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Reddit Doubles Down

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Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#441

Post by johnnyanmac »

jprete wrote: post #226
Terr_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's so easy to think of other ways this could have been handled. Well, assuming Reddit executives were telling the truth about their goals/needs, which I don't think they are. They claim the purpose was some kind of emergency band-aid to stop the service from hemorrhaging cash from evil large-scale data-sucking AI developers without compensation... But in that case, they could have simply introduced it as a fresh…

I don't think Reddit was telling the truth either. But AI developers/companies seem to almost universally believe they have fair-use rights to train their models on any data they can get their hands on, and a sufficiently expensive API at least forces them to do engineering work to get all the data. So at the time I believed Reddit's reasoning.

>But AI developers/companies seem to almost universally believe they have fair-use rights to train their models on any data they can get their hands on

Google and many other companies for almost 2 decades have spent their time scraping petabytes of data from the web. A lot of that with no expectation of payment. Some companies became billionaires off of that ability to freely access mass bulks of data.

Data scraping has always been a grey area, but I find it strange how it's suddenly taken a turn for some people whenever modern AI comes up. We can't really be drawing lines based on what we feel is good/evil, because we will never agree as a whole on what is good/evil.

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#442

Post by johnnyanmac »

dottjt wrote: post #391
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?

The main reason is not necessarily because of the information presented today, but because of the years upon years of information the platform currently contains. If I want to learn something technical (for example, music production) I'll search in google the thing I want to understand, then add the keyword `reddit`. What the past few days has demonstrated to me, is how much of this information is on Reddit and how h…

>It's the fact that it's so centralised that makes it so valuable.

And as we see yet again in internet history, we see the cost of that comfortability when you put all your eggs in one centralized basket. This isn't the 90's dial-up days; I'd rather create a burner account in 5 minutes and keep my trail scattered across the net than fall into that trap where everything is in one place.

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#443

Post by johnnyanmac »

throwaway742 wrote: post #411
xatax wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every company I've ever worked for has had some sort of name for their employees. It's probably supposed to foster some sense of community/belonging. You're welcome to take the cynical approach to that, sure, but I've never felt it to be a particularly harmful thing. It's good to have some semblance of a friendly culture, if only to break up the day. Some people will like it and I'm sure some people hate it. I've nev…

I always hated it. It feels infantilizing.

I don't see it as any different from schools or sports going "go [Mascot]s!". I was never into that culture, but I also see my world getting more and more lonely by the year.

If others bond together from that, I get it now.

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#444

Post by laverya »

Prickle wrote: post #379
refulgentis wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$3/user/mo is also the average cost across all of his (active?) users - you can bet that if the users start having to pay the people who use Reddit constantly will be more likely to subscribe than the ones who use it once a month.

There might genuinely not be a single price that pays for itself, and usage-based pricing might be required.

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#445

Post by [deleted] »

revelio wrote: post #419
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it interesting that spez admitted in his call with the apollo dev that the actual hosting cost for the api calls were pennies compared to the 'opportunity cost' of not having users use the official app. He basically admitted that harvesting data via the app and selling it to advertisers was reddit's bread and butter now.

Why is it interesting? Alternative apps aren't necessarily going to show ads, which is how Reddit makes money. Surely those statements are mundane.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#446

Post by fireweed »

scubbo wrote: post #173
philwelch wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of tech companies have silly names for their employees, I think it might have originated with “Googlers” but some companies (like Reddit) went a little further. (“Snoo” is also the name of the little Reddit alien mascot.)

I recently joined LegalZoom, where the demonym is apparently "Zoomers". Yeah, I won't be using that one :P

[flagged]

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#447

Post by George83728 »

chefandy wrote: post #375
tensor wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it common for professional designers to bash a design before even looking at it? Maybe this is why FOSS projects aren't very interested in your feedback.

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#448

Post by jupp0r »

andsoitis wrote: post #267
jupp0r wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just invest in building mobile apps that people love to use more than the alternatives.

Could it be that most Reddit traffic is via web, and so it isn't worthwhile?

Then why is it worthwhile to alienate all users with these API restrictions just so that users move to in house mobile apps?

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#449

Post by refulgentis »

laverya wrote: post #444
Prickle wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$3/user/mo is also the average cost across all of his (active?) users - you can bet that if the users start having to pay the people who use Reddit constantly will be more likely to subscribe than the ones who use it once a month. There might genuinely not be a single price that pays for itself, and usage-based pricing might be required.

Yeah, that is what running a business is like.

People are unintentionally grading him on a _huge_ curve, essentially "what if...all I had to do was code and App Store?" That would be nice, I get the impression he's had a fun ride so far where that was pretty much it. Now that the thing he's selling isn't free, he can pound the table and quit, or run the business.

Re: Reddit Doubles Down

#450

Post by futhey »

goykasi wrote: post #390
tlear wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is going to mod it.. couple reddits that I follow daily are public again, however there are no new posts as mods stopped accepting anything. I am genuinely curious how this is going to work going forward.

Reddit (the company) controls the platform. They can just install new mods if the current mods arent doing their job. I doubt most users would even notice that the mod names have changed.

Facebook spends $500m annual on moderation. That's a top-down estimate of moderation costs for a large website.

You can try to do a bottom-up estimate, but how much do you think it costs to moderate the (8th?) largest domain on earth? More or less than that? More or less than what Reddit's current operating income is?

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