Reddit still doesn't quite understand where their value is derived from.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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I can imagine bunch of idiots making user base and profit/loss projections without even opening reddit for once.
What do they say?
When your opponent is making mistakes, let them.
Its an unfortunate ideology that everything in the world should be optimized around profit.
I mean Reddit is clearly a company that shoyld focus on making proft. I don't have problems with that. The problem is that it's a stupid decision that doesn't seem to nessesarily help them profit wise. Besides, it has been a great platform for countless communities that I just didn't want it to end.
I mean Reddit is clearly a company that shoyld focus on making proft.
Reddit is a company that commoditizes human communities and profits from the free labor of those who are willing to put in the effort to belong to something. Their value is derived from the communities that use their platform and the communities derive value from the tools reddit creates that allows for them to organize.
Reddit should focus on being a good platform. The profit-centric focus degrades the quality of the platform and will be the death of the thing in the end. The expansionist attitude is the achiles heal of capitalism. Anything of value gets turned into shit under that motive.
The real question is how much is Reddit willing to pay third-party app developers for making the Reddit UX tolerable enough for people to stick around?
Reddit is going to get so much money when it goes IPO that it couldn't care less about its users and/or 3rd party devs.
Only if there's a community left there to sell! 😅
You're right though. As many people as there are fleeing, there are many times that who will stick around and endure whatever changes Reddit makes. Reddit will have plenty of eyeballs left to sell ads against. Now, will the people generating content and moderating still be around? What happens long-term if they aren't? That remains to be seen…
I had this discussion in here before and I think it's for the better that the majority doesn't leave reddit, for both sides.
The vast majority of redditors are lurkers. It's a small minority that actually care enough to post the content and engange in conversations. Coincidentally, this same minority is the only one that cares enough to leave so I am expecting the most engaging people to migrate to other platforms like this one right here and I expect that Reddit is going to be left with lurkers and no one to drive the communities forward.
Granted, they will still be able to sell ads to lurkers but who cares? That's not why most of us were in Reddit.
I was there to get more news and educate myself. If that's gone, I'm gone. I'm happy to do this here, as well.
Reddit is lemmy's marketing department
What really stands out from reddit's statements is the conspicuous lack of disagreement about the alleged charges to 3rd party apps. They can keep trying to characterize it as fair but the factual numbers in the conversation make it plainly obvious that they are instituting a model that makes it impossible for existing 3rd party apps to survive.
Per-app API billing also makes very little sense for something like RIF or Apollo. If the usage itself is so expensive then tie billing to the user account itself: want to datamine? Great, pay up. Casual user? Good news, you get ten thousand free calls per month and rate limited beyond that.
But no that would be sane and not lock people into their shitty ecosystem.
100% there is absolutely no reason Reddit needs to be making 3rd party apps be brokers in paying for these API calls. Aside from the ridiculous price for API calls, they're implementing this in the dumbest possible way. And no NSFW is dumb as fuck too and honestly anticompetitive.
They can insist on being fairly paid, but the users have to think the transaction is fair as well. Ask Digg how much their platform was worth when all of the users were gone.
I would say the majority of posts on Reddit are admin ran karma bots and scammers. Just a bunch of bots talking to themselves.
I would say the majority of posts on Reddit are admin ran karma bots and scammers. Just a bunch of bots talking to themselves.
Its hard to say and I really wonder about this. Specifically, I think there is a lot of astro turfing, but not in the way most people think it is. I think very specific subreddits like r/marvel, formula one, celebrity news (which only really started making it to the front page in earnest 2 months ago), are some how in cahoots with reddit to sponsor their popularity. The game goes like this: you work with reddit to astroturf organic engagement with the channel, and over time, organic engagement takes over.
I think this is how Reddit makes real money and I wonder if they give two wiffs of piss about the embedded ads. I think you can attribute the success the modern marvel franchises have seen as well as the success that the modern star wars series saw to astroturfed social media campaigns on reddit.
Its pure conspiracy, I have no evidence other than watching the way that reddit has evolved.
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$0.24 per 1000 requests is not being "fairly paid". It's an abusive price and it's at least 10000x their actual server cost
Wow. I had not done the math. That's an obscene amount of money. 1000 requests is nothing for a web app like Reddit, even with agreeing over-fetching.
The crazy thing is that they might have gotten away with it if they had structured it right. Set up the infastructure themselves to charge the individual user directly for their API use rather than the App creators. Carve out exceptions for moderation APIs and known moderation bots. I probably would have paid a few bucks a month to keep using Relay. I would have grumbled about it... but I would have done it.
Now I'm just gonna leave, lol.
or enable it only for the dozens of users that have reddit premium
I pray they don't change their minds and continue with these plans. It's so stupid of them and I love it.
Yeah, I agree. I'm loving lemmy and haven't spent more than 10-15 min. on Reddit over the past week.
I'm still on Reddit to upvote anything that talks about this shitshow, and recommending Lemmy.
Lemmy is a wonderful tool. All we need to do is add rewards, coins, video reels, promoted posts, and then a sort of celebrity/influencer culture will naturally flourish!
Yeah I'm out for good.
I have requested the moderation of one familiar community of mine here and intent on putting in the effort here.
I have also contributed to the lemmy github in the form of pull requests.
If reddit doesn't care about the users I won't. I will care for something that offers something back to me and the community.
The entire company is delusional wtf
They're trying to prepare for an IPO but it seems they've chosen the Twitter business plan
Problem is they're not owned by a billionaire.
Exactly, they depend on thousands of people working from free (from people that post stuff to the moderators that don't even get proper tools), and then they try to extort them. And in the middle of this I think people running some social media companies don't understand that active users are both their suppliers and main asset, and that they should do everything in their power to not piss them off.
Exactly, they depend on thousands of people working from free (from people that post stuff to the moderators that don’t even get proper tools), and then they try to extort them. And in the middle of this I think people running some social media companies don’t understand that active users are both their suppliers and main asset, and that they should do everything in their power to not piss them off.
Lemmy is about as good, if not better than reddit afa software experience goes. Maybe embedded videos would be nice, but it doesn't come with the deluge of garbage that reddit does.
"Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app," the Reddit worker said.
Uhh... Plenty of services charge less than half of that for the same number of API calls, and they are still able to make money. I would imagine that as large as Reddit is, their cost per 1k calls is way less than $0.10, unless their API is poorly engineered and inefficient AF. This is 100% them just trying to drive third parties out so they can get that sweet sweet ad revenue.
Exactly what it looks like to me. This is clearly an attempt at driving up revenue for the upcoming IPO, but I think there’s a little more to it.
We all know that Reddit depended on third party apps for years before releasing their own, which is full of ads and all the other features they cram in there that long-term users don’t care for.
To me it looks like they’ve planned for this move to drive out long-term users, who remember old Reddit before the crazy amounts of ads, and will still have the people who will tolerate the official app, and the many people who have only ever used new Reddit and the app, and of course are used to the ads.
I think they’ve underestimated just how many of their mods and content contributors are using/dependent on third party apps.
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They fire 90 employees but plan to hire another 100 before the end of the year?
Typical corporate bullshit? Searching, finding, hiring and training new employees is more expensive than keeping the old ones....
Not if they're outsourced and earning a fraction of the previous salary
They can't fix their app with 90 employees, what they gonna do with 100? My 5 friends from college built a better app than them
They're cutting a lot more than 5% of their free workforce.
laughs in lemmy and adblock if have to use reddit
If you're going to use the official app, AdGuard Home or AdGuard Private DNS.
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Then they should set a reasonable price, not $20 million dollars for allowing access to data in useful volumes. I wonder how long it's gonna take until reddit starts collapsing fully, the first few proverbial chains have broken so the ball is rolling.
Then Reddit should look around its industry and set a competitive, fair price, not 15-20x the industry standard.
It's never been about the API. Third party apps are undercutting Reddit's as revenue. They could never ban the apps outright so they set an obscene cost for API calls to indirectly kill them. They have probably factored in the potential loss of users already and it probably ain't much.
Do you guys think the higher ups will be able to retire to Reddit Island after they sell their shares? 🤣
Okay, that Archer quote in this context made my day. LOL.
I remember when Reddit's FAQ had the question "Is there a mobile app for Reddit?" and the answer was "No, we don't have a mobile app and have no intention to develop one, but you can choose from a list of third-party clients". And what do they mean by "not fairly paid", does Reddit not already have a working monetization system with paid awards and profile customizations? Not enough people paying $80 to put a sticker next to a comment?
Sounds like they haven't been able to invest dev time on how their API works for years.
So long as they can pocket a few hundred milion from the IPO, Reddit management couldn't give a monkey's about any of their milions of users or the thousands of communities that made Reddit valuable in the first place. They are quite happily flushing all that down the toilet to get their big pay day. Why didn't they just go non-profit like Wikipedia? That's the only business model that makes sense for Reddit and is sustainable. But then nobody gets to become a multi millionaire, and we can all see which would be the bigger tragedy for u/spez.
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