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Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

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Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#171

Post by Exuma »

iaw wrote: post #158
Exuma wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is more along the lines of what I was thinking, where borrowed money had higher interest, but many other replies in this thread make it seem like because treasury bills are better people are just investing in that instead. Is it both of these factors combined? Is it more one factor than the other?

Based on your comment I think you may be missing one aspect: The money you get lent at the bank is the money people are investing. Both of the things you describe in this comment are two halves of a market. There's someone borrowing money and someone lending money. The borrowing becomes more expensive because the lender has better alternatives.

Ahhh, do you know what's funny is after I wrote that comment I went to the bathroom and while peeing I basically had the intuition they were 2 halves of the same thing, but I couldn't even articulate it. I was going to come back and try to ask again and I saw this comment. Thanks!

All this stuff I've tried to learn a few times and it's just so open ended, my mind is very more technically oriented and vague hand-waving statements on investopedia drives me crazy. Other people seem to understand it so easily but after the multiple attempts that I have made, I just have given up.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#172

Post by WesternWind »

bdowling wrote: post #110
cmiles74 wrote: post #15

IMHO, Reddit's charging such a high price for API access that it's as good as unattainable is more of a last straw then anything else. Reddit has been clear that they view the data as their sole property, when you think it through, why be a moderator for a for-profit company if you aren't being paid? I don't know why it took this long for moderators to quit.

> why be a moderator for a for-profit company if you aren't being paid? They like the power of being a moderator and smacking down people who break the rules. Usually they also like to bend the rules themselves to push a personal agenda, promoting what they like and squashing what they don’t like. It’s the same motivation people have to serve on HOA boards or elected government positions.

I mean that's a possible motivation for some folks, but not everyone.

I know that when I've taken on unpaid positions of responsibility (not as a reddit mod but within my hobbyist community), it's because I cared about the organization and the people in it, and getting things right.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#173

Post by berkle4455 »

bbor wrote: post #118
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure that fact will really pump up demand for their IPO.

Is this sarcastic or am I missing some point? More users == more money, and India is the biggest under-tapped single market in social media, if you consider it a "single market". I don't get why being popular in India would be a bad thing...

Investors do not care about just DAUs (daily active users) anymore, they care just as much about ARPU (avg revenue per user)

At Facebook, users from Asia Pacific region monetize at around ~1/15th of US&CA users. The costs to serve those users remains relatively fixed on a per-user basis, so expect those costs to inflate by 10-15x to earn the same revenue. Will Reddit drastically change their business model to appeal to Asia Pacific users and advertisers? It's possible but extremely unlikely and pivoting your business model months from IPO isn't a good plan.

A flood of India users to a western-centric platform is how you kill that platform (see Quora).

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#174

Post by dehrmann »

iaw wrote: post #91
Exuma wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very stupid question - but can someone explain what the "interest rates" and "no more free money" replies mean? Is it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant money supply from investors? Or is it something else

I'll try to be quick and simple: - The US government sets a base interest rate it will pay if you buy bonds from them - Bonds are basically loans - People with money want that money to make money so they buy bonds and invest in stocks/companies - When bonds aren't giving any money rich people put more into companies - When bonds are giving money rich people shift money into bonds, less money for companies This is a g…

This is a good explanation, but the real, inflation-adjusted bond yield is still negative.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#175

Post by z3c0 »

Maxburn wrote: post #78
idiotsecant wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many moderators will actually quit as long as the users are there, especially since reddit gave back some moderator API call access. Moderating is already a terrible, thankless job. The people who do it enjoy moderating because (I assume) they're 'in charge' of something big and important. I don't think reddit closing off third party access will be enough to convince most of these people to stop giving…

This is the thing I don't get, reddit is getting a heck of a free ride with all these mods. You'd think they would do everything within their power to enable them so why kick them in the nuts? Also the "power" users would probably be happy to pay reasonable prices to interact with it via app/api, so go ahead and charge something REASONABLE. There's something nefarious going on behind the scenes and it's all very susp…

I don't even think it's behind the scenes. It seems plain as day that they're trying to recoup the cost of their shitty website redesign and even shittier app. Since everybody is using third-party apps (which use the API), they pulled the most tonedeaf, corporatist approach and targeted those third-party apps. Instead, they should have dome some soul-searching to realize that they burned a money pile to make garbage because they decided their primary users were advertisers.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#176

Post by anoonmoose »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #151

Can't Reddit just un-private all the popular subreddits? Why haven't they done this yet?

because they'd also need to remove the mods who made the subs private in the first place lest they just make them private again immediately

and removing those mods would/could/should be perceived as an escalation in this fight that could make the problem worse not better

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#177

Post by pgwhalen »

cmiles74 wrote: post #15

IMHO, Reddit's charging such a high price for API access that it's as good as unattainable is more of a last straw then anything else. Reddit has been clear that they view the data as their sole property, when you think it through, why be a moderator for a for-profit company if you aren't being paid? I don't know why it took this long for moderators to quit.

> why be a moderator for a for-profit company if you aren't being paid?

The same reason you'd be a moderator for a non-profit, which is power.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#178

Post by cactus2093 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #12

It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of post…

I agree with all of that, but honestly the more important factor is this is just not a very good cause to get all worked up about. Reddit is trying to grow into a profitable company, their business model is showing ads to users, they obviously can't just let millions of people use 3rd party apps for free.

I think even casual users understand this perfectly well. They don't use 3rd party apps for browsing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok (because those services also don't offer APIs). Why should Reddit be different?

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#179

Post by whywhywhywhy »

vkou wrote: post #16
icapybara wrote: post #11

The main problem with the protest is that there’s no viable Reddit replacement. Back during the Digg fiasco, it was easy for everyone to jump ship to Reddit.

This is the root of the problem. Large communities can't meaningfully migrate off it. Small communities shouldn't migrate off it. (As they will lose discoverability.)

>Large communities can't meaningfully migrate off it.

Yes they can, Digg migrated to reddit, Facebook migrated to Instagram. If Reddit becomes insufferable for most of their users to use they will migrate. Never forget the internet 1% rule [1], just the right set of users have to migrate to kill the site.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#180

Post by jayd16 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #12

It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of post…

I feel like this is somewhat of an indictment of Mastodon. Maybe its not a 1:1 replacements but I feel like they could be capitalizing on this moment and it feels like they're not in the conversation.
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