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

The Reddit blackout will continue

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 565 posts

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#211

Post by qup »

goplayoutside wrote: post #180
mjburgess wrote: post #56

The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations. The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps. What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's abi…

+1. However, I hope the reddits and twitters of the world continue to exist, perhaps in diminished form, if for no other reason than to provide a place for users who prefer the "outrage porn," shallow memes, flame wars, etc, so that they're less likely to intrude on the smaller, healthier communities that are forming elsewhere.

Do you have any idea if that is what will happen? I'm not convinced.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#212

Post by gary_0 »

dehrmann wrote: post #120
tester457 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that the moderators and content contributors aren't mainstream users... hence the blackout.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#213

Post by joshjob42 »

lil-lugger wrote: post #8

Can anyone explain how much pressure and where it comes from for the “raise revenue at all costs” pre-IPO. Is it common for other companies to shoot themselves in the foot by layoffs and policy changes that alienate users? Just feels like no one was smart enough to say “we can try and raise revenue by doing this, but we could lose everything” - maybe companies just constantly forget how defiant and fickle the interne…

They went from a few dozen people in 2015 to 400 in 2019 to 2000 today, and also started hosting images and videos in 2016-17. The result of all this is that they spend way more money than they did a decade ago and despite now making an estimated $600M/yr and 50M daily active users, they are apparently still losing money.

A company that's 15 years old, never turned a profit really or made much profit if it ever did, and is still losing money is not in a good place to IPO, which existing investors want to recoup some of their investment.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#214

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

i find my self mentioning this in several of the reddit threads on here because i think it is an important if only historic fact that reddit was not just founded by aaron swartz (i hope you know who that was) _and_ huffman! let that sink in. that's a sad irony and refutes the notion huffman doesn't know what reddit is about.

also even if reddit will just continue as if nothing happened - which i believe it will - it will still have changed. it officially lost its spirit and the engagement of many people who made and make reddit interesting. left will be the people who don't care.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#215

Post by azangru »

telltruth wrote: post #163
mjburgess wrote: post #56

The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations. The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps. What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's abi…

The data created by people should be owned by people. They should have right to decide if it can be distributed free or with charge through APIs, archrivals etc. I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create.

> I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create.

Suppose you are hosting a wordpress blog with a comments section. Some people leave occasional comments in your blog — god knows why. Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them? Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish?

Suppose now you are hosting a bulletin board, where more people are posting their messages. Don't you own all that? After all, the texts are stored on your server. Can't you delete the board at any point, or run data analysis on the posts, or even send targeted messages to your users, etc.?

Now scale this mentally to reddit, etc. At which point do you start arguing that the service doesn't own the data that it stores?

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#216

Post by spondylosaurus »

reagent_finder wrote: post #150
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…

The biggest problem with Reddit is that their only source of revenue basically demands you to create a completely new ad for ONLY that platform. For everything else you can just make an iframe, drop whatever malicious blinking crap you want, send it to the wild and let ad networks sell and resell space and sometimes drop your ad in it, pay pennies for clicks and even less pennies for each time it's been served. They…

What's interesting about the "they should go programmatic" argument is that programmatic ads are increasingly less lucrative thanks to low-quality traffic and the perceived ineffectiveness of cookie-based retargeting. (Yes, please, show me a hundred banner ads for that pair of pants I literally just purchased!) Programmatic ads also tend to generate more profit for the middlemen who broker transactions than they do for the publishers who display ads; once all of the ad platforms involved in the transaction have taken their cut, there's not much left.

In response to this, some people have been driving a push back to traditional/contextual ads, similar to what Reddit is currently doing. So, in theory, if Reddit is selling Guaranteed High Quality ad space, and selling it to brands with whom they have a direct partnership,[2] and not getting skimmed off the top by middlemen, they should be raking in the advertising dollars. Right?

But they're clearly not! Or not nearly enough to be profitable.

The efforts against third-party apps are clearly an attempt to drive more ad impressions (because you can't drive impressions if users aren't in an environment where you can serve impressions), but I somehow doubt that that's gonna make a big difference, even if third-party-app-users all threw up their hands and migrated, without protest, to official channels.

[1] The real cash cow among programmatic ads is video advertising, since those placements are more valuable and fetch a higher price, but I also see that as a trap for Reddit—their decision to start natively hosting video seems pretty short-sighted for a company that's already not breaking even. If they wanted to go hard on video ads, they'd have to start prioritizing more video content, which means hosting more video content....

[2] Perhaps not for nothing that half the ads on Reddit these days are for that vaguely evangelistic "He Gets Us" campaign. The buyers clearly have money to throw around, but the relative lack of other ads mixed in has to say something about the (lack of) demand for Reddit's inventory.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#217

Post by slg »

mjburgess wrote: post #56

The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations. The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps. What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's abi…

>The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations.

And the next 10 years will remove the volunteers entirely. AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations. That seems inevitable at this point. We have already been on that path for a while with the spread of algorithmic feeds. First we removed the humans from the recommendations and editorial decisions. The next step is to remove them from the creation.

Maybe if we are lucky we will get some of those "corresponding Wikipedias" too. Reddit seems to have made their choice that they don't value communities, creators, volunteers, or anything like that. They just want to serve up the lowest common denominator content to show you between ads. Volunteers complaining is just unnecessary "noise". AI won't complain.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#218

Post by kibibyte »

goplayoutside wrote: post #158

I just opened my subs back up. I mod a few subs for a niche hobby -- there's probably a few tens of thousands of us in the US. The majority of us are not especially technically inclined, and the only other place where the community regularly gathers online is Facebook Groups, which many of us want nothing to do with anymore. I long ago largely stopped using reddit outside of the subs I mod, except browsing the front…

Something I found dismaying was just how only a few of the subreddit communities I liked had any alternative platforms to go to: only the fountain pens community had a Discord server. And upon joining that server the day before the blackout, it was pretty clear just how much work had already gone into making that community feel immediately welcoming (looks like it took at least a year) and ready to handle huge influx of new users.

Given that Christian Sellig made his criticism of the API changes public only 11 days prior to the blackout and made his decision to close down Apollo only 3 days prior, most subreddits just wouldn't have the chance to get started elsewhere, regardless of whether it's Discord or Lemmy or whatever. Discord arguably requires among the least amount of technical savvy to use among the alternatives, but ensuring it doesn't become instant chaos is a nontrivial social problem. And certainly, 11 days to break the inertia of 100k+ users to move elsewhere is nontrivial as well.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#219

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#220

Post by paulmd »

menus wrote: post #200
ahahahahah wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I agree. What do you think we can do to remove these whiny mods and open up these subreddits to get reddit back to the site I enjoy. Are you suggesting that we organize against them in some way?

> to get reddit back to the site I enjoy Those "whiny mods" are the reason you "enjoy" your reddit experience. Are there some mods that abuse their power? Yes.

there’s a saying - all moderators are bastards. Yes, even the bastard moderator you’re related to. Especially them, actually.

It’s all the petit-bourgeoisie aspects of cops in general, in fact.

Post reply on HN