Substack now has a comment system and has had user given content as their thing for a while. all they lack is a front page to vote their headlines and discussions onto.
> "But I think the greater Reddit community just want to participate with their fellow community members."
> "The protest, what it really affects is the everyday users, most of whom aren't involved in this, or the changes that spurred this,"
Its amazing how we butchered the protest into the regular 'us vs them' situation seen in everything: politicize everything, pitch people against people, while the person on the top reaps the money and enjoyment from the drama.
> Huffman said negotiations have broken down with two of the most popular apps, Apollo and Reddit is Fun, but he said Reddit is willing to negotiate with most third-party developers.
Wow. You accuse him of blackmailing you for 10 million, get caught red handed (1) then say that negotiations "broke down"? I want to hear what happened with rif from the developer. I hope he recorded his calls too.
Let us not forget many other app develops revealing they got the ghost up until at least the ama and he was all “woops”
I find it ironic he says they should grow up. You know who makes up narratives in their head and when challenged on it still tries dig in and blame me. My 5 and 7 year old…
> You accuse him of blackmailing you for 10 million, get caught red handed (1)
The apollo dev's framing of the call is so disingenuous. When you want to extort a company like he did, it goes like this:
1. you float the idea somewhat ambiguously with some plausible deniability
Then either:
2a. the company seems receptive, that didn't happen here so no need to follow that path
2b. the company rebuffs the idea
3. you switch to your plausible deniability case
4. the company accepts your new framing of your extortion attempt for one of many reasons (maybe it's too much hassle to hold you to what you really meant, or they still want to continue working with you, etc). they might even say something like "oh sorry, i misunderstood you earlier", but of course it's really just how you navigate that situation.
To then go and take their response at (4) and say "oh, even they admitted that they misunderstood me" is disingenuous.
What’s the disingeniuty? The proposal from Apollo’s whether it was a joke or a genuine one, was business. “Apollo’s is so good that people rather use it than your official app? Buy it”. The only distinguity here is to act like Apollo has any power in this situation.
> To then go and take their response at (4) and say "oh, even they admitted that they misunderstood me" is disingenuous
it’s not disingenuous when they literally apologized , multiple times , in that call that they misunderstood. Literally
I don’t think people “think” otherwise, but they do apply human “ideals” or “emotion” to corporate action and while corps are run by humans they are not themselves human, obviously.
> Giving away a service for free, Huffman said, is not something Reddit would be able to do forever.
> "We've been subsidizing other business for free for a long time. We're stopping that. That is not a negotiable point," Huffman said. "We simply were in a unsustainable position."
We’ve all seen this playbook a million times. Apollo is an excellent product and I’m sorry to see anyone put in a precarious position, but what could you really expect? They’re not going to grow at a loss till the end of time.
There's a bigger issue. Reddit basically runs on free user content and free moderation. All this is saying is that they are going to only take and not give. A lot of these "what did you expect" takes never seem to mention the other side of the equation.
So... what did Reddit expect? Apparently no one to complain about massive changes. How many times have we seen THAT playbook? What did they expect?
I don't get this kind of flip response. I'm clearly suggesting there are TWO sides to the equation (if there is an "other" side of the equation, you could safely deduce I'm saying there is more than one). To be crystal clear, I never said it was "easy," either. But realistically, reddit is not an innovative system. Someone else could easily create a new one if they could round up the users——that's the hard part, so I don't know why reddit thinks it's a good move to chase them off, in, again, an entirely predictable way.
What should be apparent from my comment is that both sides need each other. spez seems to think that's not true and the people fleeing to places that won't have the users (really the third component) are making almost as much of a mistake as reddit is.
It's a symbiosis and anyone ignoring that is bound to lose.
FWIW, it does appear that at least some subs are indeed leaving, simply enough, for example /r/startrek. I would personally prefer a return to forums, but whatever.
Not sure what's going on in your workplace, but don't take it out on Redditors.
Yes, this is definitely their theory. Huffman has basically said as much.
In my opinion*, all of this brings to mind the quote attributed to Napoleon about not interrupting your enemy "when he is making a mistake."
I certainly don't / didn't consider Reddit an enemy, and yet, suddenly, the site has an adversarial halo around it that simply didn't exist several weeks ago. A halo that I'm quite sure didn't need to be created (for Reddit Inc. to achieve its actual goals) and could have been avoided with a little more "EQ" and better PR efforts and planning.
This isn't, remotely, the first time that Huffman, in particular, has shown PR ineptness, including the egregious PR blunder of outright highly visible dishonest behavior and inability to properly acknowledge & apologize [1].
* Which is the opinion of an internet rando / 'armchair general', but, informed by knowledge of past PR disasters and borne out, so far, by events of this saga, to date
It's obvious generally and as a subtext of your own comment that it isn't "so easy".
It seems more productive to look at just what it is that gives Reddit value and is of general benefit.
There are and have been Reddit contenders, among them Tildes (of which I'm a member), the former Imzy (which I joined, and watched implode spectacularly), Lemmy (which I've known of vaguely for some months) and kbin (which I've only just heard of), as well as, of course, Hacker News itself (and clones such as lobste.rs), and extant fora such as Slashdot, Digg, Fark, and the like. Not to mention Facebook with its own Groups features.
The problem facing most extant fora is their own reputation (or lack thereof). Digg, Fark, and Slashdot all burned through goodwill and interest. I was a ... very early ... participant in Slashdot, let's say, and don't think I've logged in for years, though I'll very occasionally peruse the site. The story selection may be OK (it's often comparable to HN). The discussion level is ... poor. In the extreme.
I have less experience with Digg and Fark though I suspect the general sense is similar. Both had the spark for a time, but that torch was passed. Fallen online cultures virtually never revive.
Imzy set out as its goal, "a kinder, gentler Reddit", solving problems Reddit expressed at scale, without ever first solving the problem of reaching that scale. Imzy also managed to create a few pathologies of its own, a key aspect of which was centered around its own serial pseudonymity. HN's policy of permitting pseudonymous accounts, even temporary throways for specific discussion, but banning repeatedly and frequently generating new accounts seems to me well-founded and a good balance. Reddit has effectively had a similar policy, largely through karma requirements which make brand-new low-karma profiles of limited use, though reputation can be built over a reasonable period of time.
Tildes has existed and operated reasonably well for about seven years, being launched in 2016, and I'd joined it quite near that date. It's avoided Imzy's pathologies, but has a general scaling problem, and discussion tends to be both thin and not particularly specialised. Reddit's advantage for now is that there are corners with deep technical knowledge. Tildes might get there, though I'm not sure that's its goal. For now it's ... a reasonable option.
Lobste.rs is nearly identical to Hacker News as regards Reddit, except smaller. There are no sub-discussions, there is now individual ownership of such discussions, and effectively the entire site is /r/all, much as HN is (as I recently noted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256208>). As with Tildes, Lobste.rs has functioned usefully for some years, it's not been a runaway success, and it seems to fill a different niche than Reddit's topic-based user-moderated forums.
Site growth turns out to be a hard problem. Getting a small department to agree on a lunch spot, let alone several tens of millions of Internet strangers on where to decamp to is a large coordination problem. (I've been through this myself, several times, notably with the Google+ shutdown.) Successful migrations typically take both time and significant advanced planning.
And that's mostly looking at the scaling issue.
I've argued as well recently that Reddit provides a huge amount of behind-the-scenes moderation and filtering, and that this is likely a large part of the site's value. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36332367> The immediate effects of, say, a widespread user-based moderation strike would probably NOT be overwhel...
That’s a straw man. The 3P client devs were willing to pay. 2-3x the ARPU but Reddit is demanding 20x. At one point a dev could even do a 10x multiplier with paid subscription but the admins are only interesting in killing them off.
I agree that they probably are not that interested in the survival of the apps and are happy to see them die off but my question is why anyone is surprised by that.
Apollo has repeatedly said they will pay, but the amount being asked way too high. Also, no where near enough time has been given to make a change to a pay model.
Try to think about this like you couldn’t care less about any of the actors for a minute. Is supporting Apollo likely the most profitable venture they could pursue with whatever resources it costs them?
If they wanted to work with third-party apps they could have charged reasonable rates for API access and could have offered a reasonable transition time. They gave them one month to transition their whole business onto a new model to make the costs work. This was entirely bad-faith bargaining on Reddit’s part, and NPR should be ashamed for publishing Reddit’s press release for them.
Yep. They could also have kept the api free but insisted that 3rd party apps show ads. The developer of Apollo also agrees that would have been reasonable. But no.
I've said it elsewhere, but there must be some point where both parties could have continued operating while reddit made money. Even if it wasn't much, they probably could have covered their costs if they had worked out a pricing plan with the developers.
Based on what I've seen, they went above the standard for API pricing in their industry. Comparatively the pricing offered to the 3rd party app developers was akin to gouging, and was not meant to be realistic.
if 97% of the userbase doesn't use third party apps and "And the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant" are true statements then those 3% were extreme power users
Reddit gave something to users and now they want to take it away. What did they expect?
There was likely a path to making Apollo a paid product, letting it's popularity wain, and then killing it. Instead Reddit went for the power move and gave the mob a flashpoint to rally around.
They expect the rabble-rousers to lose interest and many users not to care much in the first place or get frustrated enough to support the subs being reopened and handed over to new moderators. Which I also expect.
Sure. Risky AF, considering how the site actually runs, unnecessary, and a major-league speed-bump towards IPO.
How do you think advertisers - some of whom have now had to reschedule ad buys / launches / pause campaigns, or at least factor a sudden major hit to 'stability' / consistency into consideration of the platform [1,2] - and potential enterprise customers for ML-model feeds &c. are taking this news?
Further, it has caused the CEO himself to repeatedly indicate lack of profitability (after > $1.2 billion in VC funding) and has created a massive 'paper-trail' of PR ineptness evidence.
Sure, but your second article suggests risk to leaving it too:
> This protest has the potential to demonstrate that its place in users’ hearts is conditional, and perhaps more importantly to demonstrate to advertisers that users do not consume its content in the context of the official Reddit app
The entire notion of "make it free at first so we can trap users into paying later" approach needs to die a fiery death.
If your intent is to eventually charge, do it from day 1. If you want to entice people to try your service by not charging them, let them know what the charge is, but give them introductory credit or an overt "free trial".
Well, if Huffman says Apollo added no value to the platform, then I guess I would expect the official Reddit app to be at least as good as Apollo, rather than a dumpster fire of shoddy engineering and dark patterns.
After a 15 year status quo and 3 months since Reddit stated there would be no major changes to the API in 2023, the costs for Apollo suddenly went from $0 to tens of millions of dollars a year with 1 month notice. Reddit could have done this years earlier, or not lied about their plans, or given a reasonable notice period, not set ridiculous prices, anything. I don't see how any of this is the fault of third party devs.
I've definitely gotten the sense that this is a potential significant factor in this "clown car crash". Kind of feels like Reddit has been able to raise insane amounts of money for years, but, with the sudden appearance of (and gold rush-style interest in) ChatGPT combined with Fed moves on interest rates, the taps have 'suddenly' been closed. And, apparently, there was no ... real plan (even though they hired a CFO back in 2021 and have been signaling plans to IPO since around that time).
Of course, this underscores the stupidity of the whole thing. Given that THE 'google-hack du jour' is adding reddit to search terms (with articles in MSM showing up since at least Jan 2022) AND the value of Reddit's 'corpus' (as Huffman himself put it back in April) to companies like GOOGLE (trying to not only build ChatGPT-style ML, but relevant up-to-date search capabilities based around ChatGPT-style 'agents'), you'd think they'd be able to convert these stories into reasonable financial health and successful IPO w/o wading into brand-destroying PR debacles...
Having a business that exists entirely at the pleasure of one larger business that doesn’t consider you particularly important is a position I would seek to avoid.
Wasn’t reddit profitable a few years ago, until they took on a massive amount of extra VC money and hired more people to make their horrible new website?
Seems like reddit could easily have been run indefinitely as it was at a modest profit and brought happiness to its users, employees and shareholders. But no, they got greedy and have tried to “shoot for the moon”. And now they need to squeeze more money out of their service to please their investors. In doing so, they’re making their product worse. (No, I don’t want to install their shitty official mobile app.)
Ugh. Someone please make a simple, clean reddit replacement that my communities can move to. Reddits actions here have been slimy and I don’t want to support them.
I don’t think that would have brought happiness to the shareholders but otherwise I guess they could have pursued a low-growth strategy. That does kind of open the door to being leapfrogged, though.
leapfrogged by what though? one of the problems right now is that there is no real alternative, and the federated platforms are mostly memes / hangouts for power-users.
I love how this article is just a PR puff piece that doesn't even attempt to seek out the third party app developers, talk to any users, etc.
Also glosses over the "breakdown" in negotiation with Apollo and others. Dude got caught lying through his fucking teeth because the Apollo dev was recording their phone calls (and a damn good thing he did, too.)
2-party laws only protect the wealthy and powerful, who don't like how recordings level the playing field.
Meanwhile there were two subreddits I was in that took a poll beforehand and both had "block indefinitely" as the winning choice by members by a large degree.
Granted they were but two out of basically millions but your response have scant little else to go on.
If you can't provide evidence then I'll consider it safe to place your claim in the "unproven" catagory.
Most of the comments are not happy about the decision, complaining that the poll was up for only 15 hours and most users didn't even have to vote. Only 4k votes in a sub with 577k members doesn't sound very legit.
> Only 4k votes in a sub with 577k members doesn't sound very legit.
You'd be surprised how small the active userbase of large subreddit are. There are subreddits with millions of subscribers that rarely see more than 1,000 comments or 10,0000 votes.
As long as they're willing to pay moderators above minimum wage for that jurisdiction. (And just wait until people are complaining about moderators who have no knowledge of the topic and do not interact with the communities.)
Even if true, that would be subject to a pretty enormous sampling bias. The users most strongly in favor of the blackout aren't visiting to know that those polls are even occurring.
Adult companies do not depend on free labor to provide value. (I'm speaking about moderation in particular, but also the creation of wikis and the community management.)
Personally, I can't imagine a single moderator on Reddit continuing without being paid.
> Personally, I can't imagine a single moderator on Reddit continuing without being paid.
Unfortunately, many of them are: Just not by reddit. Commanding the attention and eyeballs of in some cases millions of users is a big opportunity, and there are countless shady hangers-on trying to cash in on personal or financial relationships with reddit moderators. If every current reddit mod quit, the platform would only be overwhelmed by financially-motivated hucksters at an accelerated rate. And frankly, that's what reddit is encouraging by not supporting the moderators that actually give a shit about the platform and not their own pocketbooks. This will only accelerate the decline of quality of reddit.
Which author is the child of a CEO? Not familiar with anything like that in Steve Inskeep's background, and Bobby Allyn's bio says his parents were a machinist and a church organist.
Disappointed in this article as well, just curious about that remark.
> "It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company"
Then stop talking about this. Mods don't own their subreddits. Ban all these mods "protesting" and replace them with a handful of paid employees and then operate like an adult company. The actual users won't care who the mods are. In fact, it would probably greatly improve things. I've been on reddit for over a decade. Probably check it twice a day. I really do not care about 3rd party apps. What would be nice would be the ability to post without getting flagged by a bot or banned over some ridiculous rules made up by someone hoarding what little power they have.
This reminds me a bit of the Netflix drama with password sharing. Just implement a sensible policy and be done with it. Most people won't even notice. Don't give like a dozen interviews where you talk about it. Only a small, but vocal, minority care. Don't cater to them.
That's nice for people (like you, apparently) who don't have a problem with the direction reddit chose with their website and app, but for those who enjoyed old.reddit and Apollo it's too bad.
This whole situation reminds me of a policy that happens around my city where they turn industrial areas into residential ones by renting out the old factory buildings for cheap to artists and once the neighbourhood is made popular (by these artists) rent goes up enormously (pricing out the artists) and yuppies move in.
Reddit is now kicking out the people that made it.
No, everybody just keeps throwing that in to maximize the appeal of the protest.
It's entirely possible, though, because they've been hanging onto old.reddit forever just like the free API. I know I'll never visit the site again without old.reddit, but I also know I'm part of an extreme minority. I get the impression that mods don't know that they're part of an extreme minority, because they thought they owned the site.
They recently shut down i.reddit.com and have been trying to sunset old.reddit.com (or at least hide it behind dark patterns) for years. It isn't a large leap to say that old.reddit.com will be next in their crosshairs.
I use old.reddit.com quite often. Is that going away? Oh well.
If tomorrow I try it and it doesn't work and just redirects it's not a big deal. I honestly wouldn't even think twice about it, just a, "Well, guess I have to use the normal site now."
I swear companies announce this stuff just for the headlines. Just to feel relevant. You could do this stuff in the background and no one would know.
He's not going to have to pay mods, even though he should. He's probably going to delete all the participating mods, and let current members of the privated subs vote for new ones. Nobody will give much of a shit, except that the old mods will start attacking the site with floods or vandalism and that will be annoying, and some subs will turn into the wild west for a month or two.
That much mod turnover, and the vandalism and hate media campaigns from former mods could seriously endanger the site if some competitor arises all of a sudden, but no competitor is visible so that's unlikely.
Problem is it’s heavily correlated with the group that matters - mods and heavy users that actually post content. Without those Reddit is a ghost town.
That's the danger. They already turned over the mod population when they shifted from being normie 4chan to respected publicly traded forum site, and they'll have to turn it over again to get out of this. There might not be anything left after they stick to their guns on this - there was a considerable quality and influence drop for the site after the first site recycling.
The problem for the Group That Matters is that plenty of them don't have anywhere else to go in order to get what they get out of Reddit, and Reddit crowded out all competitors. They might end up at 4chan themselves, but they'll more likely not go anywhere.
Reddit doesn't seem scared at all. They just watched Musk laugh through it.
Somebody needs to tell Huffman that he is the one not acting like an adult. Very poor planning, very poor communication and he insists in antagonizing those "very few users" that are pretty much the most active users in the plataform and the main subreddits moderatos.
He could have done this in such a smoother way, talking with the main people affected (like Apollo's dev) before to explore options and make them feel part of the decision, give them a longer deadline to adjust....
> "It's a small group that's very upset, and there's no way around that. We made a business decision that upset them," Huffman told NPR in his first interview since nearly 9,000 so-called subreddits staged a 48-hour boycott. "But I think the greater Reddit community just want to participate with their fellow community members."
I mean, much as some people might not like it, he's right. It is just a small group of people who care about this, as the vast majority of Reddit's userbase is on new Reddit on desktop and the official app on mobile. If the protest continues, admins will simply demod them and add new mods. You already see this on /r/RedditRequest [0] which is a way to petition the admins to take over an unmoderated or private subreddit, notice the comments saying how they hope the OP gets the sub.
As long as you build on someone else's platform, expect them to not care about you as an individual. This happened in 2015 too, with Ellen Pao and Victoria, but somehow people forget about that. It's as if most users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
> the vast majority of Reddit's userbase is on new Reddit on desktop and the official app on mobile
I think this is probably true, but has Reddit published any metrics to confirm this?
I'd be especially interested to see the usage patterns segmented by contributors vs. lurkers. I'm sure it's true that the majority of Reddit users use the official app and new reddit. But I'm far less certain that's true for the majority of users who post content to reddit, or who moderate large communities.
There are subreddit stats available to mods of subreddits, and which can optionally be made public.
I know that for my own very small subs, which I pretty much exclusively list elsewhere under old.reddit.com, the majority of access is in fact from "new". Probably also the mobile app, though I've not looked at that recently.
Again, that's despite my pushing old & Web based access generally. And my own links are a large fraction of the overall inbound.
The protest is being driven by the moderators who do the free labor. They are being mistreated by not being able to use the 3rd party apps that make their (unpaid!) job easier.
Reddit, now seemingly desperate for money, decided they needed to jack up the API prices. This is after squandering a fortune on VC on a bloated dev team making stupid features like NFTs. If they hadn't blown so much money and created an expensive wasteful company, they wouldn't find themselves in this situation.
Now they're dumping on their most valuable users, the unpaid moderators to squeeze anything from the bottom line.
It's disgusting, and I'm done with Reddit. I deleted my 8yo account. I hope the CEO gets fired and it burns to the ground. Hopefully something better rises from the ashes.
No one has to mod. If they don't or can't mod anymore, then they can leave, but shutting down the subs behind them is a different story. I guarantee this drama will pass within a few months, if that. It's really no different than other Reddit dramas over the years.
And, you hope the CEO gets fired for...increasing revenue and decreasing costs? I'm pretty sure the investors are well aware of this move and support it wholeheartedly in time for the IPO.
Just as in real life, voting may not be representative of the whole story. Selection bias can occur where people who care very much about a topic would vote for it while most casual users won't even care enough to vote. The polls I've seen on Reddit are a vast minority of overall votes compared to the subreddit size in subscribers, keeping in mind that many lurkers also don't even directly subscribe to a sub but may simply follow them on /r/all, like /r/pics or /r/politics for example. I know I don't follow them but I see them on /r/all and will sometimes click into the comments.
> Huffman said negotiations have broken down with two of the most popular apps, Apollo and Reddit is Fun, but he said Reddit is willing to negotiate with most third-party developers.
Given the lack of contrary evidence in this "article," it's abundantly clear that absolutely no journalism was done here. The Apollo guy clearly made significantly more than a reasonable effort to come to terms with Reddit (and has receipts to show it), and it was Reddit who ghosted him.
I also wonder what type of engagement that 97% figure (if accurate) reflects.
It's well known that people who submit content or comment (i.e. directly engage with the site) are a small minority of the overall userbase. Large subreddits with millions of subscribers often fail to get 10,000 upvotes or 1,000 comments.
> "separate server pools solely dedicated to handling the scraping Google and Microsoft do from Reddit every day"
I assume Google and Microsoft are HTML "scraping", not using the API and not paying. While it's in Reddit's self-interest to be indexed by the search engines, the article mentions these companies also use Reddit's corpus to feed their AIs, is this not monetizable?
It is reasonable for Reddit to want to monetize its content particularly when it loses ad revenue to 3rd-party apps but, could its approach not lead developers to follow Google's and Microsoft's lead and try to recreate (some of their API experience) by scraping Reddit?
Spez employs an all-too-common, in all senses of that word, rhetorical trope of dismissing action by a core community of Redditors as "a small group". By that same token, Reddit's executive staff and board are also a "small group", though ones that happen to hold considerable official power.
As with many domains, media behaviours follow a power law distribution: "a small group" is responsible for the majority of posts, the majority of comments, the majority of moderation actions, etc. And a small group of subreddits are where a great deal of membership, submissions, comments, and traffic occur. What spez's comment confounds is quantity with significance, most especially power and value generation.
I don't presently have deep insights into the workings of Reddit and numbers associated with its activity.
I do however have a sixteen-year trove of Hacker News front page activity that I've been studying for the past few weeks and drawing various insights from, discussed in several recent comments on both HN and the Fediverse (#HackerNewsAnalytics: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics>).
The trove (2006-2-20 through 2023-6-13) 178,642 front-page stories as archived under the "past" link (<https://news.ycombinator.com/front>), which I've crawled recently. This isn't all submissions to HN (the front page sees only about 3% of all submissions), though it's most of activity (just under half of all comments appear on those stories, integrating with a 2022 analysis from Whaly.io[1]).
Whaly also gives a denominator of active HN accounts, 767,496 (2005--2021), which I'll presume is still roughly accurate. Keep in mind that this is certainly smaller than the total registered accounts, of which I've no data, though I suspect is in the millions.
The front page dataset includes submissions from 43,598 distinct accounts. So straight off the top, only five percent of active profiles have contributed to the front page.
And majority of that 5% appears only once: 24,433, or 56%.
The top ten profiles account for 4% of FP posts.
The top 50: 11%.
253 profiles submitted 25% of front-page articles.
2,092 profiles submitted fully half of all front-page articles. That's just over a quarter percent of all, again, active HN profiles, let alone total registered accounts. A "small group" by any measure, but one that's had a profound influence on Hacker News.
Keep in mind that this is front page submissions and not comments or other activity measures. I'm reporting on what I have insights on, and that's the front page, topic titles, dates, vote & comment counts, and submitters. The Whaly analysis does look at comments, along with other activity, and offers a breakdown of types of significant HN members:
- "Seeders (16%): People that post but that never comment on other user posts"
- "Casual Users (79%): People that reasonably comment & post (between 1 and 100 comments per year) on the social network."
- "Hardcore Users (5%): People that interact a lot with the social network (more than 100 comments on the year)"
My point is that spez's characterisation is dishonest, misleading, dismissive, and irrelevant. I'm disappointed NPR, also in the media business and presumably highly cognizant of such dynamics, didn't push back harder on those talking points, or balance the article in other ways. Small groups can and do matter, most especially in media. And spez is at war with his power users who've contributed tremendously to the enterprise he&#...
"Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things," Huffman said. "We are not in the business of giving that away for free."
Hey Steve, you got that data for free in the first place. That sound you hear is users telling you that if you start charging ridiculous fees for serving that free data, your source of free data is going to dry up.
I know it's tempting as Reddit's CEO to think the two issues (acquisition price vs selling price) are orthogonal, but they aren't.
One possible solution is to offer your contributors something like a penny per word written. If you're going to charge for the words we write, we want our cut.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 521 ms ] threadIts amazing how we butchered the protest into the regular 'us vs them' situation seen in everything: politicize everything, pitch people against people, while the person on the top reaps the money and enjoyment from the drama.
> Huffman said negotiations have broken down with two of the most popular apps, Apollo and Reddit is Fun, but he said Reddit is willing to negotiate with most third-party developers.
Wow. You accuse him of blackmailing you for 10 million, get caught red handed (1) then say that negotiations "broke down"? I want to hear what happened with rif from the developer. I hope he recorded his calls too.
(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
I find it ironic he says they should grow up. You know who makes up narratives in their head and when challenged on it still tries dig in and blame me. My 5 and 7 year old…
There’s your sign.
Reddit has not disputed the validity of the recordings either.
The apollo dev's framing of the call is so disingenuous. When you want to extort a company like he did, it goes like this:
1. you float the idea somewhat ambiguously with some plausible deniability
Then either:
2a. the company seems receptive, that didn't happen here so no need to follow that path
2b. the company rebuffs the idea
3. you switch to your plausible deniability case
4. the company accepts your new framing of your extortion attempt for one of many reasons (maybe it's too much hassle to hold you to what you really meant, or they still want to continue working with you, etc). they might even say something like "oh sorry, i misunderstood you earlier", but of course it's really just how you navigate that situation.
To then go and take their response at (4) and say "oh, even they admitted that they misunderstood me" is disingenuous.
> To then go and take their response at (4) and say "oh, even they admitted that they misunderstood me" is disingenuous
it’s not disingenuous when they literally apologized , multiple times , in that call that they misunderstood. Literally
It was only ever about profit, why would you think otherwise?
So it’s a slippery distractive slope.
> "We've been subsidizing other business for free for a long time. We're stopping that. That is not a negotiable point," Huffman said. "We simply were in a unsustainable position."
We’ve all seen this playbook a million times. Apollo is an excellent product and I’m sorry to see anyone put in a precarious position, but what could you really expect? They’re not going to grow at a loss till the end of time.
So... what did Reddit expect? Apparently no one to complain about massive changes. How many times have we seen THAT playbook? What did they expect?
What should be apparent from my comment is that both sides need each other. spez seems to think that's not true and the people fleeing to places that won't have the users (really the third component) are making almost as much of a mistake as reddit is.
It's a symbiosis and anyone ignoring that is bound to lose.
FWIW, it does appear that at least some subs are indeed leaving, simply enough, for example /r/startrek. I would personally prefer a return to forums, but whatever.
Not sure what's going on in your workplace, but don't take it out on Redditors.
In my opinion*, all of this brings to mind the quote attributed to Napoleon about not interrupting your enemy "when he is making a mistake."
I certainly don't / didn't consider Reddit an enemy, and yet, suddenly, the site has an adversarial halo around it that simply didn't exist several weeks ago. A halo that I'm quite sure didn't need to be created (for Reddit Inc. to achieve its actual goals) and could have been avoided with a little more "EQ" and better PR efforts and planning.
This isn't, remotely, the first time that Huffman, in particular, has shown PR ineptness, including the egregious PR blunder of outright highly visible dishonest behavior and inability to properly acknowledge & apologize [1].
* Which is the opinion of an internet rando / 'armchair general', but, informed by knowledge of past PR disasters and borne out, so far, by events of this saga, to date
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13074093
It seems more productive to look at just what it is that gives Reddit value and is of general benefit.
There are and have been Reddit contenders, among them Tildes (of which I'm a member), the former Imzy (which I joined, and watched implode spectacularly), Lemmy (which I've known of vaguely for some months) and kbin (which I've only just heard of), as well as, of course, Hacker News itself (and clones such as lobste.rs), and extant fora such as Slashdot, Digg, Fark, and the like. Not to mention Facebook with its own Groups features.
The problem facing most extant fora is their own reputation (or lack thereof). Digg, Fark, and Slashdot all burned through goodwill and interest. I was a ... very early ... participant in Slashdot, let's say, and don't think I've logged in for years, though I'll very occasionally peruse the site. The story selection may be OK (it's often comparable to HN). The discussion level is ... poor. In the extreme.
I have less experience with Digg and Fark though I suspect the general sense is similar. Both had the spark for a time, but that torch was passed. Fallen online cultures virtually never revive.
Imzy set out as its goal, "a kinder, gentler Reddit", solving problems Reddit expressed at scale, without ever first solving the problem of reaching that scale. Imzy also managed to create a few pathologies of its own, a key aspect of which was centered around its own serial pseudonymity. HN's policy of permitting pseudonymous accounts, even temporary throways for specific discussion, but banning repeatedly and frequently generating new accounts seems to me well-founded and a good balance. Reddit has effectively had a similar policy, largely through karma requirements which make brand-new low-karma profiles of limited use, though reputation can be built over a reasonable period of time.
Tildes has existed and operated reasonably well for about seven years, being launched in 2016, and I'd joined it quite near that date. It's avoided Imzy's pathologies, but has a general scaling problem, and discussion tends to be both thin and not particularly specialised. Reddit's advantage for now is that there are corners with deep technical knowledge. Tildes might get there, though I'm not sure that's its goal. For now it's ... a reasonable option.
Lobste.rs is nearly identical to Hacker News as regards Reddit, except smaller. There are no sub-discussions, there is now individual ownership of such discussions, and effectively the entire site is /r/all, much as HN is (as I recently noted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256208>). As with Tildes, Lobste.rs has functioned usefully for some years, it's not been a runaway success, and it seems to fill a different niche than Reddit's topic-based user-moderated forums.
Site growth turns out to be a hard problem. Getting a small department to agree on a lunch spot, let alone several tens of millions of Internet strangers on where to decamp to is a large coordination problem. (I've been through this myself, several times, notably with the Google+ shutdown.) Successful migrations typically take both time and significant advanced planning.
And that's mostly looking at the scaling issue.
I've argued as well recently that Reddit provides a huge amount of behind-the-scenes moderation and filtering, and that this is likely a large part of the site's value. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36332367> The immediate effects of, say, a widespread user-based moderation strike would probably NOT be overwhel...
I think I wouldn't mind so much if their official app was anywhere near as good as Apollo.
I have a sinking feeling I'm going to be seeing this phrase posted thousands of times.
Based on what I've seen, they went above the standard for API pricing in their industry. Comparatively the pricing offered to the 3rd party app developers was akin to gouging, and was not meant to be realistic.
There was likely a path to making Apollo a paid product, letting it's popularity wain, and then killing it. Instead Reddit went for the power move and gave the mob a flashpoint to rally around.
How do you think advertisers - some of whom have now had to reschedule ad buys / launches / pause campaigns, or at least factor a sudden major hit to 'stability' / consistency into consideration of the platform [1,2] - and potential enterprise customers for ML-model feeds &c. are taking this news?
Further, it has caused the CEO himself to repeatedly indicate lack of profitability (after > $1.2 billion in VC funding) and has created a massive 'paper-trail' of PR ineptness evidence.
[1] https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-redd...
[2] https://www.thedrum.com/news/2023/06/12/what-do-advertisers-...
(... among various additional articles)
> This protest has the potential to demonstrate that its place in users’ hearts is conditional, and perhaps more importantly to demonstrate to advertisers that users do not consume its content in the context of the official Reddit app
If your intent is to eventually charge, do it from day 1. If you want to entice people to try your service by not charging them, let them know what the charge is, but give them introductory credit or an overt "free trial".
Well, if Huffman says Apollo added no value to the platform, then I guess I would expect the official Reddit app to be at least as good as Apollo, rather than a dumpster fire of shoddy engineering and dark patterns.
Of course, this underscores the stupidity of the whole thing. Given that THE 'google-hack du jour' is adding reddit to search terms (with articles in MSM showing up since at least Jan 2022) AND the value of Reddit's 'corpus' (as Huffman himself put it back in April) to companies like GOOGLE (trying to not only build ChatGPT-style ML, but relevant up-to-date search capabilities based around ChatGPT-style 'agents'), you'd think they'd be able to convert these stories into reasonable financial health and successful IPO w/o wading into brand-destroying PR debacles...
... but, apparently not.
Seems like reddit could easily have been run indefinitely as it was at a modest profit and brought happiness to its users, employees and shareholders. But no, they got greedy and have tried to “shoot for the moon”. And now they need to squeeze more money out of their service to please their investors. In doing so, they’re making their product worse. (No, I don’t want to install their shitty official mobile app.)
Ugh. Someone please make a simple, clean reddit replacement that my communities can move to. Reddits actions here have been slimy and I don’t want to support them.
Also glosses over the "breakdown" in negotiation with Apollo and others. Dude got caught lying through his fucking teeth because the Apollo dev was recording their phone calls (and a damn good thing he did, too.)
2-party laws only protect the wealthy and powerful, who don't like how recordings level the playing field.
They did talk to one, apparently:
> Christian Selig told NPR the new charges could cost Apollo, which has just one part-time employee, around $20 million a year.
Care to back up this claim with some actual evidence?
Meanwhile there were two subreddits I was in that took a poll beforehand and both had "block indefinitely" as the winning choice by members by a large degree.
Granted they were but two out of basically millions but your response have scant little else to go on.
If you can't provide evidence then I'll consider it safe to place your claim in the "unproven" catagory.
Yes, Indefinitely (sub remains private and read-only) - 2457 votes
Yes, Indefinitely (sub remains private with existing members able to post/comment) - 477 votes
Yes, Partially -- "Touch-Grass-Tuesdays” where the sub becomes private/read-only on Tuesdays) - 171 votes
No, full stop. - 583 votes
Most of the comments are not happy about the decision, complaining that the poll was up for only 15 hours and most users didn't even have to vote. Only 4k votes in a sub with 577k members doesn't sound very legit.
You'd be surprised how small the active userbase of large subreddit are. There are subreddits with millions of subscribers that rarely see more than 1,000 comments or 10,0000 votes.
But still, a flash poll that lasted less than a day and that most people didn't even have the chance to participate in is not very representative...
Adult companies do not depend on free labor to provide value. (I'm speaking about moderation in particular, but also the creation of wikis and the community management.)
Personally, I can't imagine a single moderator on Reddit continuing without being paid.
Unfortunately, many of them are: Just not by reddit. Commanding the attention and eyeballs of in some cases millions of users is a big opportunity, and there are countless shady hangers-on trying to cash in on personal or financial relationships with reddit moderators. If every current reddit mod quit, the platform would only be overwhelmed by financially-motivated hucksters at an accelerated rate. And frankly, that's what reddit is encouraging by not supporting the moderators that actually give a shit about the platform and not their own pocketbooks. This will only accelerate the decline of quality of reddit.
The ones that continue to operate are presumably in this bucket.
I also wonder if some large sub mods specifically use the API in order to carefully run their voting bot farms - but I'm not accusing anyone here.
Disappointed in this article as well, just curious about that remark.
Then stop talking about this. Mods don't own their subreddits. Ban all these mods "protesting" and replace them with a handful of paid employees and then operate like an adult company. The actual users won't care who the mods are. In fact, it would probably greatly improve things. I've been on reddit for over a decade. Probably check it twice a day. I really do not care about 3rd party apps. What would be nice would be the ability to post without getting flagged by a bot or banned over some ridiculous rules made up by someone hoarding what little power they have.
This reminds me a bit of the Netflix drama with password sharing. Just implement a sensible policy and be done with it. Most people won't even notice. Don't give like a dozen interviews where you talk about it. Only a small, but vocal, minority care. Don't cater to them.
This whole situation reminds me of a policy that happens around my city where they turn industrial areas into residential ones by renting out the old factory buildings for cheap to artists and once the neighbourhood is made popular (by these artists) rent goes up enormously (pricing out the artists) and yuppies move in.
Reddit is now kicking out the people that made it.
wait they are getting rid of that too?
It's entirely possible, though, because they've been hanging onto old.reddit forever just like the free API. I know I'll never visit the site again without old.reddit, but I also know I'm part of an extreme minority. I get the impression that mods don't know that they're part of an extreme minority, because they thought they owned the site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35281562
Then again, earlier this year they also promised the Apollo dev there would be no changes to the API this year, or even in the next few years...
If tomorrow I try it and it doesn't work and just redirects it's not a big deal. I honestly wouldn't even think twice about it, just a, "Well, guess I have to use the normal site now."
I swear companies announce this stuff just for the headlines. Just to feel relevant. You could do this stuff in the background and no one would know.
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287411
That much mod turnover, and the vandalism and hate media campaigns from former mods could seriously endanger the site if some competitor arises all of a sudden, but no competitor is visible so that's unlikely.
Problem is it’s heavily correlated with the group that matters - mods and heavy users that actually post content. Without those Reddit is a ghost town.
The problem for the Group That Matters is that plenty of them don't have anywhere else to go in order to get what they get out of Reddit, and Reddit crowded out all competitors. They might end up at 4chan themselves, but they'll more likely not go anywhere.
Reddit doesn't seem scared at all. They just watched Musk laugh through it.
I’m probably gonna give the fediverse (sp?) a shot. Will probably read Reddit either way but done with contributing
He could have done this in such a smoother way, talking with the main people affected (like Apollo's dev) before to explore options and make them feel part of the decision, give them a longer deadline to adjust....
Simply amateurish leadership here...
I mean, much as some people might not like it, he's right. It is just a small group of people who care about this, as the vast majority of Reddit's userbase is on new Reddit on desktop and the official app on mobile. If the protest continues, admins will simply demod them and add new mods. You already see this on /r/RedditRequest [0] which is a way to petition the admins to take over an unmoderated or private subreddit, notice the comments saying how they hope the OP gets the sub.
As long as you build on someone else's platform, expect them to not care about you as an individual. This happened in 2015 too, with Ellen Pao and Victoria, but somehow people forget about that. It's as if most users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...
I think this is probably true, but has Reddit published any metrics to confirm this?
I'd be especially interested to see the usage patterns segmented by contributors vs. lurkers. I'm sure it's true that the majority of Reddit users use the official app and new reddit. But I'm far less certain that's true for the majority of users who post content to reddit, or who moderate large communities.
I know that for my own very small subs, which I pretty much exclusively list elsewhere under old.reddit.com, the majority of access is in fact from "new". Probably also the mobile app, though I've not looked at that recently.
Again, that's despite my pushing old & Web based access generally. And my own links are a large fraction of the overall inbound.
Reddit, now seemingly desperate for money, decided they needed to jack up the API prices. This is after squandering a fortune on VC on a bloated dev team making stupid features like NFTs. If they hadn't blown so much money and created an expensive wasteful company, they wouldn't find themselves in this situation.
Now they're dumping on their most valuable users, the unpaid moderators to squeeze anything from the bottom line.
It's disgusting, and I'm done with Reddit. I deleted my 8yo account. I hope the CEO gets fired and it burns to the ground. Hopefully something better rises from the ashes.
And, you hope the CEO gets fired for...increasing revenue and decreasing costs? I'm pretty sure the investors are well aware of this move and support it wholeheartedly in time for the IPO.
I hope the CEO gets fired and Reddit becomes a place where I want to spend time again.
Then why even participate in this conversation about Reddit?
This is like me going on a Jeep forum to complain about the Jeep Wrangler I sold 9 years ago.
No, it is like complaining about a Jeep you bought 9 years ago and sold yesterday.
Given the lack of contrary evidence in this "article," it's abundantly clear that absolutely no journalism was done here. The Apollo guy clearly made significantly more than a reasonable effort to come to terms with Reddit (and has receipts to show it), and it was Reddit who ghosted him.
This is a Reddit puff piece.
I wonder what percent of usage is via third-party apps. And specifically, what percent of mobile usage is via these apps.
It's well known that people who submit content or comment (i.e. directly engage with the site) are a small minority of the overall userbase. Large subreddits with millions of subscribers often fail to get 10,000 upvotes or 1,000 comments.
I assume Google and Microsoft are HTML "scraping", not using the API and not paying. While it's in Reddit's self-interest to be indexed by the search engines, the article mentions these companies also use Reddit's corpus to feed their AIs, is this not monetizable?
It is reasonable for Reddit to want to monetize its content particularly when it loses ad revenue to 3rd-party apps but, could its approach not lead developers to follow Google's and Microsoft's lead and try to recreate (some of their API experience) by scraping Reddit?
As with many domains, media behaviours follow a power law distribution: "a small group" is responsible for the majority of posts, the majority of comments, the majority of moderation actions, etc. And a small group of subreddits are where a great deal of membership, submissions, comments, and traffic occur. What spez's comment confounds is quantity with significance, most especially power and value generation.
I don't presently have deep insights into the workings of Reddit and numbers associated with its activity.
I do however have a sixteen-year trove of Hacker News front page activity that I've been studying for the past few weeks and drawing various insights from, discussed in several recent comments on both HN and the Fediverse (#HackerNewsAnalytics: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics>).
The trove (2006-2-20 through 2023-6-13) 178,642 front-page stories as archived under the "past" link (<https://news.ycombinator.com/front>), which I've crawled recently. This isn't all submissions to HN (the front page sees only about 3% of all submissions), though it's most of activity (just under half of all comments appear on those stories, integrating with a 2022 analysis from Whaly.io[1]).
Whaly also gives a denominator of active HN accounts, 767,496 (2005--2021), which I'll presume is still roughly accurate. Keep in mind that this is certainly smaller than the total registered accounts, of which I've no data, though I suspect is in the millions.
The front page dataset includes submissions from 43,598 distinct accounts. So straight off the top, only five percent of active profiles have contributed to the front page.
And majority of that 5% appears only once: 24,433, or 56%.
The top ten profiles account for 4% of FP posts.
The top 50: 11%.
253 profiles submitted 25% of front-page articles.
2,092 profiles submitted fully half of all front-page articles. That's just over a quarter percent of all, again, active HN profiles, let alone total registered accounts. A "small group" by any measure, but one that's had a profound influence on Hacker News.
Keep in mind that this is front page submissions and not comments or other activity measures. I'm reporting on what I have insights on, and that's the front page, topic titles, dates, vote & comment counts, and submitters. The Whaly analysis does look at comments, along with other activity, and offers a breakdown of types of significant HN members:
- "Seeders (16%): People that post but that never comment on other user posts"
- "Casual Users (79%): People that reasonably comment & post (between 1 and 100 comments per year) on the social network."
- "Hardcore Users (5%): People that interact a lot with the social network (more than 100 comments on the year)"
My point is that spez's characterisation is dishonest, misleading, dismissive, and irrelevant. I'm disappointed NPR, also in the media business and presumably highly cognizant of such dynamics, didn't push back harder on those talking points, or balance the article in other ways. Small groups can and do matter, most especially in media. And spez is at war with his power users who've contributed tremendously to the enterprise he&#...
Hey Steve, you got that data for free in the first place. That sound you hear is users telling you that if you start charging ridiculous fees for serving that free data, your source of free data is going to dry up.
I know it's tempting as Reddit's CEO to think the two issues (acquisition price vs selling price) are orthogonal, but they aren't.
One possible solution is to offer your contributors something like a penny per word written. If you're going to charge for the words we write, we want our cut.