The question is: Does it have to be sexy to get this funding?
Why can't it be more sexy to run a sustainable small business? - I think they could run reddit profitable with less staff, which focuses on the core functionality instead of trying to grow into new markets and segments.
Sure, there is a risk that some new platform disrupts that segment they are serving, but even then there is enough of a longtail to prepare an alternative and hardly those bets on expanding reach works.
Let's look at Twitter as a sample case: the features which were successful, were the ones where they followed what users were doing and supported that (adding @-mentions, adding retweets, adding quote retweets, some degree of threading support, etc. all came after users used those things) most things where they added stuff their PMs invented is mostly forgotten already, but building all that cost resources.
That's why the venture capital industry exists, though -- to get reasonably-quick returns on their investment, at a higher rate than just putting their money into an index fund. If you're not going to potentially give them back 10x their investment in one big lump sum, you're not worth it to them. It's also why VC deals are generally structured as stock purchases, rather than loans that expect repayment. They're genuinely not in it for slowly raking in small returns over the next 50 years.
(And then, of course, they spread their investments out so that the one big success that gives them 1000x their money back pays for all the companies that flamed out chasing inadvisable growth.)
> Why can't it be more sexy to run a sustainable small business? - I think they could run reddit profitable with less staff, which focuses on the core functionality instead of trying to grow into new markets and segments.
Investor returns, obviously. The whole funding model is throw money, make it big, monetize, sell out.
I do think it would maybe be possible to make company like Reddit "just" be profitable and keep on chugging but that's not what the investors throwing millions at it want.
The funding model is antithesis to "just a sustainable company in their niche"
What fucking society ? Society has nothing to do with that. Businesses like that exist just fine.
Problems like that are entirely the creation of venture capital and stock market. The wider society have very little effect on that. And partially allows them to outcompete "healthily growing one" by allowing companies to run on negative income for years, even decades.
Investor mentality is what spawns that. The ability for people not caring about the company or the niche it is in to force the direction or buy out the competition.
And I don't think that can easily go away any time soon, and it is very double-edged sword as obviously some good had come from "someone with good idea getting money from investors to realize it"
> Why can't it be more sexy to run a sustainable small business?
What's sexy or not is determined more by the one doing the looking than the one being looked at. I find sustainable, non-exploitive small businesses much sexier, but I doubt most VCs do.
Yeah, VCs don't, that is obvious. But why are founders so willing to give up control for a small chance on a payout ... that's where I want to tackle that.
But I guess it's the same reason people participate in a lottery - the small chance of winning big is a bigger thrill than a boring investment.
I think it goes to why a person is starting a business to begin with. Lots of people do it as you say, as a kind of lottery ticket. Their goal is purely monetary, and maximizing the return is the only thing that is important.
Others start businesses because they believe in the product or service and the value it can bring to people. Making money is important because it allows that to happen, but isn't the primary goal.
Personally, I'm not going to say one sort is better than the other in some absolute sense, but my personality falls more into the latter camp. I have no interest in making money just to make money. I am interested in doing cool things, and need money to do them.
I don't think it's so much a matter of getting them to IPO than in getting the maximum price at the IPO. Effectively, a pump and dump scheme except it's not considered such by the SEC.
The third party clients hurt ad revenue, kill them. Once the stock is out the door the problems that result aren't going to hurt them, just the suckers who fell for it.
It's just raw capitalism and enshitification [1] which is why I'm going to be the annoying, stubborn guy and stop using proprietary platforms, especially ones where I'm inadvertently contributing to building some company's dataset or usage state that is just waiting to be later milked once the platform decides their users are too entrenched.
I was on digg. I was on reddit. I was on Twitter. I was on Facebook. Every platform has its day, and I like investing in things for the long term. It's a much harder battle, but even my code is now used by MS/GitHub to train ML. It's so hostile and folks are so used to it that I feel like I have to tip-toe around saying "No, this isn't okay for me."
> It seems no company is happy with being the virally adored single product little niche 50 employee powerhouse.
Imagine you had such a company, someone offered you $700 million for 10% of the company valuing it at $7 billion.
You don't understand why they'd value it that highly. But if you're willing to pretend you do for a few years, you can siphon off enough of that money that even your great-great-great-grandkids won't have to work a day in their lives.
Would you turn down that deal? Because I doubt I could resist it.
Not saying I would turn down or won't turn down, but you've companies like 37signals and folks like DHH who are very happy making millions and not having a boss rather than making billions
37signals (basecamp now) is an exception. They didn't seek investment to get started. They are able to fully control their destiny because they don't have investors, they asked for Bezos to invest because they wanted him as an advisor, not because they needed the money.
So yes DEFINITELY possible to do a 37signals, but you need starting capital. Or at least an ability to live for free for 24 months while you figure out how to make cash from your business.
37signals is profitable, though. It's easy to say "I'm happy just being a small company making a good product" if you're making enough to keep the lights on, but if you don't know how to monetize your audience and user base then the pressure to accept investor money starts getting pretty high.
Because there is no
inherent goodness in working for others and fuck you money is by far the easiest way to secure your childrens' ability to live the lives they want.
If you don't want your billions of dollars I'll happily take them of your hands.
Would you prefer to give them the option of having access to boats of money or would you prefer to spend more time with them? What if you can only choose one option?
It's easy to answer a question when there's no exclusive options.
By the way, when you have an option of cashing out at 700million (and killing your business) OR continuing to build a business that genuinely provides something good for the society (albeit maybe not as profitably), do think first what kind of lesson you are giving your kids when you make that choice. You may provide them with the money but not much meaning to spend that money in a good way.
We don't live in a binary world where it's one or the other. But having more money, makes it much easier to get back your time and spend that invaluable and unreplenishable resource however you want.
It's interesting to think there is one valid answer here. Your answer is societally accepted as "correct", however I think the "I got enough to make ends meet (and then some) & my kids will have to also figure it out (maybe with a safety net from me if needed)" is also a consistent and valid reply.
There's this really insidious meme that it's important for children to completely find their own way in life. I could best summarize it as: Children that receive more from their parents are some flavor of "less good" humans.
I don't know where/when it started. It seems like one of those ideas that mostly the bottom 99% of the income spectrum hold onto.
> There's this really insidious meme that it's important for children to completely find their own way in life. ... I don't know where/when it started. It seems like one of those ideas that mostly the bottom 99% of the income spectrum hold onto.
I agree that it's interesting that a handful of ultra rich are bucking the trend and not passing all their wealth to their children. But this is only interesting because it's so rare. It's also not very accurate.
Gates has stated publicly he plans to leave each child $10 million.
Buffet has stated publicly that his kids will only get $2 billion each.
Articles like the ones you've posted are just fuel for a false narrative.
Yeah, Gates is leaving couch money to his kids, but realistically those kids are set for life unless they have catastrophic lifestyle failure. For all intents and purposes, his kids are and will remain extraordinarily wealthy.
"Trust fund kids" are a real phenomenon that many of us have experienced personally. People who never have to work a day in their lives usually end up as insufferable spoiled brats when they grow up, and its not hard to see why
It's worth pointing out that those kids are merely a very visible minority of wealthy kids, typically born to nouveau riche families. The majority of wealthy families, especially those who have had their money for a couple generations, are basically invisible to the proletariat.
The kids go to prestigious private schools, where they get a better education than you, then get propelled into jobs that simply aren't available to most, like politics, or non-profit boards, and the like. Some will end up taking jobs basically recreationally, like my billionaire highschool teacher. They might be somewhat entitled, in the sense that they don't feel that their life of largely leisure is undeserved, but in our current economic system they're regularly told they're not wrong.
These are the terrifying rich, and the ones that are actively running the world. They're effectively checked out from the money economy, and spend their time primarily in the power economy. The illusion that "oh, rich kids grow up to be spoiled, ineffectual brats" only works to their benefit.
Having grown up around a bunch of ultra-wealthy kids the thing that is being grappled with is that knowing you will never have to do anything from a young age is corrosive to most (but not all) children.
It's noticeably distinct from the feeling of "you can never truly fail" which is more common with the upper middle class and seems be significantly better for your long-term mental health.
I don't think this means you need to actually not leave your children gobs of money, but in my experience it certainly helps to act like you're not for the duration of your kids' childhood.
There's this really insidious meme that just because their parent(s) made astronomically absurd amounts of money, children should be able to spend their entire lives doing nothing productive, treating regular people like shit, and wrecking the environment all in the name of enjoying themselves.
I genuinely believe that every human being should be given the means to survive without having to work for it—even a bit more, because psychological needs are a thing, too. The vast majority of people have an innate drive to do something, to contribute to our world, to make other people's lives better, to create something real.
Being given enough money that you can just pop from NYC to Paris on a whim on the family private jet—or even just buy a new jet to do so, because the other jet is in use—is entirely different.
Being disconnected from work, and from people without enough money to treat other humans like animals, is genuinely an unhealthy thing.
This goes back to at LEAST 19th century socialist thought, if not beyond. Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin writes about the evils of inheritance in his works.
I’d turn down any compromise to my work or my integrity if I already have enough money to retire. The kids and grandkids need to earn their own comfort after they are out of the house.
Or perhaps one could create opportunities for their future generations by building generational wealth in the hope of ensuring a better life for their kids and grandkids. It's a matter of perspective.
>> by building generational wealth in the hope of ensuring a better life for their kids and grandkids
You could make a better life for your kids, and a lot more people, without building "generational wealth". The alternative in this case is not "run reddit in destitution". I'd argue those who pursue your "winner take everything" approach are the ones lacking perspective.
What if an alternative was to make $70M or $7M a year without giving up anything? I know more companies that do turn down the crazy homerun deals and pursue the modest, yet still wildly profitable, ones on their own terms. We just don't hear about them.
- I can make $20M today and sell my company off, and I'm set for pretty much anything I'd want for life, and I don't have to work if I don't want to.
OR
- I can make $1 mil a year and run this company indefinitely theoretically, and have to keep working.
That's a more realistic expectation.
Furthermore, trying to start a company with no real wealth to start with is a massive challenge, which means you're not starting a company alone, you're going to some sort of investor. And investors don't like "lifestyle" companies, they like make big money fast, and sell.
So everything pressures you to go in one direction.
Edit: If you sell off, the investor is in control. And investors want to be facebook.
I'd turn down that deal. If they value it so highly, I'd prefer to just sell the company to them entirely over selling 10%. I know from experience that doing it any other way would make me utterly miserable.
There's an amount of money that for me, for all my intents and purposes, is effectively infinity and when it comes to these types of deals, it's way lower than that, basically something like 2
* monthly burn * 12 / ln(1.02)
With the 2 being a buffer, and 2% annualized being an inflation adjusted return.
So, for instance, 5k/month spend gives you 6 million.
So that gives some slack. If 10 million and 100 million is the same infinity you've got some negotiating leverage to prevent yourself from selling your soul
They're already making close to half a billion. They may not have much room for growth but they have shittons of content where you can strap ads on for pretty much everything.
I fully understand that Reddit needs money to keep the site running and the way to do that is via premium or showing ads. The 3rd party apps should never have promised a "no ads" experience IMO.
I'm ok if using a 3rd party app means paying a modest fee to use Reddit and not see ads. I have no idea what a reasonable rate is, but Reddit Premium is not it. I don't get that kind of value out of it.
third party devs have asked Reddit multiple times for an ad endpoint in the API.
The really good move here would’ve been profit sharing on ads between Reddit and third party apps. But heck these devs were fine displaying ads for Reddit for nothing in return.
While I do agree that Reddit probably doesn't care, the ad endpoint approach is harder to implement than one would imagine.
Normally ads have strict requirements for the placement (show one ad every x amount of posts), which would be hard to enforce across all 3rd party clients. Not to mention that they might be targeted towards the user, measure exposure time, and record interactions. I think the only way to do this is having some sort of SDK, but they probably determined that the cost would be too high.
I honestly believe that Reddit has ad targeting figured out in the form of subreddits.
Second, Reddit had/has an opportunity to hear to actually dictate the ad placement rules themselves. They don’t need to promise a certain number of placement, but rather a certain number of clicks.
Finally, they could have made the ad API something that’s locked behind a human review until the app got popular enough. I agree that it’s simply not worth it to fully automate this. Realistically there’s less than 15 clients that would need to implement this.
I wouldn’t accept that deal. Honestly the headache of that seems not worth the money.
I’d be making enough money to live and not worry. I’d have enough saved for my kids to get a pretty nice jump start too.
My great great great grandkids? I don’t care. Heck I can’t predict next week. Having that much money could end up having them get killed in a future revolution.
This is mostly true, but does depend a bit. There are of course investors looking for a steady price and steady dividend (income investors, as opposed to growth). Nobody is ever annoyed when their stock goes up of course, but it isn't always the primary factor in selecting securities.
That said, TECH stock investors mostly are growth investors, because the dividends are typically fairly paltry.
Don't take VC money if you don't wanna be forced to find a 10x exit for those investors.
The investors want an exit, so they have to IPO. To IPO at a reasonable valuation, they need to demonstrate significant revenue potential. And to get significant revenue, they need to monetize the hell out of the userbase.
You can do that through:
1. Ads--monetize your user's attention.
2. Subscriptions--monetize your user's attachment to your service.
3. Surveillance capitalism--monetize your user's data.
Very few services have shown the ability to hit that 10x target with #2, and thus Reddit chose paths #1 and #3.
The lesson: Once again, for those in the back row 1) if you're not paying for the product, you are the product, and 2) don't build communities on closed platforms unless you're comfortable with the potential of a rug-pull.
> if you're not paying for the product, you are the product
The problem with this saying is that it implies that you can avoid being the product by paying for the product. But that is increasingly not true, and is a bad bet.
It sure helps with incentive alignment, but I agree, we should also be demanding laws which ensure at minimum transparency, and ideally regulation, of how individualized data is collected, stored, bought, and sold, while collectively refusing to operate with companies that insist on viewing their customers as just another resource to be mined.
Looks like the "Freemium" business model has it's drawbacks. Especially when you want to make more money:) They are probably looking to sell and buyers are balking.
>It seems no company is happy with being the virally adored single product little niche 50 employee powerhouse.
There's Valve or JetBrains, which are not even niche or small but very successful that have stayed private, focused and avoided money from the public markets. But yes the software industry desperately needs a Mittelstand economy. Probably won't happen without actually breaking apart some of the platforms though.
Historically breakups have increased total shareholder value so it would even be a good deal for investors. In Spain for example where Uber is regulated they're essentially just a software vendor rather than trying to capture the market. If they were just a 100 person company licensing software worldwide that sounds like a more attractive business than what they are now.
It's kind of hilarious how few people even manage to benefit from the system as it is, which is mostly just VCs, managers at bloated firms and people who get rid of their stock at the right time.
Is it just me, or are users trying to solve the wrong problem here?
According to the CEO, Reddit is losing money. It won't survive long-term if that doesn't change. If people care about reddit and its community, it seems like that's what they should be thinking about.
If an alternate client uses the API, but doesn't return any advertising (or other) revenue, that is a good reason for reddit (as a company) to change that relationship.
To be clear, I'm not making a comment about how they are going about it. But destroying reddit's business is no help to anyone.
Lots of people on reddit (and on here) brag about using ad-blockers. They also complain about paying for services. I mean: something's go to give. VC's won't continue to fund these free services forever.
I'd rather live in a world where you view advertisements or pay a fee to use services. But I seem to be outside the norm on these things.
Considering the apparent cost to Reddit for a third-party client is roughly $2-5 per user, I've seen a lot of people voice support for locking third-party apps behind reddit premium. The problem is reddit doesn't want just that, they also want to force everyone to use the app so they can monitor and monetize them there.
The fairest I can be there is that it might make their ad sales more complicated. It'd be more difficult to count "impressions" for an advertiser if you had to work out whether an ad served through the API was actually going to be shown to a user. The advertisers might also dislike the lack of control over the context their ads would be shown in.
This isn't insurmountable, but it does present some challenges.
Reddit wants all that sweet sweet privacy invasion that's possible with apps. Take a look at the data usage claims on the App Store/Play Store for the official Reddit app. They sign up for basically every iota of data available. The official app also "suggests" (forces) subreddit content on you no matter your settings.
Reddit wants to be an AdTech data source and delivery platform. Simply tracking usage on the web (where tracking can be limited or blocked) or the API is not sufficient to do Facebook/Twitter levels of user tracking.
Whoa there cowboy - next you're gonna say something crazy, like we should hold the CEO accountable for his own incompetence. Obviously it's the users who are wrong!
> and spent significant resources on a new UI design that is near universally reviled.
Not that I don’t agree with your post, or how bad the redesign is, but is that really universal? With statistics I’ve heard about only 5-10% of people using old? And with the current protest, I’ve even seen comments supportive of the blackout by people using new and the official app.
I think a major factor in the scope of this blackout is that there's a lot of 3p mod tools that, per my second hand understanding, are somewhere between "significant QOL improvement" and "indispensable". So even mods who use official apps/new website/etc would be affected, and they also hold the keys to the kingdom in terms of making it happen
The developer of Apollo was clear that the problem wasn’t that Reddit wanted to charge for API usage, it was the price.
Reddit could have just made third party client use a feature of Reddit premium and avoid all of the current issues. Yes, some would still complain that Reddit costs anything to use but big clients have paying customers and are less price sensitive.
...and the timeline. Apollo could've maybe adjusted with a 12-18mo warning/phase-in. The 30-day no-compromise plan that happened instead makes it impossible to do anything but shut down.
It’s probably more than ten things and the price is number 1. $20mil/yr or something for Apollo?
Time: only a few weeks notice. They have to notify users of a change, make a plan, program it, apple approval for updates, and Apollo is just one guy with a part time designer.
Terrible communications. Say pricing would be fair and not like twitter. Say no api changes this year. Pretend to be fair. Deception .
They could have given Apollo and the many other apps that are shutting down a little more notice and time to adjust.
I think Reddit has its back against a wall and a VC gave an ultimatum/margin call that Reddit needs to make more money with a business plan in 30 days or no more funding re-up.
I agree with your overall point, but if your business is spending a bunch of money on stupid junk your customers don't want, such as a jaw-droppingly terrible web UI and stupid Tik-tok clone features, it's not unreasonable for your customers to tell you they don't want to pay the price you're asking and take their business elsewhere.
Literally nobody is saying that reddit can't charge for their API. What everyone is saying is that the proposed API usage fee structure is not designed to keep reddit's lights on. It's clearly designed to remove third party interoperability.
Its totally related question, if new reddit pricing is aligned with industry, then it is fair and reasonable pricing, and apps which go down are those who built little businesses on something reddit provided for free while not contributing back, and who now can't monetize their traffic well enough.
Apollo dev can start charging his customers $5/m and cover API costs, but the problem is that his value proposition is too small for such price.
The question is whether the API pricing is designed to lock out thirty party apps. The pricing being orders of magnitude greater than the revenue from advertisers makes this clear.
You say we should ask whether pricing is aligned with the rest of the industry. Well, the new reddit pricing is not far off twitter. The latter are infamous for freezing out third party clients.
> The pricing being orders of magnitude greater than the revenue from advertisers
Can you share how you came to this statement?
> Well, the new reddit pricing is not far off twitter.
I asked not about just twitter, but about any similar site you know. For example, imgur which is often referred in this situation actually charges $3k/50m requests, not far from reddit prices: https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing
If you don't know such example, then reddit pricing is fair and reasonable, and that's apps problem that they can't monetize traffic.
> and apps which go down are those who built little businesses on something reddit provided for free while not contributing back
Holy shit. Reddit's only content is provided by the users. The users of their APIs generate/moderate a non-trivial amount of content that gives anyone a reason to visit Reddit. Suggesting the API users aren't "giving back" is just ludicrous.
> I'm deeply disappointed in this price. Reddit iterated that the price would be A) reasonable and based in reality, and B) they would not operate like Twitter. Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.
was much cheaper just 2 years ago and he's been using it for at least 8 years... i imagine he was grandfathered in to an even earlier one/negotiated a deal.
that's what sane api companies do... grandfather and don't pull the rug out in 30 days
What i'm saying is that just 2 years ago someone who signed up at the mega plan was spending 6,000 less for the same service. apollo has been using that api for a lot longer than 2 years... unfortunately the wayback doesn't go further back than 2 years. it's entirely possible that he's getting 50m req at 160 bucks because he's grandfathered in a deal is a deal generally and if they do increase their pricing you have a long time to either find an alternative or agree to it.
aside from that i don't think the $0.001/request thing is for anyone operating at a scale much larger than 150m per month. just the initial $4000 makes it $1333/50m requests... to go from that to 50k/50m is asinine as it would be 37x more expensive; you are doing a custom deal at that point.
His initial api access at the highest tier may well have been $500/150m requests based on how much the api has shot up in price for new users in just two years.
> so, current facts are:
> - imgur officially charges way more than reddit for API on the scale
> your point is based solely on speculations
no, we have a reasonable extrapolation based on a worldview based in how the world operates. "if you need more than this call for pricing" is a trope and i've never seen a thing go up in price per unit when you guarantee a certain amount of revenue per year. flex capacity and pricing is more expensive than guaranteed traffic.
> and words of apollo dev which I absolutely don't trust
he's been nothing but forthcoming and transparent from what i've seen whereas spuz has a history of doing shady shit.
> if you need more than this call for pricing" is a trope and i've never seen a thing go up in price per unit when you guarantee a certain amount of revenue per year
it is all over the board: you give free doze at the beginning, and squeeze business when they rooted into your product
> he's been nothing but forthcoming and transparent from what i've seen whereas spuz has a history of doing shady shit.
in my view guy is total scam:
- recorded business call without other party consent
- on that call openly proposed to get $10m to go to sunset
- when got rejected started wave in the internet with heavy manipulated numbers:
* imgur API pricing
* comparing Ads revenue from reddit MAU (majority do few visits per month) to his hyper active users with 250 reqs/d
I haven't seen any notable number of people arguing that the API should remain free no matter what. I have seen a lot of people arguing that reddit is being disingenuous with the API pricing (and also making up stuff about the Apollo dev), in a way that makes it seem like what they really want is to kill all third-party clients rather than monetize them -- when a lot of users really don't like the first-party client for design / accessibility reasons.
It's worth bearing in mind that reddit's business is built on user-provided content and moderation. It doesn't have some sort of right to have the users provide these things if they're unhappy with the direction of the service.
> I haven't seen any notable number of people arguing that the API should remain free no matter what
I haven't seen any notable number of people giving a counter offer to the proposal of Reddit. People "agree that it should not be free", but are unable to give any number of what they think it should cost. All we know is that the proposal, which averages at around $2.50 / user / month is "outrageous", bearing in mind that this allows to browse Reddit fully ad-free, denying them of that revenue stream.
I really don't know how people expect Reddit to make money; they apparently don't think the service is worth $2.50 / month, but they seem to forget that Facebook sells their data for 20x that amount.
The major argument I've seen for that cost being "outrageous" is that if it needs to cost $2.50/month, there should have been a greater-than-30-days warning so that the existing clients could shift business models to support it (shut down free access, migrate existing subscribers to plans that cover the cost, etc). It's the failure to provide a grace period that gives the impression they're just trying to shut down the third-party clients.
For reference here, the Apollo dev posted numbers indicating that they'd expect a $20 million / year API access bill, and separately mentioned that if everyone with a current annual subscription gets their balance refunded now they're shutting down it'll cost them ~$250,000. (It's hard to guess how much of their traffic comes from free users, of course, so they'd presumably need to raise prices less than the 40x this implies...)
I think some important takeaways are: the proposed pricing monetizes the users much higher than Reddit can general monetize them today. And the 30 day window apparently precludes any kind of orderly transition for the app developers who have been monetizing their apps on a yearly schedule.
> the proposed pricing monetizes the users much higher than Reddit can general monetize them today
That's the whole point ! All users of Apollo bring in precisely $0 / month. And reddit will never ever be able to monetise them at all unless they start charging for the API. That's the core of the issue; with no many free riders, the average revenue / user is doomed to stay close to 0.
The question is not "how much revenue / user does reddit make on average" since all Apollo users are dragging the average close to 0 no matter what Reddit does. The question is "how much revenue / user does reddit make on average excluding bots and non ad-watching user". The number then skyrockets and $2.50 / month seems like the answer.
None of these clients filter ads. They just return the API results. Reddit could have in theory returned ads and blocked clients who didn't (or required them to pay some/more money). Instead, they decided to charge extortionate amounts, essentially causing 3rd party apps to be unable to afford them.
It's very obvious their aim isn't necessarily charging, they're more interested in getting rid of 3rd party clients so that people would be forced to use their horrendous app. As a company, they have a right to go towards that route, but they should just say that.
> None of these clients filter ads. They just return the API results. Reddit could have in theory returned ads and blocked clients who didn't (or required them to pay some/more money). Instead, they decided to charge extortionate amounts, essentially causing 3rd party apps to be unable to afford them.
Or, you know, just reasonable price for API access. Even $2/mo gonna compensate them for lost ads multiple times over
Shouldn't moderators and active users (through posting, commenting, voting/curating, etc.) then at the very least get a discount? After all, those people are and have been compensating the platform for any lost ad income far beyond even that $2/mo.
Reddit users are the ones contributing all the content to Reddit, just as here. Reddit provides the infrastructure, but nobody goes to a website to admire its infrastructure unless they're an infrastructure developer.
The issue here is that almost everyone who expresses an opinion hates Reddit's user interface. Many install 3rd party apps that leverage the API to provide a better one. Reddit's owners are trying to kill this off rather than acknowledge that their product offering is bad.
Essentially, platform owners are landlords who do provide ssome value (infrastructure) but nowhere near enough to justify the visions of profit that enticed them into the business, and they don't have any imagination besides 'put ads on it'. They would be better off charging a small subscription fee, but you can't grow a giant community with a paywall so they used capital and free access to gain max market share. Nobody wants to start paying a subscription for what was previously free, everyone hates advertising because it's dishonest and manipulative, so the owners have painted themselves into a corner.
This is a general problem with the platform model; people are only attracted to it because of other people who already go there, and the only way to make money out of people is to either sell stuff to them (which they don't really want) or sell information about them to other people who want to sell stuff to them (arguably worse). Conde Nast should just declare defeat and offer to sell the platform to its users.
Do you have a source for them losing money? I don't trust them; advertising aside, I think they've been covering most expenses just from users paying for Reddit awards.
Sure, maybe it makes sense from a business perspective to make their API paid-access only.
Maybe it even makes sense to make the prices so outrageously high it results in the subreddit mods striking. Perhaps this gives them the ability to remove the moderation teams and sell the spots to the highest corporate bidders.
That doesn't mean that we as users have to like it, or them, after these changes.
I'm just hoping something better comes along out of all this.
The CEO absolutely has an incentive to make it seem like this is the case, so they can use it to justify more user-hostile changes in the name of profits
> Honestly don't really care. Use something for as long as it's free and when they start monetizing it move on to next free thing.
As a person who grew up on the internet, went from AIM to usenet/forums and stopped this entirely in my late teens/early 20s, when do you give this up?
Despite being a millennial, at the very core ages mind you, I missed social media entirely because of how predictable this all was (the only thing they could monetize was your data, if you grew up in the early internet/chaning why would anyone willingly give this up?) so my question is: why bother?
Platform hopping is a thing for people with more time on their hands than anything else, migrating platforms seems to me like something that is something that would fall out of favour after your late 20s, when you're more likely to bother pretending to be something you're not on the internet which just leaves having endless rants with bots for engagement in your 30+ for fake internet points, which is incredibly sad... so what's the point?
Personally speaking, I just keep a close circle of friends who I speak with via Signal or Telegram if we cannot meet in person (most live on other continents) or can't do PgP encrypted email.
I have held highly social positions most of my career in and outside of tech, and I just cannot grasp why anyone would want to do use their free time on these platforms to interact with people; let alone be willingly be used as a pawn for big data based organizations, including nation states and their respective intelligence agencies.
Social media is the equivalent of playing games on your phone or binging Netflix. Most people aren't actually doing anything meaningful in this world and their time is not at a premium.
> According to the CEO, Reddit is losing money. It won't survive long-term if that doesn't change. If people care about reddit and its community, it seems like that's what they should be thinking about.
So throw a $2 price tag on API-enabled account (enough API limits to comfortably run media account). That's probably already 10x more profit that average user provides in ads. Boom, now your API earns money for you without alienating users, and it feels fair.
And maybe not dump massive amount of effort on shittifying your UI in meantime...
Were they always losing money? I can't imagine Reddit costing that much when all it did was serve text and was largely community moderated but now they self host videos and other things.
Reddit used to show how much users donated vs the server cost (and running costs). It was always maxed out. Reddit grew and simply got greedy. Typical enterprise company woes where a much smaller company could cover most if not all what your typical user actually wants without losing money.
Reddit didn't need to be a video and image host as you allude to. They didn't need to bloat their stack with 'hot' technology. They didn't need to even make an app, the third parties were basically doing that for free.
They want to be an ad and data platform because they know that this will in the long run net them more money. To get there though they will have to alienate their entire user base.
Just from introspection I wonder if the problem with getting people to pay is more about friction than preserving resources or being a freeloader. I don't want to think about my overall budget for services at each turn when I'm presented with a paywall or a donation page. Not to mention getting out my payment method. I don't want to pay into an exclusive communication protocol, I want to know any of my friends could join. Etc. And overall it's just not something we're used to doing.
I gotta wonder if I'm not alone, whether the solution might be in presentation and organization.
Seems you did not follow the conversation very closely. Few things
1. No trust spez. so anything he says can just be toss out. He has Zero creditably at this point
2. Almost universally everyone was fine with the plan to charge for API access, the problem came in when they wanted to charge fees well outside what anyone would believe is fair or even "with in market reality" then proceeded to lie and denigrate about developers
3. Reddit is the source of the unprofitably, it is largely their cost structure that is the problem, not revenue. They want to fix it with revenue side only modifications and not cost structure. They ballooned their costs under the former CEO's brain dead plan to move everyone to CA or NY. Even though I believe they are reversed their in office requirement, they still have most of the costs that came with that move. That is just one of many examples.
That's an entirely separate discussion from what is being talked about right now. They are being dishonest about the service they provide; users are responsible for the communities working at all. Their representation of the situation as for-profit company vs. freeloading users is a slap in the face to the many years of engagement that gave them this platform.
They are well within their rights as a company to attempt to monetize further. The problem is that they seem willfully ignorant of where their value actually comes from.
>Lots of people on reddit (and on here) brag about using ad-blockers. They also complain about paying for services. I mean: something's go to give. VC's won't continue to fund these free services forever.
These people will claim that their contributions are so valuable that they drive the engagement of other plebs who do generate revenue for the site.
No, really. They do. It's the tech nerd equivalent of the "we'll pay you in clout" Instagram grifter.
> According to the CEO, Reddit is losing money. It won't survive long-term if that doesn't change. If people care about reddit and its community, it seems like that's what they should be thinking about.
You are correct. There are two ways to solve this. One is reducing expenses. How many paid employess would a site like reddit need? I would be surprised if that number was more than 50-100, and not surprsed if that number in reality is much higher.
Second is increasing revenue. Increasing the price for the API is probbly a wrong move as API increases distribution which is what you want. You do not want AI companies scraping and reusing content for model training for free, so you make separate terms for that.
Instead, you try with paid Reddit plans. Would be nice for users to own their piece of reddit and pay for their favorite scoial platform with some perks included (freemium). Also it does make sense for subreddits to pay a fee proportional to their membership after some threshold of say 1,000 users. After all, owning a huge subreddit give a lot of power in many ways. If I had a subreddit with 1,000,000 users I think I would pay $100-$1000/month to have that kind of distribution power.
Wikipedia says they have 2,000 employees as of June, citing some stats from an article about their layoffs.
(I do find it hard to pick how many employees a company "should" have, particularly since you need to account for things like HR / legal / advertising sales / etc...)
No one is protesting ads, and most redditors support the idea of a reasonable monetization approach for third party apps. But u/spez is pretty open about the fact that he views third party apps as competitors and/or leeches, and he's killing them off with a fee that no one can pay. The end goal is clearly to make the platform less open so that Reddit itself can control (monetize) all aspects.
The problem isn't that they're trying to make money. The problem is the management. They would have lost the users anyway, because their official app is terrible. This blackout is about signalling that something is very wrong.
I’m happy to pay for Reddit if they can figure out how to truly add value to paying users. Some random virtual tokens don’t count. I was a paying user for many years, but ended up cancelling as the difference was so thin and my usage went down significantly as Reddit deteriorated.
I know I uninstalled Apollo this morning. The blackout is just the mild push needed to kick the habit. I'm not interested in racking up API charges for the Apollo dev. I'm not logged in anywhere else and I won't be.
If I have time this weekend, I want to build a tool that allows users to edit all their historic posts to display a message saying they've temporarily removed all posts from reddit until they institute reasonable API terms.
Ideally it'll save all the content from all the posts into a sqlite database or something, and then can be run again to restore all the content.
I don't like the idea of removing so much valuable content from the internet, but I also think Reddit is acting irresponsibly as a steward, and needs to be reminded that the content creators (aka users) are the reason their platform has the value it does in the first place.
Well I'm another who's left Reddit today, though I used RiF (aka Reddit is Fun) not Apollo. I also used to use RedReader, which afaik is not being asked to pay fees as it's a lower-volume client and Reddit wants to leave some access for visually impaired people, but despite twelve+ years of enjoying/wasting time on Reddit enough's enough and I'm gone
You posted 10 copies of your link in the last several hours. That's excessive, and users are complaining to us that you're spamming. I realize there have been a zillion reddit threads, but please stop.
Hey dang, I appreciate the feedback about this. Is it appropriate for me to post this in some of the relevant threads today? I don't want to spam, but it does seem relevant.
I suppose so, as long as you only do it in particularly relevant places, don't do it in every related thread, and it's a minority of what you're posting.
HN readers are vigilant about this kind of thing and tend to be way less permissive than we are, btw, so I would err on the side of unspamminess.
While I'm happy to hear you are leaving Reddit, please consider reinstalling Apollo until Christian is able to shut down the app. He is planning to ask folks to forgo the refund much like Twitterific and Tweetbot did[1]. He will give refunds to anyone who takes no action I believe, but if you'd like to support him you'll need to opt-in once he asks, after which you can delete the app.
I’ve been a pretty much daily Reddit user for 12 years and I stopped using it maybe last Tuesday. I’ll keep the Apollo app until I learn how to opt out of a refund. It’s been surprisingly easy to quit. I’ve just been looking at this site and reading more.
Isn't this more likely related to the CloudFlare outage, or some other technical issue? I'm not sure how subreddits going dark would bring down Reddit.
The article mentions this possibility as an aside, but still ran with a headline that seems like a post hoc fallacy.
Nope. Reddit admitted that it was due to the protest.
> “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,”
I'm amazed that they can call it "expected" and "anticipated" after it took their site down, the very definition of something unanticipated and unintended happening.
Your impression is correct. Reddit does not use Cloudflare and an employee explicitly said so in a post this morning about the cloudflare issues because people were blaming the reddit outage on it.
Honestly Google should just acquire Reddit, re-instate 3rd party client apps' API access, boot off all the model training API users, and farm Reddit's content for its own model training. Companies like Google and Microsoft can uniquely profit from this.
Microsoft can even spin it as adjacent to Xbox/Minecraft.
I'd wager the single reason why this hasn't already happened is all the porn.
Honestly I see this as an opportunity. I'm just waiting to request a few since I have no issue with the API changes.
Not that u/spez isn't handling things poorly, but those who rely on third party apps have no right to shut down the site for those of us that don't and don't care.
I mean, they have as much a right as you do to not care and not do anything, right? Its clearly not just people who use third party apps but also the opinions of people who believe in more than just apathy.
"They don't have the right to organize and decide on collective action" just reads like, "I'm entitled to not be inconvenienced by things I don't care about"
Sure they have a right, but their decisions based on that right are inconveniencing a ton of people.
It seems a better solution would be for them to just leave, and hand over the subs to people who have no issue with the API changes and are happy to continue to moderate.
I mean, if their protest works I'm all for it, but I suspect it won't, and the communities that want to keep on communing don't deserve to die because mods made a unilateral choice for everybody.
I mean, you're more than welcome to create a subreddit and start rebuilding with the members of the community who think as you do. I'd also like to point out that inconvenience is a desired feature of protest, not a bug.
Why is it other peoples responsibility to not inconvenience you?
I'm also more than welcome to just attempt to take over the existing subs, which is much more convenient for everyone involved.
Inconvenience is a desired feature of the protest, but not of Reddit - at least not to this extent.
> Why is it other peoples responsibility to not inconvenience you?
I never claimed it was. But if people are leaving to Lemmy, then they should leave the subs to people that are fine staying on Reddit. Ultimately, they don't own the subs, Reddit does, and if Reddit is willing to reassign them, I don't see a problem with that.
Everyone involved still relevant. The people doing the protest say they will not use reddit after third party apps no longer work, so really they shouldn't care about what happens after they leave.
Give me a break. If the boycotts caused 99% of subs to close the remaining 1% would still easily have enough content to keep the front page fresh, and the algorithm could adapt smoothly. The assertion that Reddit is actually already dead at this point is wildly premature.
While I can't verify redmerchant2's claim, I could absolutely imagine that the Reddit front page algorithm can't handle a large portion of the site going dark at once. Reddit can't code for every possible situation, and it's not surprising to see weird behavior during a weird situation.
The front page material does look startlingly less 'interesting' than it does normally.
I think reddit will be die the same way 'The Simpsons' died -- we all know seasons 8-13 are the by far the most critically acclaimed and the 'soul' of the series. You could point to the next 20/30 seasons as proof of 'success' and maybe you've a point and I think the same will happen to reddit. It will probably grow for years after June 30th but it will be 'Zombie Reddit' just like 'Zombie Simpsons'.
>The front page material does look startlingly less 'interesting' than it does normally.
Yeah, it's all a bunch of repetitive protest posts.
The self-aggrandizement of activists saying "we represent the actual value-generating members of this site and we are angry" borders on delusion. Sadly, powerusers/mods that are still participating are also being subjected to various forms of harassment, which could fuel a false perception of consensus.
> The self-aggrandizement of activists saying "we represent the actual value-generating members of this site and we are angry" borders on delusion.
If that's the case, then where's all the content from users who aren't angry? Why is the front page filled with protest posts? If it's just self-aggrandizing delusion from a small subset of activists like you seem to be claiming, then surely there must be plenty of other users to generate content.
The delusion is not in thinking that there's some impact, but in thinking that you as an activist can speak for the collective voice of value-generating users of the site. There are plenty of other users generating content. Eventually when the topic gets stale the protest posts will fall off the front page. Barring more dramatic PR missteps from Reddit, in a week there will be no noticeable difference in the site experience to the average user.
The idea that only a special class of users can be motivated to take whatever Twitter screenshots or political ragebait articles and crosspost them to Reddit is laughable.
> The idea that only a special class of users can be motivated to take whatever Twitter screenshots or political ragebait articles and crosspost them to Reddit is laughable.
The vast majority of Reddit users (myself included, if I'm being fair) are just there to lurk. If you actually pay attention to who's posting the majority of those screenshots, it will generally be the same set of dedicated users. You might be deluded into thinking this isn't the case, but I assure you, beyond a small 1% of users, there is very little valuable content being generated.
Beyond that, there is an even smaller and even more special class of users who are understandably pissed off: Moderators, who absolutely do real work that generates value. These people are the most pissed off. Call them activists if you like, but this response honestly sounds like whining to me. If you don't want these people using their power to control the front page, why don't you go start your own subreddit? Then you can enjoy the pleasure of doing hours of unpaid work just so other people can go look at your stupid screenshots (or whatever valueless content you apparently think Reddit is good for.)
>If you actually pay attention to who's posting the majority of those screenshots, it will generally be the same set of dedicated users.
I guarantee you that someone, somewhere on Reddit will always post the latest ragebait piece on Elon Musk and have it upvoted for the front page. Indeed, as I type this the top post on Reddit is a tweet screenshot calling Trump a psychopath - truly a work of such creative genius that only a Reddit poweruser could hope to accomplish it. But perhaps the marginal platform value of being the first mover and having a botnet to ensure that you, the sophisticated poweruser, receive the glory you deserve in this winner-take-all process is in fact quite minimal.
>If you don't want these people using their power to control the front page, why don't you go start your own subreddit?
Or maybe the moderators can build their own platform rather than "whining". I think the platform would be much better off is moderators were on a much tighter leash, rather than the admins letting moderators basically be minimally-constrained petty tyrants ruling their fiefs, with rare exceptions.
It's clear to me that you're either not a long-term user of the site, or one of those users who consumes only low-value content, which has never been the true value of reddit and in my opinion has continued to destroy the value of the website. Reddit's value is not vested in image macros or other low-effort memes; its value derives from its communities, and their power to enable in-depth discussion in almost every conceivable variety, in a way that no other social media platform has achieved. These are the reason people append "reddit" to the end of almost any Google search to get a (relatively) unbiased opinion.
All I can say is: if you think the value of reddit -- what draws and has continued to draw users to the site for years -- is low-effort screenshots and memes that could be posted on almost any image-hosting site -- you are wrong. Go ask 9GAG and FunnyJunk how that plays out in creating a social media platform.
> I think the platform would be much better off is moderators were on a much tighter leash
I think they'd have to -- you know -- actually pay them, if they wanted to exert some level of control. At this point, the only draw to being a reddit mod is caring about influencing a community in a particular manner; I don't see any particular interest in doing unpaid work for people who are clearly ungrateful and ignorant to how much work it really entails. But I shouldn't be surprised that the entitlement here is real.
>It's clear to me that you're either not a long-term user of the site, or one of those users who consumes only low-value content, which has never been the true value of reddit and in my opinion has continued to destroy the value of the website. Reddit's value is not vested in image macros or other low-effort memes; its value derives from its communities, and their power to enable in-depth discussion in almost every conceivable variety, in a way that no other social media platform has achieved.
Well, this discussion was talking about the front page of Reddit, which is largely dominated by image macros and other low-effort memes, and basically looks the same today as any other day just with more posts about the protest or just attack spez.
There are communities that are still open, eg. /r/AskReddit. Have they devolved into 4chan with these fabled powerusers deciding to Go Galt? As far as I can tell, not yet. But perhaps I'm not among the Chosen who are qualified to make this discernment.
>I think they'd have to -- you know -- actually pay them, if they wanted to exert some level of control.
I doubt it. I don't think mods being able to pin their own political screeds to posts or to ensure that only they can generate content or any other number of deleterious behaviors is an essential non-pecuniary benefit that keeps the equilibrium wage at zero (claims of "entitlement" could be lobbed just as lazily at the mods as they could at me and/or Reddit.) But hey, maybe I'm wrong - at the least, Reddit should explore in that direction and see what happens.
The problem from Reddit's perspective is that moderators hold a huge amount of power, and Reddit has very little leverage over these users.
Reddit is heavily reliant on moderators for basic functionality of the site. Reddit just doesn't have the staff to take over moderating even the top 100 subreddits. This is far more power then any subset of users for any other social media site, and the mods are using this power to try and enact change.
It's unclear how this will proceed. In the long term, I suspect Reddit will try and reduce moderator power so that this sort of protest can't really happen again. But right now, it's a matter of which party blinks first.
If they weren't adversarial to the moderators they would seem them as their golden goose. They've done what other social media platforms haven't and solved scaling moderation without having to pay the moderators.
First, Reddit's monetization is broken by design. It never made any sense to me why they would charge for reddit gold for an ad-free experience on their website and own mobile app but not on the API. Why would they let third party apps serve their own ads and let them charge to remove them? This would be simple to fix, both technically and in the API's ToS, just serve the same ads regardless of the client. People would be upset, but ultimately I feel it would be entirely fair. But no, it doesn't seem to be a solution considered.
Second, the LLM dataset issue is also attributed to the price hike. Again, I think it's fair if unpopular to charge premium for bulk data. Again, there are technical and ToS solutions for this. They could introduce exponential tiers for bulk data, restrictions on allowed usage, other things that make user-facing usage reasonable but bulk processing expensive, but then again, starting measuring api usage per client id and not per user goes against this point, just making the API extremely expensive for everyone anywhere to the point of being unusable.
Third, all points seem to lead to the fact that what they really want is to kill third party apps and hope a large part of those users move to their app, for what? More tracking, tighter grip, better engagement metrics? Not sure. Even the changes to the extremely hostile mobile site now forcing some users to download the app. Really, I'd figure they'd understand their userbase better than that and how a small fraction on content producers and a even smaller fraction of power users and moderators carry the site, and pissing them off is a really bad idea. But what do I know.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadIt seems no company is happy with being the virally adored single product little niche 50 employee powerhouse.
It's so much sexier to bloat the org and then try to justify the economics afterward.
Why can't it be more sexy to run a sustainable small business? - I think they could run reddit profitable with less staff, which focuses on the core functionality instead of trying to grow into new markets and segments.
Sure, there is a risk that some new platform disrupts that segment they are serving, but even then there is enough of a longtail to prepare an alternative and hardly those bets on expanding reach works.
Let's look at Twitter as a sample case: the features which were successful, were the ones where they followed what users were doing and supported that (adding @-mentions, adding retweets, adding quote retweets, some degree of threading support, etc. all came after users used those things) most things where they added stuff their PMs invented is mostly forgotten already, but building all that cost resources.
(And then, of course, they spread their investments out so that the one big success that gives them 1000x their money back pays for all the companies that flamed out chasing inadvisable growth.)
Investor returns, obviously. The whole funding model is throw money, make it big, monetize, sell out.
I do think it would maybe be possible to make company like Reddit "just" be profitable and keep on chugging but that's not what the investors throwing millions at it want.
The funding model is antithesis to "just a sustainable company in their niche"
I'm all for the founders having a good life and having fun, but they shouldn't have to try hyperscaling.
Problems like that are entirely the creation of venture capital and stock market. The wider society have very little effect on that. And partially allows them to outcompete "healthily growing one" by allowing companies to run on negative income for years, even decades.
Investor mentality is what spawns that. The ability for people not caring about the company or the niche it is in to force the direction or buy out the competition.
And I don't think that can easily go away any time soon, and it is very double-edged sword as obviously some good had come from "someone with good idea getting money from investors to realize it"
What's sexy or not is determined more by the one doing the looking than the one being looked at. I find sustainable, non-exploitive small businesses much sexier, but I doubt most VCs do.
But I guess it's the same reason people participate in a lottery - the small chance of winning big is a bigger thrill than a boring investment.
Others start businesses because they believe in the product or service and the value it can bring to people. Making money is important because it allows that to happen, but isn't the primary goal.
Personally, I'm not going to say one sort is better than the other in some absolute sense, but my personality falls more into the latter camp. I have no interest in making money just to make money. I am interested in doing cool things, and need money to do them.
The third party clients hurt ad revenue, kill them. Once the stock is out the door the problems that result aren't going to hurt them, just the suckers who fell for it.
I was on digg. I was on reddit. I was on Twitter. I was on Facebook. Every platform has its day, and I like investing in things for the long term. It's a much harder battle, but even my code is now used by MS/GitHub to train ML. It's so hostile and folks are so used to it that I feel like I have to tip-toe around saying "No, this isn't okay for me."
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys (credit to mostlysimilar! thank you! I despise Medium but hadn't found this link)
Um, no. It's Reddit being led by a corrupt CEO seeking short-term profits through an IPo(. That's not capitalism.
I'm also very curious as to what you would suggest as an alternative to "capitalism".
Imagine you had such a company, someone offered you $700 million for 10% of the company valuing it at $7 billion.
You don't understand why they'd value it that highly. But if you're willing to pretend you do for a few years, you can siphon off enough of that money that even your great-great-great-grandkids won't have to work a day in their lives.
Would you turn down that deal? Because I doubt I could resist it.
So yes DEFINITELY possible to do a 37signals, but you need starting capital. Or at least an ability to live for free for 24 months while you figure out how to make cash from your business.
If you don't want your billions of dollars I'll happily take them of your hands.
How do they know what they want?
There's a LCD across humans, the bare minimum - a place to live, food, and clothes.
I'd rather give them the option if possible.
It's easy to answer a question when there's no exclusive options.
By the way, when you have an option of cashing out at 700million (and killing your business) OR continuing to build a business that genuinely provides something good for the society (albeit maybe not as profitably), do think first what kind of lesson you are giving your kids when you make that choice. You may provide them with the money but not much meaning to spend that money in a good way.
I don't know where/when it started. It seems like one of those ideas that mostly the bottom 99% of the income spectrum hold onto.
Why the super-rich aren’t leaving much of their fortunes to their kids https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/why-the-very-...
8 billionaires whose kids won’t inherit their fortunes, from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, to late Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell Jobs https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/31485...
Gates has stated publicly he plans to leave each child $10 million.
Buffet has stated publicly that his kids will only get $2 billion each.
Articles like the ones you've posted are just fuel for a false narrative.
There are lots of people in this world who have grown up wealthy and aren't anything close to the spoiled brat you are describing.
The kids go to prestigious private schools, where they get a better education than you, then get propelled into jobs that simply aren't available to most, like politics, or non-profit boards, and the like. Some will end up taking jobs basically recreationally, like my billionaire highschool teacher. They might be somewhat entitled, in the sense that they don't feel that their life of largely leisure is undeserved, but in our current economic system they're regularly told they're not wrong.
These are the terrifying rich, and the ones that are actively running the world. They're effectively checked out from the money economy, and spend their time primarily in the power economy. The illusion that "oh, rich kids grow up to be spoiled, ineffectual brats" only works to their benefit.
It's noticeably distinct from the feeling of "you can never truly fail" which is more common with the upper middle class and seems be significantly better for your long-term mental health.
I don't think this means you need to actually not leave your children gobs of money, but in my experience it certainly helps to act like you're not for the duration of your kids' childhood.
There's this really insidious meme that just because their parent(s) made astronomically absurd amounts of money, children should be able to spend their entire lives doing nothing productive, treating regular people like shit, and wrecking the environment all in the name of enjoying themselves.
I genuinely believe that every human being should be given the means to survive without having to work for it—even a bit more, because psychological needs are a thing, too. The vast majority of people have an innate drive to do something, to contribute to our world, to make other people's lives better, to create something real.
Being given enough money that you can just pop from NYC to Paris on a whim on the family private jet—or even just buy a new jet to do so, because the other jet is in use—is entirely different.
Being disconnected from work, and from people without enough money to treat other humans like animals, is genuinely an unhealthy thing.
You could make a better life for your kids, and a lot more people, without building "generational wealth". The alternative in this case is not "run reddit in destitution". I'd argue those who pursue your "winner take everything" approach are the ones lacking perspective.
- I can make $20M today and sell my company off, and I'm set for pretty much anything I'd want for life, and I don't have to work if I don't want to.
OR
- I can make $1 mil a year and run this company indefinitely theoretically, and have to keep working.
That's a more realistic expectation.
Furthermore, trying to start a company with no real wealth to start with is a massive challenge, which means you're not starting a company alone, you're going to some sort of investor. And investors don't like "lifestyle" companies, they like make big money fast, and sell.
So everything pressures you to go in one direction.
Edit: If you sell off, the investor is in control. And investors want to be facebook.
With the 2 being a buffer, and 2% annualized being an inflation adjusted return.
So, for instance, 5k/month spend gives you 6 million.
So that gives some slack. If 10 million and 100 million is the same infinity you've got some negotiating leverage to prevent yourself from selling your soul
I'm ok if using a 3rd party app means paying a modest fee to use Reddit and not see ads. I have no idea what a reasonable rate is, but Reddit Premium is not it. I don't get that kind of value out of it.
The really good move here would’ve been profit sharing on ads between Reddit and third party apps. But heck these devs were fine displaying ads for Reddit for nothing in return.
Reddit didn’t care.
Normally ads have strict requirements for the placement (show one ad every x amount of posts), which would be hard to enforce across all 3rd party clients. Not to mention that they might be targeted towards the user, measure exposure time, and record interactions. I think the only way to do this is having some sort of SDK, but they probably determined that the cost would be too high.
Second, Reddit had/has an opportunity to hear to actually dictate the ad placement rules themselves. They don’t need to promise a certain number of placement, but rather a certain number of clicks.
Finally, they could have made the ad API something that’s locked behind a human review until the app got popular enough. I agree that it’s simply not worth it to fully automate this. Realistically there’s less than 15 clients that would need to implement this.
I’d be making enough money to live and not worry. I’d have enough saved for my kids to get a pretty nice jump start too.
My great great great grandkids? I don’t care. Heck I can’t predict next week. Having that much money could end up having them get killed in a future revolution.
With growth enshittification will eventually come and people flee. Then a new cycle begins…
That said, TECH stock investors mostly are growth investors, because the dividends are typically fairly paltry.
The investors want an exit, so they have to IPO. To IPO at a reasonable valuation, they need to demonstrate significant revenue potential. And to get significant revenue, they need to monetize the hell out of the userbase.
You can do that through:
1. Ads--monetize your user's attention.
2. Subscriptions--monetize your user's attachment to your service.
3. Surveillance capitalism--monetize your user's data.
Very few services have shown the ability to hit that 10x target with #2, and thus Reddit chose paths #1 and #3.
The lesson: Once again, for those in the back row 1) if you're not paying for the product, you are the product, and 2) don't build communities on closed platforms unless you're comfortable with the potential of a rug-pull.
But I would question the goal of building a business this size. Why do you want to?
Or don't.
Who decided every company must be a global blitzscaled decacorn monopoly?
The problem with this saying is that it implies that you can avoid being the product by paying for the product. But that is increasingly not true, and is a bad bet.
There's Valve or JetBrains, which are not even niche or small but very successful that have stayed private, focused and avoided money from the public markets. But yes the software industry desperately needs a Mittelstand economy. Probably won't happen without actually breaking apart some of the platforms though.
Historically breakups have increased total shareholder value so it would even be a good deal for investors. In Spain for example where Uber is regulated they're essentially just a software vendor rather than trying to capture the market. If they were just a 100 person company licensing software worldwide that sounds like a more attractive business than what they are now.
It's kind of hilarious how few people even manage to benefit from the system as it is, which is mostly just VCs, managers at bloated firms and people who get rid of their stock at the right time.
[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2023/06/12/reddit-is-blocking-logins-...
[2] it happened to me
According to the CEO, Reddit is losing money. It won't survive long-term if that doesn't change. If people care about reddit and its community, it seems like that's what they should be thinking about.
If an alternate client uses the API, but doesn't return any advertising (or other) revenue, that is a good reason for reddit (as a company) to change that relationship.
To be clear, I'm not making a comment about how they are going about it. But destroying reddit's business is no help to anyone.
Lots of people on reddit (and on here) brag about using ad-blockers. They also complain about paying for services. I mean: something's go to give. VC's won't continue to fund these free services forever.
I'd rather live in a world where you view advertisements or pay a fee to use services. But I seem to be outside the norm on these things.
Make it an API policy violation to hide ads, which is reasonable.
This isn't insurmountable, but it does present some challenges.
Reddit wants to be an AdTech data source and delivery platform. Simply tracking usage on the web (where tracking can be limited or blocked) or the API is not sufficient to do Facebook/Twitter levels of user tracking.
and spent significant funding on buying Alien Blue and then ruining it.
and spent significant resources on a new UI design that is near universally reviled.
Its not good enough to say you are not profitable, when you are a significant cause
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubsmash
Not that I don’t agree with your post, or how bad the redesign is, but is that really universal? With statistics I’ve heard about only 5-10% of people using old? And with the current protest, I’ve even seen comments supportive of the blackout by people using new and the official app.
Probably a significant percentage of the people who were using old. Everyone else started with new.
I actually had reddit gold primarily because of the old UI.
Reddit could have just made third party client use a feature of Reddit premium and avoid all of the current issues. Yes, some would still complain that Reddit costs anything to use but big clients have paying customers and are less price sensitive.
Time: only a few weeks notice. They have to notify users of a change, make a plan, program it, apple approval for updates, and Apollo is just one guy with a part time designer.
Terrible communications. Say pricing would be fair and not like twitter. Say no api changes this year. Pretend to be fair. Deception .
They could have given Apollo and the many other apps that are shutting down a little more notice and time to adjust.
I think Reddit has its back against a wall and a VC gave an ultimatum/margin call that Reddit needs to make more money with a business plan in 30 days or no more funding re-up.
Apollo dev can start charging his customers $5/m and cover API costs, but the problem is that his value proposition is too small for such price.
You say we should ask whether pricing is aligned with the rest of the industry. Well, the new reddit pricing is not far off twitter. The latter are infamous for freezing out third party clients.
Can you share how you came to this statement?
> Well, the new reddit pricing is not far off twitter.
I asked not about just twitter, but about any similar site you know. For example, imgur which is often referred in this situation actually charges $3k/50m requests, not far from reddit prices: https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing
If you don't know such example, then reddit pricing is fair and reasonable, and that's apps problem that they can't monetize traffic.
Holy shit. Reddit's only content is provided by the users. The users of their APIs generate/moderate a non-trivial amount of content that gives anyone a reason to visit Reddit. Suggesting the API users aren't "giving back" is just ludicrous.
and they don't, apollo free app doesn't allow you to post, you need to pay $5 to unlock post feature.
Also, obviously, I talked about revenue numbers, not content which already generated far than enough using default reddit app/web.
> I'm deeply disappointed in this price. Reddit iterated that the price would be A) reasonable and based in reality, and B) they would not operate like Twitter. Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.
was much cheaper just 2 years ago and he's been using it for at least 8 years... i imagine he was grandfathered in to an even earlier one/negotiated a deal.
that's what sane api companies do... grandfather and don't pull the rug out in 30 days
aside from that i don't think the $0.001/request thing is for anyone operating at a scale much larger than 150m per month. just the initial $4000 makes it $1333/50m requests... to go from that to 50k/50m is asinine as it would be 37x more expensive; you are doing a custom deal at that point.
His initial api access at the highest tier may well have been $500/150m requests based on how much the api has shot up in price for new users in just two years.
- imgur officially charges way more than reddit for API on the scale
- your point is based solely on speculations and words of apollo dev, which I absolutely don't trust
no, we have a reasonable extrapolation based on a worldview based in how the world operates. "if you need more than this call for pricing" is a trope and i've never seen a thing go up in price per unit when you guarantee a certain amount of revenue per year. flex capacity and pricing is more expensive than guaranteed traffic.
> and words of apollo dev which I absolutely don't trust
he's been nothing but forthcoming and transparent from what i've seen whereas spuz has a history of doing shady shit.
it is all over the board: you give free doze at the beginning, and squeeze business when they rooted into your product
> he's been nothing but forthcoming and transparent from what i've seen whereas spuz has a history of doing shady shit.
in my view guy is total scam:
- recorded business call without other party consent
- on that call openly proposed to get $10m to go to sunset
- when got rejected started wave in the internet with heavy manipulated numbers:
It's worth bearing in mind that reddit's business is built on user-provided content and moderation. It doesn't have some sort of right to have the users provide these things if they're unhappy with the direction of the service.
I haven't seen any notable number of people giving a counter offer to the proposal of Reddit. People "agree that it should not be free", but are unable to give any number of what they think it should cost. All we know is that the proposal, which averages at around $2.50 / user / month is "outrageous", bearing in mind that this allows to browse Reddit fully ad-free, denying them of that revenue stream.
I really don't know how people expect Reddit to make money; they apparently don't think the service is worth $2.50 / month, but they seem to forget that Facebook sells their data for 20x that amount.
For reference here, the Apollo dev posted numbers indicating that they'd expect a $20 million / year API access bill, and separately mentioned that if everyone with a current annual subscription gets their balance refunded now they're shutting down it'll cost them ~$250,000. (It's hard to guess how much of their traffic comes from free users, of course, so they'd presumably need to raise prices less than the 40x this implies...)
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
I think some important takeaways are: the proposed pricing monetizes the users much higher than Reddit can general monetize them today. And the 30 day window apparently precludes any kind of orderly transition for the app developers who have been monetizing their apps on a yearly schedule.
That's the whole point ! All users of Apollo bring in precisely $0 / month. And reddit will never ever be able to monetise them at all unless they start charging for the API. That's the core of the issue; with no many free riders, the average revenue / user is doomed to stay close to 0.
The question is not "how much revenue / user does reddit make on average" since all Apollo users are dragging the average close to 0 no matter what Reddit does. The question is "how much revenue / user does reddit make on average excluding bots and non ad-watching user". The number then skyrockets and $2.50 / month seems like the answer.
It's very obvious their aim isn't necessarily charging, they're more interested in getting rid of 3rd party clients so that people would be forced to use their horrendous app. As a company, they have a right to go towards that route, but they should just say that.
Or, you know, just reasonable price for API access. Even $2/mo gonna compensate them for lost ads multiple times over
For moderators while on principle I agree, "mod X comments and you get reddit for free" might give weird incentives...
The issue here is that almost everyone who expresses an opinion hates Reddit's user interface. Many install 3rd party apps that leverage the API to provide a better one. Reddit's owners are trying to kill this off rather than acknowledge that their product offering is bad.
Essentially, platform owners are landlords who do provide ssome value (infrastructure) but nowhere near enough to justify the visions of profit that enticed them into the business, and they don't have any imagination besides 'put ads on it'. They would be better off charging a small subscription fee, but you can't grow a giant community with a paywall so they used capital and free access to gain max market share. Nobody wants to start paying a subscription for what was previously free, everyone hates advertising because it's dishonest and manipulative, so the owners have painted themselves into a corner.
This is a general problem with the platform model; people are only attracted to it because of other people who already go there, and the only way to make money out of people is to either sell stuff to them (which they don't really want) or sell information about them to other people who want to sell stuff to them (arguably worse). Conde Nast should just declare defeat and offer to sell the platform to its users.
Sure, maybe it makes sense from a business perspective to make their API paid-access only.
Maybe it even makes sense to make the prices so outrageously high it results in the subreddit mods striking. Perhaps this gives them the ability to remove the moderation teams and sell the spots to the highest corporate bidders.
That doesn't mean that we as users have to like it, or them, after these changes.
I'm just hoping something better comes along out of all this.
The CEO absolutely has an incentive to make it seem like this is the case, so they can use it to justify more user-hostile changes in the name of profits
And I'm not the only one- WhatsApp asking for money was scrapped within weeks after they noticed rising Telegram installations.
As a person who grew up on the internet, went from AIM to usenet/forums and stopped this entirely in my late teens/early 20s, when do you give this up?
Despite being a millennial, at the very core ages mind you, I missed social media entirely because of how predictable this all was (the only thing they could monetize was your data, if you grew up in the early internet/chaning why would anyone willingly give this up?) so my question is: why bother?
Platform hopping is a thing for people with more time on their hands than anything else, migrating platforms seems to me like something that is something that would fall out of favour after your late 20s, when you're more likely to bother pretending to be something you're not on the internet which just leaves having endless rants with bots for engagement in your 30+ for fake internet points, which is incredibly sad... so what's the point?
Personally speaking, I just keep a close circle of friends who I speak with via Signal or Telegram if we cannot meet in person (most live on other continents) or can't do PgP encrypted email.
I have held highly social positions most of my career in and outside of tech, and I just cannot grasp why anyone would want to do use their free time on these platforms to interact with people; let alone be willingly be used as a pawn for big data based organizations, including nation states and their respective intelligence agencies.
They are destroying Reddit's business because of how they are trying to solve their problem with API pricing.
Their solution sucks.
So throw a $2 price tag on API-enabled account (enough API limits to comfortably run media account). That's probably already 10x more profit that average user provides in ads. Boom, now your API earns money for you without alienating users, and it feels fair.
And maybe not dump massive amount of effort on shittifying your UI in meantime...
Reddit didn't need to be a video and image host as you allude to. They didn't need to bloat their stack with 'hot' technology. They didn't need to even make an app, the third parties were basically doing that for free.
They want to be an ad and data platform because they know that this will in the long run net them more money. To get there though they will have to alienate their entire user base.
I gotta wonder if I'm not alone, whether the solution might be in presentation and organization.
1. No trust spez. so anything he says can just be toss out. He has Zero creditably at this point
2. Almost universally everyone was fine with the plan to charge for API access, the problem came in when they wanted to charge fees well outside what anyone would believe is fair or even "with in market reality" then proceeded to lie and denigrate about developers
3. Reddit is the source of the unprofitably, it is largely their cost structure that is the problem, not revenue. They want to fix it with revenue side only modifications and not cost structure. They ballooned their costs under the former CEO's brain dead plan to move everyone to CA or NY. Even though I believe they are reversed their in office requirement, they still have most of the costs that came with that move. That is just one of many examples.
They are well within their rights as a company to attempt to monetize further. The problem is that they seem willfully ignorant of where their value actually comes from.
These people will claim that their contributions are so valuable that they drive the engagement of other plebs who do generate revenue for the site.
No, really. They do. It's the tech nerd equivalent of the "we'll pay you in clout" Instagram grifter.
You are correct. There are two ways to solve this. One is reducing expenses. How many paid employess would a site like reddit need? I would be surprised if that number was more than 50-100, and not surprsed if that number in reality is much higher.
Second is increasing revenue. Increasing the price for the API is probbly a wrong move as API increases distribution which is what you want. You do not want AI companies scraping and reusing content for model training for free, so you make separate terms for that.
Instead, you try with paid Reddit plans. Would be nice for users to own their piece of reddit and pay for their favorite scoial platform with some perks included (freemium). Also it does make sense for subreddits to pay a fee proportional to their membership after some threshold of say 1,000 users. After all, owning a huge subreddit give a lot of power in many ways. If I had a subreddit with 1,000,000 users I think I would pay $100-$1000/month to have that kind of distribution power.
(I do find it hard to pick how many employees a company "should" have, particularly since you need to account for things like HR / legal / advertising sales / etc...)
I just made a Chrome extension that lets you delete all your posts and comments: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...
Would love to get any feedback — I'm still working on it.
No way I'd personally pay for increased deletions though, that seems a bit silly. Good luck though
For anyone else looking to export before deleting - https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
Ideally it'll save all the content from all the posts into a sqlite database or something, and then can be run again to restore all the content.
I don't like the idea of removing so much valuable content from the internet, but I also think Reddit is acting irresponsibly as a steward, and needs to be reminded that the content creators (aka users) are the reason their platform has the value it does in the first place.
eta: that doesn't have the restore function iirc
Well I'm another who's left Reddit today, though I used RiF (aka Reddit is Fun) not Apollo. I also used to use RedReader, which afaik is not being asked to pay fees as it's a lower-volume client and Reddit wants to leave some access for visually impaired people, but despite twelve+ years of enjoying/wasting time on Reddit enough's enough and I'm gone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296299
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36295536
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36295399
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36295347
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36295092
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36295065
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36295056
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36294985
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36294908
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36294898
HN readers are vigilant about this kind of thing and tend to be way less permissive than we are, btw, so I would err on the side of unspamminess.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2023/03/tweetbot_and_twitterrific...
The article mentions this possibility as an aside, but still ran with a headline that seems like a post hoc fallacy.
> “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/12/23758002/reddit-crashing-...
I'm amazed that they can call it "expected" and "anticipated" after it took their site down, the very definition of something unanticipated and unintended happening.
Microsoft can even spin it as adjacent to Xbox/Minecraft.
I'd wager the single reason why this hasn't already happened is all the porn.
Not that u/spez isn't handling things poorly, but those who rely on third party apps have no right to shut down the site for those of us that don't and don't care.
"They don't have the right to organize and decide on collective action" just reads like, "I'm entitled to not be inconvenienced by things I don't care about"
/shrug, just my two cents.
It seems a better solution would be for them to just leave, and hand over the subs to people who have no issue with the API changes and are happy to continue to moderate.
I mean, if their protest works I'm all for it, but I suspect it won't, and the communities that want to keep on communing don't deserve to die because mods made a unilateral choice for everybody.
Why is it other peoples responsibility to not inconvenience you?
Inconvenience is a desired feature of the protest, but not of Reddit - at least not to this extent.
> Why is it other peoples responsibility to not inconvenience you?
I never claimed it was. But if people are leaving to Lemmy, then they should leave the subs to people that are fine staying on Reddit. Ultimately, they don't own the subs, Reddit does, and if Reddit is willing to reassign them, I don't see a problem with that.
Well, not everyone involved right? If I understand correctly, just the people who don't care about the people affected by the API cost increase.
Front page is filled with posts from 16 hours ago.
I know a vocal dissident claimed it didn’t matter but looks like the power law is kicking in.
When the 1% of creators mostly stop posting, the 90% of lurkers will have nothing to consume.
It’s still up in the air how much it’ll matter but I’m cautiously optimistic.
I think reddit will be die the same way 'The Simpsons' died -- we all know seasons 8-13 are the by far the most critically acclaimed and the 'soul' of the series. You could point to the next 20/30 seasons as proof of 'success' and maybe you've a point and I think the same will happen to reddit. It will probably grow for years after June 30th but it will be 'Zombie Reddit' just like 'Zombie Simpsons'.
Excellent watch on the Fall of the Simpsons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFNbCcyFkk
Yeah, it's all a bunch of repetitive protest posts.
The self-aggrandizement of activists saying "we represent the actual value-generating members of this site and we are angry" borders on delusion. Sadly, powerusers/mods that are still participating are also being subjected to various forms of harassment, which could fuel a false perception of consensus.
If that's the case, then where's all the content from users who aren't angry? Why is the front page filled with protest posts? If it's just self-aggrandizing delusion from a small subset of activists like you seem to be claiming, then surely there must be plenty of other users to generate content.
The idea that only a special class of users can be motivated to take whatever Twitter screenshots or political ragebait articles and crosspost them to Reddit is laughable.
The vast majority of Reddit users (myself included, if I'm being fair) are just there to lurk. If you actually pay attention to who's posting the majority of those screenshots, it will generally be the same set of dedicated users. You might be deluded into thinking this isn't the case, but I assure you, beyond a small 1% of users, there is very little valuable content being generated.
Beyond that, there is an even smaller and even more special class of users who are understandably pissed off: Moderators, who absolutely do real work that generates value. These people are the most pissed off. Call them activists if you like, but this response honestly sounds like whining to me. If you don't want these people using their power to control the front page, why don't you go start your own subreddit? Then you can enjoy the pleasure of doing hours of unpaid work just so other people can go look at your stupid screenshots (or whatever valueless content you apparently think Reddit is good for.)
I guarantee you that someone, somewhere on Reddit will always post the latest ragebait piece on Elon Musk and have it upvoted for the front page. Indeed, as I type this the top post on Reddit is a tweet screenshot calling Trump a psychopath - truly a work of such creative genius that only a Reddit poweruser could hope to accomplish it. But perhaps the marginal platform value of being the first mover and having a botnet to ensure that you, the sophisticated poweruser, receive the glory you deserve in this winner-take-all process is in fact quite minimal.
>If you don't want these people using their power to control the front page, why don't you go start your own subreddit?
Or maybe the moderators can build their own platform rather than "whining". I think the platform would be much better off is moderators were on a much tighter leash, rather than the admins letting moderators basically be minimally-constrained petty tyrants ruling their fiefs, with rare exceptions.
All I can say is: if you think the value of reddit -- what draws and has continued to draw users to the site for years -- is low-effort screenshots and memes that could be posted on almost any image-hosting site -- you are wrong. Go ask 9GAG and FunnyJunk how that plays out in creating a social media platform.
> I think the platform would be much better off is moderators were on a much tighter leash
I think they'd have to -- you know -- actually pay them, if they wanted to exert some level of control. At this point, the only draw to being a reddit mod is caring about influencing a community in a particular manner; I don't see any particular interest in doing unpaid work for people who are clearly ungrateful and ignorant to how much work it really entails. But I shouldn't be surprised that the entitlement here is real.
Well, this discussion was talking about the front page of Reddit, which is largely dominated by image macros and other low-effort memes, and basically looks the same today as any other day just with more posts about the protest or just attack spez.
There are communities that are still open, eg. /r/AskReddit. Have they devolved into 4chan with these fabled powerusers deciding to Go Galt? As far as I can tell, not yet. But perhaps I'm not among the Chosen who are qualified to make this discernment.
>I think they'd have to -- you know -- actually pay them, if they wanted to exert some level of control.
I doubt it. I don't think mods being able to pin their own political screeds to posts or to ensure that only they can generate content or any other number of deleterious behaviors is an essential non-pecuniary benefit that keeps the equilibrium wage at zero (claims of "entitlement" could be lobbed just as lazily at the mods as they could at me and/or Reddit.) But hey, maybe I'm wrong - at the least, Reddit should explore in that direction and see what happens.
Reddit is heavily reliant on moderators for basic functionality of the site. Reddit just doesn't have the staff to take over moderating even the top 100 subreddits. This is far more power then any subset of users for any other social media site, and the mods are using this power to try and enact change.
It's unclear how this will proceed. In the long term, I suspect Reddit will try and reduce moderator power so that this sort of protest can't really happen again. But right now, it's a matter of which party blinks first.
EDIT: It's been redirecting to reddit.com since at least 2021
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/124whzg/changelog_n...
First, Reddit's monetization is broken by design. It never made any sense to me why they would charge for reddit gold for an ad-free experience on their website and own mobile app but not on the API. Why would they let third party apps serve their own ads and let them charge to remove them? This would be simple to fix, both technically and in the API's ToS, just serve the same ads regardless of the client. People would be upset, but ultimately I feel it would be entirely fair. But no, it doesn't seem to be a solution considered.
Second, the LLM dataset issue is also attributed to the price hike. Again, I think it's fair if unpopular to charge premium for bulk data. Again, there are technical and ToS solutions for this. They could introduce exponential tiers for bulk data, restrictions on allowed usage, other things that make user-facing usage reasonable but bulk processing expensive, but then again, starting measuring api usage per client id and not per user goes against this point, just making the API extremely expensive for everyone anywhere to the point of being unusable.
Third, all points seem to lead to the fact that what they really want is to kill third party apps and hope a large part of those users move to their app, for what? More tracking, tighter grip, better engagement metrics? Not sure. Even the changes to the extremely hostile mobile site now forcing some users to download the app. Really, I'd figure they'd understand their userbase better than that and how a small fraction on content producers and a even smaller fraction of power users and moderators carry the site, and pissing them off is a really bad idea. But what do I know.