to provoke and double down. The leaked internal memo, which is obvious that would leak (after all it is a 2,000 person company) is a clear provocation: > We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as…

> It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one You don't negotiate with blackmailers, because this is what this is now, blackmail. If things continue like this I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods.

I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods

The impact of this would be to make lots of subreddit unmoderated, leading to a huge amount of spam, adult content in sfw subreddit, cross-posting, etc. The impact would be to let everyone know just how much free work the mods do to keep Reddit tidy and valuable.

I don't think you're wrong (except maybe on the timescale) but I do think the strategy would shoot the CEO in the foot again.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#116

Post by aniforprez »

frankacter wrote: post #81
abhibeckert wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost is something like $500 per user per year. People just aren't going to pay that much.

This is not accurate. From the data presented, in aggregate, >90% fall well within the free tier of usage (100 API calls per minute for OAuth logged in client). The majority of the remaining fall into a $1/month tier [1]. Certainly there are some outliers that exceed those ranges and unfortunately the majority of the spotlight seems to be on the smallest of the populace. It is also worth noting that app developers ca…

Why would you take the word of reddit management on this issue? That seems like the least trustworthy source here

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#117

Post by klipklop »

Spez assumes he has more power than Reddit users. He is likely right. Sadly. I wish people would just stop using that site and go back to web forums, but that is never happening. The average person enjoys the convenience of consolidation under one corporate overlord.

I assume the ipo will allow him to eventually join the (multi-millionaire?) billionaire class. One would assume he would fight tooth and nail to make this happen. Considering his past unethical behavior, I don’t see him playing nice to get what he wants.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#119

Post by SilverBirch »

reso wrote: post #71

Is there something counter-intuitive about reddit that makes it hard to monetize? That's the core issue. Reddit still makes barely $1/user/month while instagram makes $35. Cutting off the 3rd party apps is a cost-cutting move, not a revenue-generating move. Why haven't they managed to find more revenue? I'm loath to say it but Huffman has had a decade to solve this and hasn't. Might be time for new leadership with ne…

Cutting off 3rd party apps isn't a cost cutting move. It has two clear benefits - firstly they can push users into the officially supported apps where ads can be shown in a more controlled fashion and metrics on those ads can be gathered. Second, it removes the ability for other companies to programmatically gather Reddit's data - this is important in the context of large language models where investors are convinced that the data sets to train the models will be valuable.

The reason reddit is hard to monetize is actually quite simple, they don't know much about their users so they can't do the high value targeting other companies do, and they have a site where it's very difficult to insert adverts in what looks like an organic way. It's easy to scroll past an advert on instagram and not realise it's an advert, it's visually consistent, on reddit it sticks out like a sore thumb so they get CPS rates of a 90s banner ad - because that's what they're selling.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#120

Post by dehrmann »

tester457 wrote: post #95
reso wrote: post #71

Is there something counter-intuitive about reddit that makes it hard to monetize? That's the core issue. Reddit still makes barely $1/user/month while instagram makes $35. Cutting off the 3rd party apps is a cost-cutting move, not a revenue-generating move. Why haven't they managed to find more revenue? I'm loath to say it but Huffman has had a decade to solve this and hasn't. Might be time for new leadership with ne…

Redditors aren't as valuable to sell to because they are more likely to use ad blockers. That and instagram ads are said to be better.

> Redditors aren't as valuable to sell to because they are more likely to use ad blockers.

reddit's gone so mainstream I'm not sure if this is true anymore.

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