111–120 of 284 posts
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My bet is that investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are pulling their hairs out, seeing Reddit lose money at the end of the month, after Open AI and others are raising trillions by scraping their data
Wait, you're saying openai was trained on reddit posts?! No wonder people are scared of AI.
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> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal. The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect"…
People are going to go somewhere. I just can't see Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastadon gaining much traction. For those old enough to remember Napster, it worked because it was centralized.
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They could just charge $2 for "API access with enough limits for power users" and pay both for missing ads and for API usage
That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol, but people still got outraged at that. The Apollo dev said that he would have to charge every user $2.50 a month to cover costs of the API, so even if the Apollo dev is exaggerating, $2.50 is not that high if people really want to user third party apps.
No, they're charging exorbitant rates for API access lol. I honestly can't understand how people can look at $2.50 / month per user for a few JSON responses and think "wow now that's reasonable."
If their infrastructure is that bad that it costs even on the order of a dollar per month per user to serve API requests, then I'd be horrified to imagine how much it costs them to send entire HTML pages to the millions of people that use desktop exclusively.
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Why does an alternative need to exist? The attention economy is saturated and users are likely happy to have one less feed.
> Why does an alternative need to exist? Because there are a great many people that have legitimately used Reddit as their "frontpage of the internet" for years and don't enjoy the form factor that other websites / apps provide. Places like Twitter and TikTok aren't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content.
My take is that this type of person is more likely to not need to replace their feed fix with another feed and is more likely to pursue fulfillment in other areas of life.
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>There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened. Yeah but they need to be BAD. "Mediocre enough that users don't want to migrate elsewhere" (like /r/games) seems to be enough to keep it running and gaining subs…
r/games was once the upstart and had to gain enough users who wanted something more moderated/curated than r/gaming to get to its current position.
At this point I hope Reddit kicks out mods from all major subreddits still set to private and places their own people. I'm tired of drama from 3% of the Reddit population (or less) impacting the other 97% negatively. I just don't think either side has the moral high ground. The mods like the convenience of 3rd party apps. I get it. It's not a real moral issue.
Reddit literally will not function without the gargantuan amount of mod labor they get for free.
Why not embrace the "subreddit simulator" meme and simply make users argue with GPT-X, trained on previous Reddit posts? No moderation required — every user is corralled into a tiny bubble, perhaps consisting of a single real person, all while consuming ads.
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Apollo doesn't show ads, right? In fact getting users away from Apollo and onto the main Reddit app would be net revenue positive.
Indeed, the fact that Apollo can use the API for free then turn around and charge users for a premium version all while giving nothing back to Reddit is simply insane, you would never see Facebook, Instagram or other services allowing the same thing. And before one says that third party app users drive user driven content, what kind of content do you think Facebook and Instagram have?
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That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol, but people still got outraged at that. The Apollo dev said that he would have to charge every user $2.50 a month to cover costs of the API, so even if the Apollo dev is exaggerating, $2.50 is not that high if people really want to user third party apps.
> That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol No, they're charging exorbitant rates for API access lol. I honestly can't understand how people can look at $2.50 / month per user for a few JSON responses and think "wow now that's reasonable." If their infrastructure is that bad that it costs even on the order of a dollar per month per user to serve API requests, then I'd be horrified to imagine how much it cos…
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> We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor. From Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-... Nothing blew up in their face. It's almost as if the vast majority of users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
I don't think of "going black" as a shutdown but as a PR move from the moderators. It was all about getting the message out. Real "shutdown" comes when the good moderators decides they had enough and stops being active, so reddit becomes run by shitty mods. Only then will the users leave. So it will take many months before the effect is visible in user count.
Well...