[HN Gopher] Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
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Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
Author : robbiet480
Score : 925 points
Date : 2023-05-31 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| subpar wrote:
| Come for the pricing info (50 million requests costs $12,000).
| Stay for the argument in the comments about whether or not HN
| users are deranged.
| [deleted]
| altairprime wrote:
| I'm looking forward to this outcome. Reddit and Apollo both need
| to get paid, on a recurring basis, for their recurring services
| that require recurring maintenance and updates.
|
| Reddit gets paid either through ad revenue displayed to non-
| paying visitors to the website, or through API calls for access
| to their dataset. Apps that enable user access via the API will
| need to pass along this charge to their users.
|
| Apollo must become a paid-subscriptions-only app, as Reddit now
| charges for usage. This is fine. Apollo needs to constantly be
| updated to keep up with Reddit API changes over time _anyways_ ,
| so neither 'free' nor 'one-time purchase' are acceptable ways to
| provide a continuous living wage for keeping up with reddit API
| (and mobile OS) updates.
|
| There's a third (paid) option, which is that Apollo sells the app
| to Brave or Firefox, where it's integrated _into_ a paid "Reader
| Mode" subscription -- because a team of developers will need
| recurring revenue for living wages in order to maintain the
| website rendering overlay and overcome Reddit's attempts to block
| or break it, and will need a team of lawyers to defend against
| the eventual lawsuit Reddit will bring against them (even if
| they'll lose due to the LinkedIn precedent from a few months ago
| -- but, I am not their lawyer, this is not legal advice).
|
| There are no good free outcomes that are not advertising-
| supported, and the API is incompatible with advertising, which is
| why so many people use it. I'm glad to see that Reddit has
| realized this, and I'm glad they are still offering the free ad-
| supported website rather than a paywall. I hope that Apollo is
| willing to charge me for their app, and isn't demoralized by
| their users complaining about this. We'll see.
| UberFly wrote:
| The pricing seems to be aimed at killing 3rd party apps, rather
| than making them partners. Reddit seems to be entering it's
| late-stage period. I wonder what will replace it.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _There are no good free outcomes that are not advertising-
| supported, and the API is incompatible with advertising..._
|
| I'm curious why you'd think that. If anything, an API access
| agreement allows Reddit to compel Apollo to meet advertising
| requirements.
| nocoiner wrote:
| Believe it or not it's actually totally feasible to come up
| with a one-time number, paid upfront, that represents adequate
| compensation for future services. Obviously it's going to be a
| multiple of periodic pricing, but equalizing a one-time payment
| versus a series of cash flows isn't rocket science.
|
| And though it's easier to price a subscription, those also tend
| to be more user-hostile and occasionally not that great for the
| developer either (just look at the recent Twitter client
| debacle, where for-profit enterprises were begging their users
| not to ask for a refund for prepaid services that could not be
| rendered). I can't imagine anyone came away from that with a
| good taste in their mouth.
|
| I don't begrudge anyone the right to earn a living, but in my
| mind the vast majority of subscription models on the market
| don't imo represent a very compelling value proposition.
| symlinkk wrote:
| How much did this guy make from people buying Apollo though?
| Probably millions right?
| UberFly wrote:
| Lots of 3rd party Reddit apps are going down as well. RIF is a
| great android app for example. It is Reddit for me and I'm not
| going to install the official app. I'll go away rather than be
| stuffed in their Clockwork Orange media chair.
| dopamean wrote:
| If Apollo stops working on my phone I'll basically stop being a
| reddit user.
| miki123211 wrote:
| This feels like it's all priced for AI companies, TBH. This per-
| request pricing makes a LOT more sense if you assume that one
| particular piece of content will only be requested once in your
| company's history, saved on a server somewhere and used for
| training forever. You're not paying for a request being
| processed, you're not even paying to offset any advertising cost,
| you're essentially paying for the ability to use the requested
| piece of content forever. Maybe that's what Apollo should do, set
| up a huge cache layer and proxy all requests for the public data
| through there? I feel like the power law would apply here, so 80%
| of the requests would be for 20% of the content. Considering how
| popular the most popular subreddits are, I wouldn't be surprised
| if the balance was something like 99-to-1. Cache misses would
| still need to be fetched from the API itself, but that should
| drive costs down massively.
|
| If the ToS allow this, the cache layer could even be shared
| across apps from different developers (developers supporting both
| iOS and Android might have an advantage here), making the costs
| even lower.
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| Transparent attempt at shutting down clients that don't show
| their ads. When Apollo stops working, I stop using Reddit. Their
| official app is garbage. Their website is garbage. Good riddance
| probably, I spend way too much time on it anyway. I even use the
| iOS Apollo app on my Mac because I like it so much, even if the
| experience isn't perfect it's still loads better than the
| official one.
| cantsingh wrote:
| This is where Apollo builds their own reddit clone, implements
| reddit's API, and starts their own competing social network. Use
| the ~$5/month to pay for server costs, or run an ad supported
| variant.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Seems to me like they priced the API to cash in on the LLM
| training data gold rush, and as a side-effect it makes third-
| party user apps infeasible. Oops.
| hendersoon wrote:
| They priced the API for LLM training and killing third-party
| apps is just a great bonus. If they wanted to retain third-
| party apps while protecting their revenue stream they could
| have simply created a new free API including all the ads. They
| deliberately chose to kill these apps.
| dontreact wrote:
| Why wouldn't people then just scrape using the free API?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| You can throttle APIs so they are still useful for a human
| browsing content, but essentially worthless for scraping
| meaningful amounts of data.
|
| You can also detect accounts that are displaying scraping
| behavior and block them.
| dontreact wrote:
| An LLM only has to download text once. You could easily
| coordinate a scrape across various IPs and accounts over
| the course of a couple of months and it would be really
| hard to detect. Especially if you target alternate GUI
| api based versions of the site.
| nawgz wrote:
| Most users are not technical
|
| Most technical users are still happy to use a GUI over
| writing their own scraper / visualizer
| Zetice wrote:
| I blocked the reddit.com domain from all of my devices a few
| weeks ago, because until recently I didn't feel like I could keep
| my finger on the pulse of "The Internet" without Reddit.
|
| That's no longer the case. Google's "For You" gets me my niche
| subject-specific content, Google News/Memeorandum (and its
| sibling sites)/Apple News gives me the mainstream media
| perspectives, HN (and maybe Bluesky occasionally) my urge to
| discuss and engage with others, and YouTube Shorts (I refuse to
| install TikTok) helps me understand Internet culture.
|
| I don't think any one company came for Reddit on their own, but
| what they've left Reddit with as a differentiator are the
| communities. Unfortunately, those end up existing as little
| fiefdoms for the moderators who run them, and if that's all
| you're going to offer, you're not going to be able to justify
| that $10-$15bn (probably lower now) valuation to investors.
| jdwithit wrote:
| I just checked "For You" for the first time and the top story
| was about one celebrity commenting on another's ass. And then a
| bunch of clickbait headlines designed to make people share them
| on social media and get mad. Think I'll pass.
| dopamean wrote:
| If you've never used it before might you need to for it to
| show you more relevant things?
| Zetice wrote:
| Yup, I've found the worst offenders are typically a small
| subset of sites, and you can ban sites from your For You,
| which cleans it up pretty quickly.
|
| I've got articles about the debt limit, AI, immigration,
| the new Titleist irons, etc.
| SlimyHog wrote:
| I can't even find this feature. I googled "for you" and got
| LMGTFY and related sites. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| telotortium wrote:
| I mostly use Reddit for city subreddits. Despite the overall
| political bias of Reddit these days, they have a habit of
| uncovering and bringing to widespread attention a lot of
| stories that I wouldn't hear about otherwise. Nextdoor and
| Facebook generally don't cover a wide enough range of topics
| and are almost impossible to use to read a lot of stories. For
| everything else, I feel that Discord, Twitter, and forums can
| replace Reddit pretty handily now.
| doix wrote:
| > but what they've left Reddit with as a differentiator are the
| communities.
|
| Yeah, I pretty much only use reddit for a few game communities,
| unfortunately with this change I suspect more and more people
| will move to discord. It's pretty annoying, but I suspect I'll
| have to eventually cave and join them when they finally kill
| old.reddit.com.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| >Yeah, I pretty much only use reddit for a few game
| communities, unfortunately with this change I suspect more
| and more people will move to discord
|
| Oh boy, I can't wait to have to join a specific game discord
| for every game I want to play or else be locked out of any
| community information!
|
| Discords are easily killing a lot of hobbies by sequestering
| away information. And even when you're told "Oh that answer
| is on XYZ discord" you have to go in and find the
| conversation using Discords ever-shittier search function
| idiotsecant wrote:
| ugh, discord is basically IRC. There's a reason we don't use
| IRC for everything. I hate that it's replacing everything.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| No? It's more like a BB with inbuild live voicechat,
| streaming etc.
|
| IRC itself doesn't provide a shared history, threading etc.
|
| You could get there with alternative clients and bots (at
| least if all participants use the same), but calling that
| IRC is a stretch
| idiotsecant wrote:
| threading isn't particularly impactful if 90% of
| discussions don't use it.
| xg15 wrote:
| Discord reuses the IRC "aesthetic" with "servers", channels
| and slash commands, but the actual structure of the
| conversations is much more like a forum.
| adastra22 wrote:
| In what way? It's still time based instead of topic
| based.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| You can turn any top-level message in a room into a
| Thread. I don't ever really see that used though, and I
| don't believe it bumps the thread when there's a new
| message (then again neither does Reddit).
| xg15 wrote:
| I think it depends how the server is structured. You can
| also have "threads" which are topic-based inside a
| specific channel.
| HansHamster wrote:
| > but what they've left Reddit with as a differentiator are the
| communities
|
| And I'm honestly not very fond of how the communities on reddit
| work. Sure, there is some overlap between the peoples on
| different subreddits, but there is little 'community' across
| subreddits and it feels very different to the 'good old'
| discussion boards that cover a very general topic and then have
| many more specific subsections. I'm especially missing the more
| off-topic aspects, which just doesn't fit well with the
| separation in subreddits.
| xg15 wrote:
| The "hive mind" effect is also much more pronounced than on
| traditional forums, sometimes bordering on being creepy.
|
| Not sure if it's caused by power-hungry mods, the
| upvote/downvote dynamics or political polarisation, but you
| can often quickly make out specific "opinions" that are
| somehow magically shared by everyone posting in a particular
| subreddit.
|
| The UX also actively supports this by de-emphasizing
| individual users and emphasizing subreddits as the primary
| "personalities" of the platform. This goes so far that on
| r/all, the names of the individual users who posted the
| threads aren't even shown anymore. All you see is subreddits.
|
| That together with some "supermods" moderating large
| fractions of the popular subreddits and a recent post on HN
| of another redditor who experienced shadowbanning makes me
| seriously wonder how authentic the discussions you see on
| r/all really are.
| jdwithit wrote:
| I check the fantasy football sub from time to time and the
| hive mind is definitely a factor there. If you post an
| opinion that goes against the grain, you're likely to get
| aggressively dogpiled with downvotes and called a moron in
| the replies. Reddit really isn't an enjoyable place to
| post.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye the same-thinking is creepy. Many subs are like sects. I
| believe there is a huge manipulation ongoing on the popular
| subs. In a natural forum posters don't agree to the extent
| they do on Reddit.
| telotortium wrote:
| Nah, the supermods intentionally go after popular-enough
| subreddits that contradict their ideological lean, or are
| just not ideological enough, either taking over
| moderation of subreddits that aren't breaking rules, or
| banning subreddits that are (while never banning
| subreddits that break the rules but are ideologically
| align).
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I think it's almost entirely emergent based on how the
| incentives and pressures of self-selecting subreddit
| membership intersects with the upvote/downvote system.
|
| An interesting and notable thing in this context is how
| for any given interest represented on reddit there is
| actually an entire ecosystem of subs. There's the main
| one, the decade-old mod schism one, the "circlejerk"
| parody one, the "True" one that takes itself more
| seriously, the more recent schism that allows slurs, the
| one for memes about the interest, a few to many for
| various subdivisions or specializations within the
| interest, various vestigial zombie schisms and
| misspellings that may or may not just redirect to one of
| the others.
|
| Each of these will have elements of its own culture and
| history and jargon and in-jokes, but drawn from the same
| pool of subject matter and all in some way referencing or
| revolving around the biggest one, even if only in
| opposition to it. All will share some mods with at least
| some others and most users will frequent more than one of
| them.
|
| What you end up coming up against is _identity_. Each sub
| needs a reason for itself to exist and so members create
| that meaning by enforcing the norms, referencing the
| jokes, and socializing new members into the history and
| protocol. HN works exactly like this too btw; it is
| culturally a subreddit, even if hosted elsewhere with
| slightly different game mechanics.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| What do you do isntead of appending 'reddit' to google search?
| I could imagine dropping everything else but search is terrible
| for a lot of things without it.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| For what it's worth, you should append "site:reddit.com"
| instead of just "reddit", to avoid being tricked by sites
| which simply include the word reddit.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I know I can do this, but FWIW my searches with just
| "reddit" nearly always get dozens of responses from reddit
| before they get anything from anywhere else.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| yeah the lazy reddit add nearly always works. Why waste
| time say lot word when few word do trick?
| victor106 wrote:
| What is Google's "For You" ?
| humblepie wrote:
| It's https://news.google.com/foryou.
| tech234a wrote:
| Could be referring to the suggested news on the mobile home
| page and also in Google News
| Zetice wrote:
| Correct; I'm not sure what to call the mobile home page,
| but it's different from just the News "For you" offering
| (which I also use), though I'm not sure how.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I find a lot of the google customization features to be
| hard to find,or trust/count on, because they no longer
| reside at a URI. Things like travel details pulled from
| emails... I still use tripit just because Google doesn't
| seem to want to commit. So perplexing.
|
| I wish the "my" portals would come back.
| swozey wrote:
| Has anyone _stopped_ using old.reddit.com that uses it and LIKEs
| using new reddit? I don 't know what it is but when I get popped
| over to new reddit it's absolutely jarring.
|
| It looks ridiculous on my 49" monitor because it's middle aligned
| and horribly padded horizontally.
|
| Also it doesn't seem to be doing it right now, or maybe it only
| does it on mobile but that thing where they only show you a
| couple of comments then have a DIFFERENT post/comment section
| right under it drives me crazy.
|
| Maybe I'm just a luddite unwilling to learn new things.
| kaszanka wrote:
| I wonder if the official smartphone app uses the same API as the
| one exposed and documented for third-party apps. It's my
| understanding that it does not because the unofficial app I use
| (reddit is fun) lacks some features, so just borrowing the
| official app's key and putting it in RiF is out, but surely it
| would be possible to adapt a FOSS app like Slide to quack like
| the Blessed Official App and let the arms race begin, no?
| Shakahs wrote:
| Yeah, API arms race is definitely the next step. I'll put up
| with reduced functionality or just stop using Reddit on mobile.
|
| Worst case scenario is just web scraping Reddit and serving up
| to 3rd party clients as read only.
| sosodev wrote:
| Keep in mind that Reddit has said they're going to stop serving
| NSFW content via API too. So if you enjoy that stuff you won't
| get it in Apollo even if you pay them.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Reddit seems to want NSFW content gone altogether. At this
| point you can only see it anonymously if you go to
| old.reddit.com, if you go to the regular UI it requires you to
| authenticate before you can see any kind of questionable
| content.
| philipkglass wrote:
| It looks like it's currently blocked on "new Reddit" only for
| mobile user agents. If I try opening
| https://www.reddit.com/r/boobs/ in a desktop browser (or with
| a desktop agent on mobile) I get an option to just click on
| an "I'm over 18" button to see the content.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Browse a little farther. Last time I found myself in that
| position, I could say I was over 18 and it let me go. For
| another click or too, then it interrupted again and
| insisted I sign in.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Maybe they are A/B testing further restrictions. Just now
| I tried scrolling continuously through r/boobs on desktop
| Firefox in a private window. I was able to load hundreds
| of posts after clicking the "I'm over 18" button. I also
| clicked on a dozen posts to open them in a separate tab.
| I never saw additional interruptions.
| dizhn wrote:
| Maybe the subs themselves can pick out of a few options.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > Reddit seems to want NSFW content gone altogether.
|
| Between this and trying to crowd out third party clients, one
| has to wonder if they're trying to position themselves to
| become the next Digg.
| superfrank wrote:
| I agree, but I find it funny that it seems to be backfiring.
| I've noticed a pretty large increase in the number of posts
| that are people getting maimed or killed on subs that show up
| on the front page. Subs like publicfeakout that used to be
| stuff like people yelling at each other in mall now regularly
| have gore voted to the top.
| napoleoncomplex wrote:
| It's clearly intended to weed out third party apps, same as
| Twitter. I have a pet theory that all the companies doing this
| are converging on the same long term plan - kill third party
| apps, have premium subscriptions (Facebook recently launched one
| too), and then give the users the choice - use the service for
| free, with forced opt-in into personalized marketing, sharing
| data with 3rd parties, or pay for premium.
|
| There's legal precedent already in Europe that this is fine by
| GDPR rules, as long as the price of the subscription is
| "reasonable".
|
| That way they get to preserve (or even improve) their ad
| targeting business, on the assumption that most users will just
| choose selling their data over a subscription. And if they go for
| a subscription, even better. In a sense, let the market decide
| the value of privacy.
|
| The first step in this would obviously be killing any third party
| alternatives that would be the first place of refuge when they
| make that move.
|
| In any case, a pet theory, but there's been a strange convergence
| by these big companies and the way they're changing their
| business models.
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| Reddit Permabanned me (13 year old 450k karma account) after I
| went after crypto scammers, calling out the scam with details
| etc. I got tons of coins or whatever gifted to me and even more
| thanks and way to go from users. Evidently reddit considered it
| harassment (of the plain as day scammers) and won't budge after
| an appeal. So, f reddit.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The appeals aren't monitored by humans in a meaningful way. You
| expect some human to look into it for 10 minutes, see that your
| comments aren't abusive and that there is some merit...
|
| But they have someone once or twice a week look at a list of
| 200 appeals at a time, dismiss all 200 after glancing at the
| subject line of all of them together for 15 seconds, and then
| move on to the next page.
|
| There is nothing they want from a 13 year old account. You're a
| liability. You still use old.reddit.com, they want to get rid
| of that without backlash. You want 2007's reddit back where you
| could have amazingly intelligent discussions on just about
| anything with dozens of other people who are essentially
| anonymous to you. They want to be Facebook, with ijits clicking
| on tiktok videos.
|
| It's quite possibly they're just banning old accounts so they
| can re-invent themselves as a spammy
| Facebook/Instagram/whatever clone. You're in the way.
|
| It'd be a mistake to assume that they're pro-bitcoin-scammer,
| when mostly they're just generically evil and want what you
| liked about Reddit to be long dead.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Funny, something very similar happened to me. 15 year old
| account, 500k comment karma, called out crypto scam - I was
| temp banned for 3 days for harassment, and multiple accounts
| reported my posts for "risk of suicide". Then like 2 days after
| my ban ended, I made a fairly innocuous comment on a video of a
| man falling down a mountain after immediately failing his
| mountainbike stunt - and was perma banned. My comment was in
| response to someone who said something about how brave he was,
| and I said "It's not brave to throw yourself down a mountain.
| It's stupid". Anyways, that was enough to get my account
| permanently banned for "Hate". If that was the standard, I'm
| not sure how my account made it that long considering I've
| probably posted worse things than "That was stupid" over the
| years.
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| I know I'm by far not the only person to be banned for
| calling out crypto scams. At this point I wouldn't doubt a
| good deal of the scams are run from inside Reddit. Comments
| calling out scams often get downvoted 100x or more within
| seconds. Only a bot farm can do that. Any reasonable admin
| could see this and ban all the down voting accounts and the
| ones that upvote the post 100x as well but no, they ban the
| people getting downvoted for calling out the filthy scammer
| scum.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| You can always file a lawsuit. In Germany, it's even easier, a
| C&D court order is enough here to make most of the social
| networks reconsider.
| adastra22 wrote:
| On what basis?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| See e.g. this report: https://christian-
| saefken.de/abmahnen-aber-richtig/
| stuckonempty wrote:
| With the value of website karma and account age being so high,
| you must be ruined
| irusensei wrote:
| I've had an old account which I deleted since there was no easy
| way to clean up the post history. Created a new one and
| couldn't do shit. Can't post. No Karma. Account got closed due
| to "suspicious activity" a week later.
|
| Combine that with the obviously hostile user interface. It's a
| terrible terrible website and nowadays I don't really miss it
| that much.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I'm not sure deleting your account deletes the posts for what
| it's worth. Definitely much harder to track the posts though.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yep, creating a new reddit account nowadays is pretty tough,
| and forget participating in the current conversation as your
| stuff won't show up until a moderator approves it, which can
| take days.
| arbitrage wrote:
| A hit dog hollers, that's for sure. You likely pissed off an
| admin who was heavily leveraged in the crypto markets, or
| actively scamming users.
|
| Seems like reddit's old reputation of being capricious and
| spiteful is still apt. Charming.
| activiation wrote:
| Reddit admins are paid by scammers
| ccooffee wrote:
| > 50 million requests costs $12,000
|
| I've never worked on a web platform like Reddit, nor with any
| per-request priced APIs. Reddit's charge of $0.00024 per request
| still looks like it is _significantly_ above what their own costs
| are.
|
| Wasn't Reddit's pay-for-API-access announcement originally
| phrased as a desire to claw back some of the value that LLMs have
| found in Reddit data? I don't understand how per-request API
| pricing actually accomplishes that. (I was vaguely anticipating
| Reddit's API pricing to have some sort of expensive "firehose"
| endpoint for OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc to pull from.)
|
| It looks like they're instead going to squeeze out all third-
| party apps instead. I don't think this bodes well for Reddit's
| future.
| kenhwang wrote:
| Their pricing likely includes the cost of potential ad revenue
| that an API call is displacing. There's no easy way to
| integrate ads into an API, so they just offload the
| advertising/monetization problem to whoever buys the content.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| APIs should not be revenue generators! I don't mind companies
| charging for an API, either to cover the costs of service or to
| encourage efficient behavior. But Twitter and now Reddit seem
| more like they are rent seeking with their APIs and it's just not
| going to work out well. Particularly galling since they're
| effectively charging to access all this content that users
| generated for free.
|
| The other explanation is these charges are intended to kill third
| party uses of the API. I'm pretty sure that's what is mostly
| motivating Twitter (down to the weed joke price).
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Apollo is such a quality app that I had to delete it because it
| was so addicting.
|
| Good riddance to Reddit. The only sad part is there is no clear
| successor ready to take its place for the minority of subreddits
| that host real communities and serve as a useful distribution
| point for information.
|
| Personally I think the developers of the top Reddit apps should
| get together and develop their own backend that clones the Reddit
| API endpoints but hosts the content on federated instances. Just
| cut out Reddit corporate - what value are they providing when the
| bulk of content creators are using third party apps to browse and
| create content?
| glonq wrote:
| Oh, that sucks. I don't use Apollo, but I imagine that this
| mean's I'll eventually lose RIF, which is an excellent mobile
| client.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| Everyone saying their pricing is absurd had better get ready for
| the new wave of API pricing.
|
| Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things
| are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze"
| where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and
| explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half
| the customer base.
|
| Twitter was one of the first to give access to cheap mass data,
| and now they're one of the first to charge through the nose for
| that. The move is going to be that if you're not enterprise level
| you're not getting this data anymore, and I doubt it stops with
| reddit.
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| If you make more money it's hardly BS. There are supply and
| demand graphs and you can reasonably calculate how many
| customers you lose/gain from a price increase/decrease.
| 9991 wrote:
| reddit's users are creating the content for the other users,
| so a drop in users means less or worse content. Doubt you
| could model easily with a demand chart.
| jeffalyanak wrote:
| It can be rational and still be BS.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| It's only BS because you have to pay more.
| philistine wrote:
| I don't disagree that it's one point of view, but I hardly
| believe both examples do not have a simpler explanation: both
| companies no longer want APIs for third-party clients.
|
| Elon wanted to turn it completely off and was probably
| convinced to ban the accounts of all the third-party clients
| and to try and harass the world's many weather services to pay
| 42,000$ a month.
|
| Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo. He's always
| been fairly transparent about his money flow, so it's
| exceedingly easy for Reddit to price him out and put the fear
| of god into any developer interested in a Reddit client.
| afterburner wrote:
| > Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo.
|
| Do you mean at least one? Because there are many "credible"
| ones, unless I misunderstand what you mean by credible.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable
| consequence arising from the combination of the ease of
| changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the
| nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between
| buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off
| an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
| egberts1 wrote:
| have you seen the latest Reddit app for iOS/macOS and its data
| privacy: there is zero privacy.
|
| This is why I am sticking with the web-based Old Reddit.
|
| Any further strangulation and it's "hasta la vista, Reddit".
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Presumably that's why they've been making old reddit worse over
| time before they turn it off (kinda like i.reddit.com)
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Just a reminder that power delete suite exists, but will probably
| be killed off eventually as well:
| https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
|
| This is a tool to purge your reddit comments. It first edits them
| to something else, then deletes them. Reddit admins have claimed
| that this is a _true_ delete, as opposed to setting a delete
| flag.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I think it has all to do with AI accessing sites for "training",
| you can't blame reddit for wanting a piece of the action. Is the
| price high ? To me it is, but for a large company doing AI,
| probably not.
| duskwuff wrote:
| If it was about restricting access for AI training data, I'd
| expect them to give developers of actual, well-known client
| apps a break.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's all about keeping reddit safe for dark patterns.
|
| There is some good content on reddit still, if you look hard
| to find it, but one thing that makes it hard is that reddit
| blends ads into the content and I think also blends in non-
| sequitur content that further confuses the reader into
| looking at and clicking on the ads.
|
| They just can't let reddit clients provide a good, never mind
| better, experience.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| can't they differentiate between api calls made by third party
| clients and AI training?
|
| this looks more malicious than ignorance or inefficiency. they
| want to mimic twitter by building off of community then
| claiming "costs".
|
| fuck reddit. No redditor wanted them to selfhost photos and
| videos, yet they replaced imgur with their own. Why?
| duskwuff wrote:
| > No redditor wanted them to selfhost photos and videos
|
| Honestly, this was probably one of the more reasonable
| features they've added. Having to upload images on an
| external site added a lot of friction for users, and put
| Imgur in an awkward spot as well when problematic content was
| removed from Reddit, but not from Imgur.
|
| Their video player still sucks, though. I'm not sure how they
| managed to make it so bad.
| SirMaster wrote:
| They say that the free tier API for users will be 100 queries per
| minute.
|
| Why can't a third party app use each user's individual API
| queries for that user's app usage? Like you have the user OAuth
| with the app, and then the app uses that user's own user API
| access to query the API. 100 queries a minutes seems like it
| should be enough for most people.
| jamie_ca wrote:
| Because they're also taking this opportunity to change rate
| limiting from client_id+user_id to just client_id.
|
| To stay inside the free tier, you get 1000 requests spread over
| 10 minutes (their current spike-smoothing behaviour) across
| your entire user base.
| SirMaster wrote:
| I'm not that great at APIs.
|
| Is client_id something you have to register with reddit?
|
| So you can't, for example have a client_id per user?
|
| What if you as the app maker forced all your users who want
| to use your app to go register for their free personal
| client_id for their own personal API use, and then you have
| them give that client_id to the app along with their OAuth
| with they log in?
|
| I am just trying to understand why a third party app can't
| just be a "software shell" that individual users can use to
| access reddit through their own personal free API limits as
| if they were just some individual accessing reddit through
| the API.
| wvenable wrote:
| > Is client_id something you have to register with reddit?
|
| Yes.
| JoshGlazebrook wrote:
| client_id is effectively "apollo" in this context.
| asoneth wrote:
| Many people are pointing out that they're going to lose a huge
| number of users over this, but that seems to be the point of the
| "cutting" phase of bulking and cutting.
|
| (By bulking and cutting I mean eating a calorie surplus to gain
| muscle and fat followed by a calorie deficit to reduce fat while
| hanging on to as much muscle as possible.)
|
| Reddit, Netflix, YouTube... they bulked their user base by
| subsidizing products. Now they're in the cutting phase and
| raising prices, restricting features, and/or increasing ads. They
| know they're going to end up with a significantly smaller user
| base, but if the cutting manages to maintain a large enough
| number of profitable users (muscle) while shedding unprofitable
| users (fat) then the business will end up in better shape.
|
| Alternately one can keep calories stable and slowly increase
| muscle without gaining fat, but that's much slower and harder
| than a bulk/cut cycle, and most people and public companies don't
| have that kind of patience.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Maybe I am just too desktopbrained but it seems weird to charge
| the developer for requests sent by a User Agent, rather than....
| the user.
|
| Are they gonna try to bill google chrome, too?
| rvz wrote:
| Unsurprising as that was inevitable and Reddit needs to make
| money. Unless you can afford the high prices, don't build your
| whole business solely on someone else's API. Twitter made that
| clear and now so did Reddit.
|
| Like I said before in [0]
|
| _" Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you
| purchase a high price for it."_
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087219
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| A good reminder that Reddit is not actually usenet, or even the
| individual forum sites that it ultimately killed off. It's a
| massive surveillance capitalism corporation that ultimately only
| serves its owners.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Consuming an API is a tough business. Between Twitter arbitrarily
| blocking API access, and now both Twitter and Reddit now charging
| obscene rates. It's a death sentence for some really useful
| projects and reduces the total value of the ecosystem.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Why have no platforms launched an ad supported API?
|
| I realise that it's ripe for mis-use as clients could always just
| not display ads, and analytics would be hard as even if the
| client isn't actively malicious, it may fail to display an ad
| that it records as visible which is effectively ad-fraud.
|
| Nevertheless I feel like there are unexplored options here,
| including SDKs rather than web APIs, select partnerships, and
| maybe more. I would imagine if it could be done it would work
| well for Twitter, Reddit, and potentially even Facebook and
| Instagram.
|
| I guess it probably comes down to it being a hard problem with
| little perceived benefit over owning the customer interface, but
| the backlash to these things always feels significant (in my
| bubble at least), and I'd be surprised if these companies didn't
| feel it was an unqualified positive change.
| robryan wrote:
| There is a middle ground where they only audit the ads on the
| big clients. If you are say a top 10 Reddit client by usage it
| is going to be hard to get away with not showing the ads.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Great point. Also there's a range of auditing - from code
| level audits or the inclusion of first-party analytics, to
| spot checks, to self certification.
|
| I've undergone audits for "Sign in with Facebook" usage in
| the past on a small app (~50k FB auth'd users), and it was
| enough of a spot-check that they probably catch egregious
| mis-use with not a lot of effort.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Time to pivot man
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Fuck you, Reddit. A guy develops an app way better than your
| dogshit for FREE and now you want to charge him for API calls?
| Frankly you should be paying him, and it should be a lot of
| money!
| nklmilojevic wrote:
| Well, it is not for free, he earns quite a lot of money for it.
| He is not a philanthropist.
| slushh wrote:
| He will get a better deal. If he has to shut down, he can turn
| Apollo into a lemmy.ml client and migrate a huge part of his
| 500,000 power users. Reddit cannot risk that lemmy.ml becomes
| mainstream.
| robbiet480 wrote:
| I'm shocked that Reddit has done this mere weeks after Twitter
| destroyed their thriving ecosystem of bots and apps by
| introducing horrific pricing.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It is not at all accidental. Elon Musk has given cover for
| other social media sites to imitate many of his moves, such as
| Facebook introducing a subscription tier.
| izzydata wrote:
| Why would they want to imitate a failing business model?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's not about being rational, instead it is a kind of
| "vice signalling" between billionaires.
|
| It would be a better question to ask "Why did Mark
| Zuckerberg buy successful VR game companies and shut their
| games down?" (if you were having fun you wouldn't visit
| _Horizon Worlds_ ) or "Why did Zuckerberg damage a
| successful brand by renaming it?"
|
| It's not about money, it's about power. The primary
| currency of power is deference and if one powerful person
| demonstrates they can take an action and get deference that
| action is appealing to other powerful people who want to
| prove they can to do the same.
| xeromal wrote:
| Now that's the question. Is it a failing business model if
| everyone is starting to do it?
| raydev wrote:
| What's funny is that Reddit's pricing is indeed more reasonable
| than Twitter's, but it's still too high to be make cheap third
| party clients feasible.
| enlyth wrote:
| It's probably the point, they want the official app to be the
| only choice, so they can control everything and show you more
| unblockable ads.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Wonder if they'll be sensible enough to acquire some apps
| after they become worthless to replace official app.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I can see revanced reddit becoming a lot more popular soon.
| TwoNineA wrote:
| The day Apollo dies, the day I will stop using Reddit.
| dkersten wrote:
| Same. I can't stand their web version or their own app.
| It's Apollo or nothing for me.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Fully agreed. Reddit without Apollo, Narwhal, RIF, Sync,
| etc is just plain unusable. The official site and app are
| so blatantly built around pumping "engagement" without
| regard to user experience and are engineered badly to
| boot.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Along the same lines, once old.reddit.com stops working,
| it'll be the end of the line for me as well.
| elaus wrote:
| I just wish one of the countless Reddit alternatives in
| the past ten years had gained any significant amount of
| traction (outside of very niche groups or groups far on
| the political fringe).
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| any dollar amount more than 0 is too much for an open source
| app like infinity or redreader who do not charge any money
| from users
| rvz wrote:
| It doesn't matter. It is their service and the API terms are
| subject to change at any time. So either the API gets blocked
| for third-party clients, or you purchase access for a high
| price.
|
| Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse and TikTok have
| decided to ban third-party apps. Twitter and Reddit decided
| to charge for it.
|
| In this case with the developer of the third party Reddit
| client, unless he is making enough to cover the API costs,
| then it make no sense to build on someone else's API with
| little to no revenue. That is the risk.
|
| It is no different to TapBots (creators of TweetBot) doing
| the same mistake.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but Discord, Instagram, Snapchat,
| Clubhouse, and TikTok all launched with first party apps.
|
| Twitter and Reddit both allowed a thriving third party
| ecosystem to develop _before_ they made apps. (And in both
| cases they just bought the most popular apps.) Hell, the
| word tweet was invented by Twitterific, a third party
| twitter app.
|
| While it certainly is completely up to the platform to
| allow whatever they want, it's shitty to make a change that
| big and alienate many of your original most dedicated
| users.
| alex_lav wrote:
| Company that can't make money desperately tries to gouge profit
| out of stuck users. There's a playbook for this.
| conradfr wrote:
| I'm amazed that one of the most visited website/app in the
| world with highly cacheable (free user generated) content can't
| be profitable (enough?).
| Ekaros wrote:
| In the end users must be for the service in one way or an
| other. Either be it add impressions, subscriptions, selling
| imaginary stickers or charging a lot for using the API...
|
| Not sure why couldn't subscription cover the API use for the
| user.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user
| uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month,
| which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so
| I'd be in the red every month.
|
| I just don't understand why developers underprice their apps so
| much. You're talking about an app that people are constantly
| raving about, and that people use for multiple hours per day.
| Charge $5/month, that's half the price of Netflix or Disney+.
| sorenjan wrote:
| I'm guessing that you work in the tech industry in the US and
| makes $100k+ per year?
|
| $5 is not an insignificant amount to a lot of people all over
| the world, including Europe and maybe the US. Especially when
| every single app and service wants you to subscribe to them
| now, I've heard plenty of people saying they're going to cancel
| their Netflix subscription when password sharing stops working.
|
| 344 requests per day is not worth $5 per month for the average
| user.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| There's no reason for $5/month to be what the average user
| pays. It's for power users who spend way more time on the
| app.
|
| Netflix has introduced ad-supported tiers where you pay less.
| That's the same here, those users can use the website or
| first-party app.
| sorenjan wrote:
| My comment was mostly about the comment about developers
| underpricing their apps. If all apps would charge a minimum
| of $5 there would be a lot fewer app users.
|
| According to Apollo's developer 80% of the users make less
| than 500 requests per day, so I'm guessing the proportion
| of power users making a lot of requests are in the single
| digits. I doubt enough of them want's to pay enough to
| subsidize the others.
|
| There's also the point that using Reddit is a two way
| street. Reddit is made up of user created (or user stolen)
| content, and moderators are working for free. Reddit's
| whole value is made up of user interactions, allowing users
| to make those interactions is not just a cost.
|
| Why should the app developer pay anything at all? The users
| are also Reddit's users, they authenticate and can use
| Reddit's resources in a number of ways, why not charge them
| directly? Will Reddit be sending a bill to Mozilla for my
| page loads?
| raydev wrote:
| > Why should the app developer pay anything at all?
|
| Because Reddit makes money off the ads. They can't
| guarantee third parties will always show the ads in the
| way they've designed.
|
| So now they are charging third parties the cost of losing
| ad views.
| sorenjan wrote:
| So only allow Reddit premium users to use third party
| apps, like how Spotify does.
| [deleted]
| raydev wrote:
| If the user is already paying reddit directly, it's even
| less likely they are using a third party client. All the
| benefits are in the first party app.
|
| And then Reddit would have to audit third party apps to
| ensure paying users are getting what they pay for. Sounds
| more onerous than just making third parties pay up.
| sorenjan wrote:
| I can log in with my Spotify premium account to a number
| of third party clients without expecting them to contain
| the same thing as the official one, no auditing by
| Spotify needed.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > My comment was mostly about the comment about
| developers underpricing their apps. If all apps would
| charge a minimum of $5 there would be a lot fewer app
| users.
|
| Not all apps are worth $5/month, but this particular one
| that people apparently love enough to spend hours per day
| on certainly seems like it should be. A slightly nicer
| calculator app that you use twice a month? $0.99 is fine.
| A professional productivity app that saves a high-value
| worker hours of time? Way more than $5/month.
|
| It's ok if not everyone can afford an app.
|
| > Why should the app developer pay anything at all?
|
| The app developer is just a proxy for the users, who are
| using Reddit without seeing any of Reddit's ads.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| It's a Reddit client. It's marginally better than the
| official one but there is absolutely no way that it's 5$
| a month better to most user. I did purchase it and
| thought it was too expensive for what it is (it's
| noticeably worse than most free Android client for
| exemple) and always refused to pay the subscription
| because, well, it's a bloody Reddit client.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| That's fine, it's not worth it to me either. But if it's
| not worth $5 to anyone, then why is anyone even talking
| about it? If it's not $5 of value, why would anyone care
| if it disappeared?
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| You can't arbitrarily decide that being ready to pay $5 a
| month is magically an appropriate filter under which
| people are not allowed to care. This argument has no
| substance.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| well the problem with mobile apps is the alternatives are free.
| It's a bad business and why I didn't take my passion for mobile
| apps as a career.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| The reddit ones won't be though, unless they scrape instead
| of use the api. I doubt that's viable for a consumer app
| though, Reddit will probably break your app constantly.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| the official app isn't going to remain free?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Ok but the official app is basically unusable. It's
| better to use the browser instead and ignore the annoying
| message telling you to use the app.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| agreed but that's what your up against as an app
| developer. free and shit or good and not free. people
| will deal with shit sadly.
| sosodev wrote:
| I suspect that a fraction of users would convert and many
| others would trash the developer/app for the switch to
| subscription. Users of free apps like this have a seriously
| warped view of software costs.
|
| It seems like Reddit is pushing these changes because that's
| exactly what they want to happen. They want all users to be
| using the free first-party Reddit app.
| kdkdowp wrote:
| LMAO can you imagine paying monthly to use Reddit? That'd be
| like paying monthly to browse this site or 4chan. I think I'd
| reevaluate my life if I considered paying monthly to access
| that cesspool.
|
| Reddit is already nearly entirely astroturfed advertisements,
| and you pay for the site by reading the shill posts that fill
| its pages. The fact that anyone pays Apollo or Reddit for a
| subscription is already just sad. Like paying for cable.
| Alupis wrote:
| I agree. The OP makes the case that it will cost him on average
| $2.50 per month per user - so... charge $3 per month - no blog
| post needed.
|
| Same with Twitter. So many businesses were built upon
| _basically free_ API access and are now shocked the company
| responsible for their app 's customer appeal wants some of that
| action.
|
| It's not Reddit's responsibility to float OP's business and
| make it profitable. OP's billions of monthly requests have a
| real cost for Reddit - and now that Reddit's API is so coveted,
| they can charge whatever they want for it's access.
|
| No Twitter - no Twitter App.
|
| No Reddit - no Reddit App.
|
| It's really simple...
| mmis1000 wrote:
| Honestly, reddit is the only one irritated me enough that I
| get a third party app. The ass behavior of popping sub I
| didn't subscribe and pretend it is a notification of reply to
| me just drives me insane.
|
| They are just truly shitty at make a working app. It's really
| not a business or what, just the official one truly don't
| work.
|
| Popup ad to notification is already bad, pretend it to be
| user message? How the fxxk do they think it is going to
| encourage the engagement?
| lapcat wrote:
| > The OP makes the case that it will cost him on average
| $2.50 per month per user - so... charge $3 per month
|
| Apple takes at least 15% of that, or 30% depending on the
| developer's revenue, leaving $2.55 or $2.10.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Why not just make the users pay for their own API requests?
|
| Reddit even gives each user 100 API queries per minutes for
| free.
|
| Why can't apps use that to access the data for each user?
|
| When I go use an app that talks to OpenAI for example, it
| asks me to put in my API key. So why not just do that for
| third party reddit apps?
|
| I think the app can just ask the user to OAuth with it and
| then it should be able to use that user's API access up to
| the free rate limits.
| manmal wrote:
| I suppose calls need to provide an API secret, and you
| need to register with Reddit (with a credit card) in
| order to get one.
| SirMaster wrote:
| If so yeah, but that wasn't clear to me.
|
| It sounded like an OAuth'd user gets an individual
| allocation of free rate limited API queries (100 per
| minute).
| Alupis wrote:
| The point was - figure out what you need to charge instead
| of complaining you can't profit off someone else's
| resources.
|
| Reddit, Twitter et all don't owe you anything. They do not
| make money via read-access API calls - they lose money.
| It's super simple...
|
| Only a fool would build a business around a free service
| with no escape plan.
| myk9001 wrote:
| While I very much agree with what you're saying in this
| thread: Reddit is not a public service, it's a business,
| and the owners want to make money off it.
|
| I wouldn't call that Apollo app's author a fool. My
| understanding is they were turning a profit from the app
| up to now. So, apparently, it was a nice business. It's
| just that their business model is about to stop working.
|
| Well, that happens to other business too sometimes.
| They'll have to adapt somehow or come up with another
| business. Life as usual.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Reddit, Twitter et all don't owe you anything. They do
| not make money via read-access API calls - they lose
| money. It's super simple...
|
| Twitter eliminated 3rd party clients, and now Twitter is
| estimated to be worth 1/3 of its acquisition price.
| Alupis wrote:
| Seeing how all the numbers are private, I don't know how
| anyone can reasonably estimate it's value. Seeing how
| unaffected Twitter has been in public discourse, and
| media, it seems these estimates are grossly
| underinflated.
|
| Lastly - Twitter's market price has nothing to do with
| it's profitability. That seems obvious, but apparently
| needs to be said here.
| sorenjan wrote:
| If you believe Elon Musk Twitter's current value is less
| than half of what he bought it for ($20B compared to
| $44B).
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/27/tech/elon-musk-
| twitter-si...
| lapcat wrote:
| > Lastly - Twitter's market price has nothing to do with
| it's profitability. That seems obvious, but apparently
| needs to be said here.
|
| It's not profitable. That's why they're cutting to the
| bone and not even paying a lot of their bills.
|
| They had to make an advertising exec the nominal CEO,
| because a lot of advertisers have fled the platform.
| Alupis wrote:
| [flagged]
| lapcat wrote:
| > You forget how unprofitable Twitter has been over the
| past decade.
|
| I haven't forgotten anything.
|
| > It's crazy this stuff needs to be said on HN folks.
|
| This shouldn't need to be said, but "Please don't
| fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of
| the community." "Please respond to the strongest
| plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a
| weaker one that's easier to criticize."
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Alupis wrote:
| The argument you are putting forth boils down to folks
| like Apollo should receive free API access because they
| increase the usefulness of Reddit for end-users.
|
| That would be a fair argument, except for the fact that
| nothing is really free and Apollo currently makes
| millions in profit at Reddit's expense.
|
| That is not sustainable... any business should have
| realized this right from the beginning. Apollo's own
| business model requires income to continue to run... so
| Reddit's doesn't?
|
| This is just a silly discussion to be having. Of course
| Apollo and businesses like Apollo were going to be
| required to pay for API access at some point. The
| business owner complaining "it's not fair", or that it's
| not priced like API's that nobody cares about is just
| staggering.
| lapcat wrote:
| > The argument you are putting forth boils down to folks
| like Apollo should receive free API access
|
| Incorrect. Straw man. I already explained this in another
| comment (which you already replied to, so you know this).
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142316
|
| > Apollo currently makes millions in profit
|
| Citation needed.
|
| > Apollo's own business model requires income to continue
| to run... so Reddit's doesn't?
|
| Reddit is making a lot of income.
|
| > This is just a silly discussion to be having.
|
| Yes, because you keep making extremely uncharitable
| interpretations of my comments.
| raydev wrote:
| Ad revenue cratered for ElonTwitter months before Elon
| banned third party clients. Unrelated events.
| albertopv wrote:
| I spend 5EUR/month for my mobile phone plan, 40GB data cap.
| 5EUR/month for a service extending reddit is quite a lot
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Where in the hell you live where that generous mobile plan
| exists?
| infofarmer wrote:
| You also don't understand how 95% of the world or 80% of HN
| lives. $5/month is a very significant expense.
| benced wrote:
| For the world? Yes it is.
|
| For the average HN user? Lol, no it's not.
|
| I would wager the majority of HN users can point to several
| dumb >=$5 expenses in any given month. If you don't value
| Apollo enough to pay for it, fine. Just don't pretend that
| $60 a year is a morally outrageous amount for software.
| witchesindublin wrote:
| $5 per month for Reddit is silly though. Expensiveness is
| based on the value/return of whatever you are buying.
| generichuman wrote:
| > For the average HN user? Lol, no it's not.
|
| Depends on who you think an average HN user is.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Again, compare to the price for streaming services. Hulu
| charges $8/month an still makes you watch ads.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| That's fine. If you can't or don't want to pay, you can look
| at Reddit's ads. I do not use Reddit very much, so it's not
| worth $5/month to me. But why would I expect to get a third-
| party ad-free client for free?
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| What percent of the app's current customer base do you think
| would stick around at paying $5 a month to browse r/funny on
| the phone?
| Alupis wrote:
| Who cares? It doesn't matter one bit. OP built a profitable
| business off free API access. That is the mistake here...
| assuming it would always be free.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| It matters a lot if most of the userbase relies on these
| separate businesses to either read or moderate the site, as
| seems to be the case.
| Alupis wrote:
| And just like the Twitterocolypse that never was...
| people will just use the official client - or subscribe
| to their favorite reader app.
|
| Complaining you don't get free stuff anymore is really
| unbecoming of an entrepreneur.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Complaining you don't get free stuff anymore is really
| unbecoming of an entrepreneur.
|
| He wasn't complaining about that. He was led to believe
| that the price would be reasonable, and he was willing to
| pay a reasonable price, as he already pays Imgur.
| Alupis wrote:
| Imgur does not generate content and interest on the same
| level of Reddit/Twitter, etc. It would not be reasonable
| to assume similar API pricing.
|
| It seems the OP has a very distorted impression of what
| "reasonable" means to another for-profit company.
| raydev wrote:
| How does the Apollo maintainer get to decide what's a
| reasonable price? It certainly can't be through hand-wavy
| and supposedly "generous" estimations of how much money
| Reddit makes.
|
| Only Reddit knows how much money it loses per user who
| doesn't see ads.
| lapcat wrote:
| > How does the Apollo maintainer get to decide what's a
| reasonable price?
|
| Prices are a two-way street. You can name any price you
| like, but if buyers can't afford it, then you make $0.
|
| This is why the developer himself can't just raise his
| own prices by any arbitrary amount. Buyers have some say
| in the price.
| raydev wrote:
| > This is why the developer himself can't just raise his
| own prices by any arbitrary amount. Buyers have some say
| in the price.
|
| Indeed, but this is the risk in selling a middleware
| product. The Apollo developer doesn't own the platform,
| and was lucky he hadn't yet been asked to pay for the
| share of maintenance costs his app created.
| theRealMe wrote:
| Maybe it's just because I don't know the Reddit API, but doesn't
| caching semi-solve the problem? At Applo's scale at least?
|
| I HAVE to assume there is quite a bit of overlap in Apollo's
| mentioned 7 billion Reddit api requests last month...
| Banbeck wrote:
| The day I can't use Apollo to browse Reddit is the day I ditch it
| entirely. It's mostly just a toilet scroller for me anyways.
| weystrom wrote:
| What we need is a resurgence of specialty forums, but there's no
| good modern forum engine around, at least I'm not aware of one.
| dcchambers wrote:
| If the primary complaint from Reddit is that they are losing
| revenue (no ad impressions/lack of user data and metrics
| gathering) why don't they just keep the API free/affordable but
| require developers to show ads and send usage metrics back to
| reddit?
|
| I feel like it's incredibly short sighted for these companies to
| limit their APIs.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Doesn't thins kind of do that while putting all the work and
| risk on to the third parties? Apollo will either find revenue
| to support the cost, or someone else will, or no one will and
| then Reddit can maybe lower the price.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| So... Everyone is moving back to Slashdot?
| Undrafted7 wrote:
| For what it's worth, I literally just created my first HN account
| after seeing the Apollo dev's post. Hope I don't bring down
| y'all's collective IQ by being here lol.
| elbigbad wrote:
| I found Apollo to be fairly shady. I paid for the app and they
| "lost" my account or something so suddenly I could no longer use
| the pro features. Pretty lame, no amount of support could help,
| so I used the app for a while as a free user because I didn't
| want to pay twice. One day they pushed like 50 modals over the
| course of a day to "upgrade to pro" and eventually moved to a
| monthly subscription service, which suddenly made me realize why
| they "couldn't find" my previous account.
|
| Love the features, but feels shady to me still. The API pricing
| thing does suck, but at this point I'm not willing to throw any
| money at them.
| winrid wrote:
| I guess I'm charging too little. 50m GET requests would only be
| $500 with fastcomments lol
| mongol wrote:
| Something like this at first feels like bad news, but may later
| turn out to be good. If something hooks me off Reddit and I use
| my time better, it is a net positive, for me. Unfortunately,
| Reddit has good parts to which I don't know alternatives. For
| example, right now I am studying for a certification and there is
| a subreddit for that. I recently bought an e-bike and there was a
| subreddit for that. It is useful.
| jlmorton wrote:
| Here's a much more informative post [1] from Apollo developer
| Christian on Reddit last month, along with an older post [2] with
| some additional info.
|
| [1]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
|
| [2]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
| rjh29 wrote:
| I'm confused as your first link is the same link as this HN
| post - unless mods have changed it.
| [deleted]
| jlmorton wrote:
| Yeah, the post was originally a link to Daring Fireball [1].
|
| [1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/05/31/reddit-
| apollo-a...
| Arcuru wrote:
| A few threads have been merged into this one, so some of the
| comments were on submissions that linked elsewhere.
| jdwithit wrote:
| Mods merged 2 or 3 posts into this one, there were several
| dupes
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| Seriously, does anyone think it won't be different with APIs from
| other vendors... like ChatGPT?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Right now GPT-4 is the clear front-runner. But it could easily
| be the case that in a few months there will be someone else in
| the lead. And Claude/Bard are already catching up. What I'm
| saying is that LLMs are more of a commodity than Reddit is. If
| one locks out 3rd party developers then another can become the
| favorite.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| The irony of the sheer number of awards people are giving each
| other on that post, which if I am not mistaken, is just lining
| Reddit's pockets.
| malikNF wrote:
| Every few years we rediscover centralization even if they start
| off as open-source community driven yada yada and the eventually
| lead to walled gardens.
|
| I love reddit but recently they are starting to make it harder to
| use their services. Eventually its going to turn in to a cesspool
| just like facebook. Something new is gonna come open to all we
| promise its always free and then repeat.
| cloudking wrote:
| They should just acquire it.
| superfrank wrote:
| I don't know how many employees Apollo App has, but I wonder if a
| viable solution is just to build their own Reddit? I realize
| that's a massive task, but if the only other option is shut the
| company down, it might be worth exploring. They've already got
| the interface built and if you remove a lot of the bells and
| whistles, Reddit is a pretty simple app other than the scale at
| which they operate (which is obviously a massive challenge).
| Tsiklon wrote:
| I think Apollo is a "one man band"
| TechnicolorByte wrote:
| Honestly not a bad idea. Apollo has such a dedicated fanbase
| that if you get them to adopt a new community, then the quality
| of posts will start out pretty high. So much of Reddit is crap
| anyway so drop in quantity from lack of network effect wouldn't
| be such a bad thing. Focus on Apollo's strengths: great UX and
| bring it to the web.
|
| Ofc the major issue is how to avoid enshittification. Having a
| good monetization strategy from the start is key. Hardest part
| besides attracting large user count is to attack some of
| Reddit's failings: terrible arbitrary moderation. That's the
| tricky part.
| lxchase wrote:
| Late to the party and this may get buried, but wanted to add a
| contextual POV. I'm an Apollo user, and I am also someone who was
| Reddit's earliest enterprise advertisers. As in, the campaigns
| I've green lit are perhaps still in their advertising media decks
| as case studies.
|
| Reddit for the past few years have been changing the UX to
| benefit their revenue streams. Visit any reddit thread on a
| mobile browser, and get a nag to download the official app. Their
| app is less likely to be blocked by ad blockers, has advertising
| SDKs, and can link advertising parameters.
|
| I believe certain threads need you to login. It is also in their
| best interest to find opportunities for you to login to again
| link browse behavior. Forgot to mention, the app also allows a
| logged in state to persist easier than browser.
|
| TL;DR All of Reddit's UX decisions have been to grow their
| revenue stream.
|
| Do they have the right to do so? Of course. Does it suck for this
| audience in particular, probably. In my opinion, they will lose
| their early adopters and perhaps some power users. Is that a risk
| they are taking? Clearly.
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| Scrape the website, take up more of their bandwidth. Remind them
| of why the original engineers created the API in the first place!
| Banbeck wrote:
| Well, looks like this is the end of any social media use for me.
| Reddit was already hanging by a thread for me. Not being able to
| use Apollo for this will be the last nail in the coffin.
| thewataccount wrote:
| Serious question and I don't mean anything negative - Do you
| consider HN to be social media?
|
| Using it as just a news source seems really valid.
|
| And it feels different from other social media platforms
| because of the focus on full discussions. But surely this still
| counts as social media?
|
| Genuinely asking because I see you made your account just to
| post this comment - why did you do that? It's not a bad thing
| (I'm here too), I'm just curious why you felt it was important
| to do?
| nottorp wrote:
| I've noticed that everything that allows interaction between
| users is social media for the younger generation. They have
| no notion of forum, chat app or... social media organized
| like facebook or tiktok.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I don't consider HN a social network anymore than I consider
| my local news website (which also has comments) to be social
| media.
| dylan604 wrote:
| isn't that a website utilizing features of web2.0? seems
| like there is a bit of fuzziness when separating socials
| from web2.0. not really sure why
| adastra22 wrote:
| Yes. But the question was about social media not web2.0.
| Unrelated topics.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Leaving comments on a website is what I was referring to.
| The GGP commented that news sites allow comments, which I
| stated was a web2.0 feature that does not make the site
| using it a social media site which supports the original
| comment's sentiment as well. hopefully that clears up
| your confusion
| irrational wrote:
| No. It is not social media. Neither is Reddit. Social media
| is any platform that can be used to track you down to send
| you an invite to your high school reunion. That is, it is not
| anonymous. Social media is social - real people interacting
| with each other in a non anonymous manner. I have no proof
| that anyone on here, or Reddit, is not a bot except for me.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Social media usually let you subscribe to specific
| users/groups, whether via friend requests or something else.
| The result is a network of users who follow each other. HN on
| the other hand doesn't feel more "social" to me than any
| oldschool forum. The focus is on content and usernames only
| exist to tell them apart.
| bigthymer wrote:
| > Do you consider HN to be social media?
|
| I think this site will get a flood of new users from Reddit
| once the axe drops. I think this will cause the quality of
| discussions to go down.
| azemetre wrote:
| I don't think so, this site is extremely slow compared to
| any other social media (slow as in not much content). I
| honestly wouldn't be shocked if hn had a slightly larger
| audience compared to fark.
|
| I suppose time will tell.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| It's already been happening for years.
| csydas wrote:
| I think social media is a vague term that has lost its
| original meaning, whatever that was. [0]
|
| Especially with modern tech, very few pieces of technology
| act as a single purpose; my phone can be just a phone, just a
| camera, just a chat application, or any combination of the
| above. Whether it's a toy or a work tool or a social media
| device changes depending on how its being used.
|
| HackerNews is the same, in that you can just use it as a link
| aggregator, maybe you like it as a "classic" forum, maybe you
| use it for advertising. (HN-ready articles that are basically
| advertisements are quite common and popular even)
|
| I think before anyone can really answer if something is
| social media or not, it needs to be better defined what it
| actually encompasses now as oppose to when the term was
| coined. Like, is a Glade AirFreshner a social media device
| just because you can tweet from it?
|
| 0 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8064945/pdf/
| cyb... I guess this says it originated in 1990? But it
| doesn't seem well defined.
| mongol wrote:
| Yes I would, but not in the most common sense. Basically, I
| would categorize any internet forum or bulletin board a
| social media. At least if you go by some kind of identity and
| that identity persists. As opposed to traditional media,
| which was broadcast only (through airwaves or paper).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I think the proper contrast isn't "airwaves or paper" vs
| "internet" but "one-to-many" vs "many-to-many". The
| internet is a key enabling technology for many-to-many mass
| media, but a top-down one-way editorial-content website is
| as much traditional media as a newspaper.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Probably any media aggregator where you can submit content
| and vote on it qualifies as social media. So yes, HN is
| social media, and has some of the negatives that social media
| engenders (e.g. outrage-driven comments, low-quality
| discussion, people optimizing their lives around accruing
| pointless karma).
|
| But, without a social graph, I wouldn't call it a social
| _network_ , so it does not suffer a lot of the problems
| social networks have (e.g. echo chambers, ostracizing
| members, showing off, influencers, and many others).
|
| Social media has problems, social networks have problems, and
| social media which leverages a social graph has a whole
| different class of problems. Ironically, the relative
| primitiveness of HN protects it from at least _some_ of the
| worst elements of the internet.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I think the main argument is to avoid Social Media that comes
| along with the baggage of the big platforms. I think the
| downsides to HN are so much smaller and few, that it's easy
| for me to consider "forum-like" social activity completely
| separate from typical Social Media.
| go_prodev wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, what do you plan to use for
| news/entertainment instead? I don't use Facebook, and generally
| alternate between HN and Reddit whenever I need a break from
| work and don't know any other good options.
| zeekaran wrote:
| [flagged]
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| Same. I only find Reddit tolerable because of Apollo. The
| official Reddit app pales in comparison.
|
| I hope they can come to some sort of agreement or find a way to
| acquihire the Apollo developer (though that might kill the app
| with crappy features as well).
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I've always just used the web, is there some reason to use an
| app for it? I liked it as a place to look for people talking
| about things I might want to buy. I'm sure it is full of fake
| comments, but the ones that make verifiable claims for or
| against are useful.
| rattus wrote:
| they're starting to featurewall more actively
| Eji1700 wrote:
| I've used RES + web + adblockers forever. Any app i've
| looked at is usually more cluttered than that.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > is there some reason to use an app for it?
|
| Yes, the obstructive popup when you visit reddit on a
| mobile browser to force you into installing the app. Other
| than that only if you want to do more than read.
| cmh89 wrote:
| It makes me laugh that reddit's mobile site will let you
| view NSFW content but wont let you go to the contents of
| a NSFW post without downloading the app or signing in.
|
| Reddits main function as a porn facilitator will really
| hamper its desire to make lots of money as a publicly-
| traded business.
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| My understanding is they're actively working to minimise
| NSFW communities in lede to the IPO.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's funny they're still pushing it after Tumblr, and
| also considering 5ch.net always had the NSFW part in a
| different domain(not subdomain). It's as if everyone
| knows and some always knew...
| cmh89 wrote:
| The NSFW content feels like its just ads for OnlyFans
| accounts at this point. The NSFW subs suffer from the
| fate that all the other subs do, Reddit is too large at
| this point to cultivate any real, organic community.
| goodmachine wrote:
| Another happy Apollo user here. Reddit is painful without it.
| wnevets wrote:
| If Reddit wants to _Digg_ itself, so be it. If I can 't use my
| favorite 3rd party app my usage will drop like a rock. Its
| current usefulness probably means my usage won't disappear
| completely like twitter but it will be severely reduced. I can't
| imagine I'm the only reddit user who feels this way.
| digdigdag wrote:
| Disappointing. Sad to see such a wonderful app likely meet its
| end. This is to be expected when you pin your existence on the
| good graces of a for-profit company.
|
| Reddit wants IPO. Badly. They want to show potential investors
| that they're solvent. To this end, as Google did nearly two
| decades ago, they will monetize every inch of their user base and
| application -- that includes access to their data.
|
| But Reddit is on thin ice -- as MySpace, Digg, del.icio.us all
| found out and as Twitter is finding out.
|
| Why? Reddit doesn't have any asset of intrinsic value. Reddit
| don't have sought after intellectual property. Reddit doesn't
| produce any goods. Reddit's value is the community and the data
| they bring. When they antagonize the community, they are
| antagonizing what is keeping the lights on for them.
| jiscariot wrote:
| I think there is also value to the general online/web
| community, in keeping the reddit community on reddit.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Reddit is too big for there to be a "Reddit community"... any
| other online community (like HN) is probably already full of
| people who also frequent Reddit.
| throwaway106382 wrote:
| [dead]
| s1k3s wrote:
| Reading the comments in their announcement thread[0] reminds me
| of the "I'm leaving to Canada" from the Trump era. I'm sure they
| did the math and I'm sure Reddit will be just fine.
|
| [0]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Switching to a new trendy online platform is very, very
| different from migrating to another country and all that comes
| with it. It takes a few minutes at most.
|
| Imagine where Meta would be now if it hadn't just bought up all
| competition from WhatsApp to Instagram.
| s1k3s wrote:
| Of course it is, yet people still stormed social media
| claiming they'd do it.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Why are capitalists always so surprised when capitalism
| capitalizes on other capitalists?
| abe-101 wrote:
| Funny how Reddit allows this post to be on the front page
| xavdid wrote:
| I got nervous that the API changes would be the end of Apollo,
| and thus largely the end of my Reddit use. So, I made a way to
| export all of my post and comment data into a searchable SQLite
| archive:
|
| https://github.com/xavdid/reddit-user-to-sqlite/
|
| It can pull your recent activity from the API, but also has
| support for pulling data from a GDPR archive (a feature I'm very
| proud of).
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Reddit sucks
| flenserboy wrote:
| All part of the process of TVifying the internet. It is
| considered dangerous for people to be able to communicate, to
| speak their minds about products and politicians, and the power
| of commercial interests combined with government is speeding this
| degradation along.
| aSockPuppeteer wrote:
| Off to Teddit or?
|
| https://teddit.net/about
|
| Or self host your own. https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| This will basically kill 3rd apps. I refuse to use their official
| client.
|
| Where are you guys moving on next?
| willio58 wrote:
| Wow, that price is insane. To me, that's pretty clearly a shot at
| any competitor apps for Reddit. Purely anti-competitive behavior
| here, which to me is silly. Let other apps pop up to better serve
| your users. At the end of the day, they are still your users and
| you might learn things from the other apps.
|
| Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term
| profits over user happiness and long-term growth.
| thesid wrote:
| > At the end of the day, they are still your users and you
| might learn things from the other apps.
|
| but those users don't see ads on 3rd party apps. they already
| know what all they can implement to improve user experience.
| they just wont, willingly
| abletonlive wrote:
| The idea that it's anti-competitive to do with your platform
| what you want is in my mind silly. There is absolutely nothing
| stopping you from building a reddit clone to compete against
| reddit besides your ability to attract their users.
|
| It comes off as extremely entitled to think that reddit should
| supply you with the data created by their platform to do what
| you want with it.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Reddit didn't create data. I did, you did, random users did.
| Why did it happen on Reddit? Because Reddit, at least for a
| while, seemed like it was a relatively open place where data
| wouldn't be stuck and made inaccessible without an account.
|
| Reddit exists _despite_ Reddit's incompetent management and
| tech teams, not thanks to them.
| buildbot wrote:
| Um, the users create the data, and consume it. Reddit
| provides a "marketplace" for that, and sells your data in
| exchange. Now, they want to rent-seek from the very people
| making it possible to create and consume that content easily.
|
| And it IMO, is anti-competitive - they are intentionally
| killing all existing competitors, vs. improving their own
| offering.
| abletonlive wrote:
| Apollo is not a competitor to reddit, it's a consumer of
| reddit. Those are very distinct things. It literally
| doesn't even exist without reddit.
|
| If I have a backyard and let you host a couple concerts in
| it free of charge and then next year I decide "hmm, I think
| I should be paid for those concerts you're hosting in my
| backyard" is that anti-competitive?
|
| Absolutely not.
| primax wrote:
| Apollo is also a producer to Reddit, as a large portion
| of its users use the app and contribute data via it
| nomel wrote:
| > Purely anti-competitive behavior here
|
| An app that uses reddit is not a competitor to reddit, it's a
| client of reddit. No definition of "anti-competitive" applies
| here.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Except there's a first party client for Reddit, so they're
| both a client and server. Their client competes with other
| clients, and they use their control over the server to give
| their client an advantage.
|
| Now, whether this constitutes "anti competitive" in the legal
| sense is probably not going to fly in court: it's unlikely
| Reddit can be compelled to offer an API at any particular
| price. It's their service, they can do what they want with
| it. Rather, it's a lesson that third parties should not be
| developing clients for other company's services, as it is
| building a foundation on quicksand.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term
| profits over user happiness and long-term growth.
|
| That's pretty much the definition of enshittification.
| kenhwang wrote:
| On the other hand, I think the price is damn steal. If Apollo's
| numbers are to be believed, Reddit is willing to sell its
| traffic at ~$2.50/user/month. That's half the value of a pre-
| Musk Twitter user and a third of the value of a Facebook or
| video streaming user.
|
| So, if you already have a sophisticated ad tech and sales team,
| you'd be able to pull 50%+ profit margin without having to
| worry about running the infrastructure for content.
|
| That being said, there's maybe only a handful of companies with
| a more competent ad tech/sales team than Reddit, and Reddit's
| is pretty damn bad. So while the numbers make sense, the
| strategy does not given the competencies available in the
| market they're trying to sell in.
| fooey wrote:
| none of the 3rd party apps are real companies with resources
|
| they're passion hobby projects that'll disappear rather than
| turn into a job
| kenhwang wrote:
| You're still allowed to use the API for passion/personal
| use. They're "passion hobby projects" trying that collect
| revenue by selling the app to other users. It's
| disingenuous to pretend they're not also a business.
|
| If you're building your business to be completely reliant
| on another unsustainable, unprofitable business, don't be
| too surprised when they ask you to help row or get off the
| boat before it sinks.
|
| For API restrictions, Reddit has been in a doomed if they
| do, doomed if they don't situation for a while now. I think
| there's about a thousand other better decisions they
| could've made before being forced to make this one about
| API usage, but I also don't see their numbers and their
| time simply might've already run out.
| privacyking wrote:
| There's plenty of FOSS apps that will be impacted from
| this that don't charge any money
| ac29 wrote:
| > If Apollo's numbers are to be believed, Reddit is willing
| to sell its traffic at ~$2.50/user/month.
|
| That's only one side of it though. According to the same
| post, Reddit's ad revenue is closer to $0.12/user/month. So,
| they are apparently willing to sell traffic to advertisers
| for a much much lower price than API users.
| rjh29 wrote:
| I blocked reddit for a week. I was much more productive and I'm
| having a hard time thinking of what I missed out on. I told
| myself it was full of interesting discussions but I basically
| forgot all of it the second I had closed the tab.
| AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote:
| This is what it comes down to. I've spent too much time in the
| last 10 years on Reddit, and I have absolutely no issue with
| dropping it.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It worked great for Twitter, I'm sure it will be an incredible
| success for Reddit as well. </sarcasm>
|
| Hopefully one more nudge towards decentralized services and open
| standards.
| [deleted]
| Zemtomo wrote:
| Using reddit only for porn.
|
| So I'm quite happy if they destroy themselves. I spend too much
| time on it anyway
| schoolornot wrote:
| Seems odd to only charge developers. Make API use part of Gold
| and call it a day.
| Terretta wrote:
| Daring Fireball framing is unfortunate: "Apollo is making API
| calls"...
|
| No, users who want a usable Reddit are making API calls.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| Reddit is getting destroyed by tiktok for casual news/random
| videos etc.
|
| I was a huge reddit user over the years, but now I only go there
| for a handful of very specific subreddits. That's really it's
| only use anymore. It's great for that, but they are probably
| seeing massive decline in usage.
|
| And the moment they basically kill 3rd party reddit apps is the
| day I barely touch it again.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Reddit is getting destroyed by tiktok for casual news
| /random videos etc._
|
| Yes please. Random videos should move to TikTok.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| I can't really agree. The curation on reddit just far, far
| better outside of the super generic frontpage subreddits. Tik
| tok is 99% garbage content.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| My experience is the opposite. TikTok curation is incredibly
| efficient at honing in on the content niches that appeal to
| you. My TikTok feed feels very personal, I regularly interact
| in the comments and find some truly insightful discussions
| there. Reddit is a totally random mess of crap that I used to
| like. The manual curation of subreddits feels outdated and a
| pain compared to TikTok's ability to "organically" bring me
| to content that I am interested in at the moment.
| SSLy wrote:
| How do you initially train the tiktok algo? I don't have
| the willpower to wade through videos of children crying or
| dancing, acapella singers, people having small accidents,
| and so on.
|
| And I swipe next as soon as I realize it's this kind of
| content.
| travelton wrote:
| It's far more efficient to search and subscribe to
| accounts that produce content you're interested in.
| Consider disliking things to help the algorithm figure
| out your interests. Long hold on any video, tap "Not
| Interested".
| JoshGlazebrook wrote:
| You already described how to train it. It can't magically
| know what you are into without any input.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| [dead]
| emodendroket wrote:
| I think the problem is the garbage content is where the money
| is.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| >The curation on reddit just far, far better outside of the
| super generic frontpage subreddits.
|
| Even smaller subreddits can be pretty terrible with bad mods.
|
| A lot of smaller hobby subreddits are basically treated as
| facebook groups, with people treating it as a group for
| people with an interest and not a focused discussion _about_
| that interest,
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Sure, bad mods are a problem sometimes. But you also run
| into a lot of extremely knowledgeable users in your
| particular area of interest and can actually have great
| back and forth discussion.
|
| Be it cars, bikes, coffee, firearms, you name it.
|
| For hobbies I've found Tiktok is riddled with low quality
| content.
|
| I suppose it really depends what you're looking for.
| [deleted]
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| Oh, no arguments there. When it's good, it's great. It's
| just frustrating to be used to that level of quality and
| end up with a bunch of garbage content you have to wade
| through to get to the good stuff.
| witchesindublin wrote:
| The other side of the argument is that, when Reddit is
| actually doing a good job for these niche communities, is
| it different to the old forum culture or a discord
| server?
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| Culturally, I'd argue no. In terms of UX and permanence,
| I'd argue yes. Reddit is a lot easier for someone to
| search after the fact and find good info, and it's a lot
| easier to follow individual comments on a big Reddit
| thread than it is to try to follow the chain-of-quotes on
| an old-style forum.
|
| Discord is good but it's a chat app first and foremost
| and it's a pain to search for esoteric information,
| especially since you have to be _in_ the server in
| question to even search.
| arbitrage wrote:
| > Tik tok is 99% garbage content.
|
| You're likely not using TikTok effectively. I personally use
| it, and all my engagements with it are 100% relevant to my
| interests.
| witchesindublin wrote:
| The main problem with Reddit is the moderation. It all hit
| the wall when Trump was elected and the Reddit directors
| decided to run around like chickens and clamp down on half
| the community. The website has become a far-left US-centric
| mass market echochamber.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| For political subreddits, sure. But I'd argue there aren't
| really any great places on the internet to actually have
| nuanced political discussion anyways. It's dominated by
| folks with too much time on their hands... either radically
| far left or radically far right. And each group ostracizes
| members that don't subscribe to their brand or level of
| extremism.
|
| Bottom line is it depends what kind of content you're
| looking for. For niche interests/hobbies, Reddit is very
| hard to beat.
| witchesindublin wrote:
| I think you are looking for the old forum culture that
| used to exist before Reddit came along. Reddit is weak
| because it is either segregating people into subreddits
| and echo-chambers (making it just an over-moderated
| monopolistic forum killer), or it is a tool to force you
| to read political stuff that you don't want to get into,
| or it is an over-moderated amphitheater for far-left
| chauvinism. What exactly is the point of the "Reddit
| system" if you're basically trying to mimic what used to
| exist in the forum culture pre-reddit?
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| But that's what I mean- for the few specific places to go,
| sure it's great. However I only need to go to something like
| an /r/nfl or /r/valheim for a few minutes each day to catch
| up on some specific news like that I want to see.
|
| For checking out completely random things, or funny things,
| or just to brwose around... that's where tiktok destroys them
| now.
|
| >Tiktok is 99% garbage content
|
| That's... a statement.
| lastangryman wrote:
| That API pricing, for what is mostly static content, is just
| insane. I've created pricing models for write heavy APIs that
| come out at a fraction of that, while still maintaining a margin.
| If that's a genuinely "fair" price then Reddit have some serious
| technical debt. It feels like this is intentionally overpriced to
| discourage any serious use.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| I see your point but mostly pricing is not based on cost, it's
| what the market will bear. Could be way above cost or way below
| time0ut wrote:
| Over 90% of my reddit usage is through Apollo. Sounds like I'll
| have to find another way to kill a few minutes while I am eating
| lunch or waiting on a bus.
| bink wrote:
| Reddit has a long history of making truly brain-dead decisions
| and following them up with something slightly more reasonable. I
| can only hope this is another case.
| yreg wrote:
| I think the devs of Apollo, RIF and the other major 3rd party
| clients should spin up an alternative reddit backend. They can
| let their users chose whether they want to connect to reddit
| proper (and purchase API tokens) or to the new custom one.
|
| I imagine that with the userbase these apps have they could
| succeed and perhaps do some less greedy/intrusive monetization.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I stopped using Reddit last week when they shadowbanned me for, I
| assume because you cannot know for sure, saying something related
| to gun violence in America and my local area in a political
| subreddit. I only ever commented about sim-racing at any other
| point in that account's life, and so perhaps it was shadowbanned
| for posting my own YouTube videos that were not monitized and had
| like a dozen views? I don't know, and I don't care, my mental
| health has never been better than the past week!
|
| tl;dr: I quit Reddit because I didn't want to make yet another
| account, and my life is better for it.
|
| Edit: Also, I've been trying not to come into HN political and
| pop-culture threads too much, but am failing at that. Maybe today
| is the day I start just hitting the technical threads!
| GiorgioG wrote:
| I won't be renewing my Reddit Premium. Clueless management doing
| what they do best.
|
| Edit: just to put my money with my mouth is, Reddit Premium sub
| cancelled.
| zeekaran wrote:
| [flagged]
| grrrate wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| bluescrn wrote:
| Please Reddit, just let us use a web browser to access your web
| site.
|
| Users shouldn't be forced so aggressively into using an 'app' -
| whether the official one or a 3rd-party app - when mobile web
| browsers are so very capable.
| PNewling wrote:
| Have you tried using the 'old' reddit? Replacing 'www.' with
| 'old.' will move you over to the old style of reddit and will
| keep you there when clicking through links.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/all/
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| or you could log in and set your UI preferences to the old
| and then it's always that look. Stop lurking!
| blowski wrote:
| They've got rid of the alternative mobile UI (I.reddit.com).
| And a lot of links from old.reddit.com redirect to the main
| site.
| tangus wrote:
| Try this: https://old.reddit.com/r/all/.i
|
| Unfortunately it doesn't keep across links.
| kioleanu wrote:
| Teddit.net is what you're looking for. It can get slow,
| but there are a lot of instances and you can also self
| host
| m348e912 wrote:
| old.reddit.com and Apollo are the only things that makes
| reddit usable. I suspect that there are plans to do away with
| old.reddit.com at some point.
|
| Maybe that will be reddit's Digg exodus moment.
|
| I read a thread on reddit about the api fees where commenters
| called out HN as the next site to move to. Hopefully not.
| bakugo wrote:
| > reddit's Digg exodus moment
|
| People keep bringing this up and I feel like there's a
| fundamental misunderstanding going on. The internet of 2010
| is not the internet of today, not even close.
|
| The average reddit user of today isn't going to stop using
| reddit due to problems like this because they just don't
| care, at all. They don't care about the new web design
| being a massive downgrade over the old one because they're
| used to every website looking like that, they have no
| complaints, many of them probably don't even know the old
| design still exists. They don't care that the app sucks and
| is full of ads because, again, most official apps for most
| websites are like that, it's the new normal. They just want
| to scroll through funny meme videos on their phone for a
| while and don't think about it beyond that, the age of the
| average user having standards is long, long gone.
| costco wrote:
| Exactly right and saddening as well. Their growth
| strategy is clearly working because based on MAU graphs
| it seems like most Reddit users joined in the past 2-3
| years which is when all this stuff started. I wouldn't be
| surprised if the average comment length is half of what
| it was even 5 years ago. A lot of the growth seems to
| have come from mobile users but mobile users are terrible
| from a comment quality perspective so I hope this
| ultimately backfires in some way though I'm not hopeful.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| If the digg exodus taught C level's anything, it's that
| digg's target market isn't worth marketing to. They're
| too picky. Reddit and everyone else has used that market
| to get the ball off the ground and then pivot AWAY from
| them ever since. The last thing you want is a userbase
| that has opinions when there's so many out there who will
| put up with anything.
| kgwxd wrote:
| And you can append .rss /r/all.rss to any sub. Never have to
| reskim a headline and all the links open in old.reddit
| adzm wrote:
| If you have an account you can also just tell it to use the
| old / desktop site in settings.
| azemetre wrote:
| Ever since learning the phrase "enshittification" [1] from Cory
| Doctorow it becomes more apparent when it happens around you.
|
| I wonder if there is a "fediverse" for something like forums? I
| can never get into mastodon because it's not like forums and
| conversations between people are quite hard if you don't follow
| them.
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
| avdlinde wrote:
| Unfortunately that wired website seems to be following the
| enshittification protocol.
| azemetre wrote:
| Sorry you aren't able to read it, he also talks about it
| here as well:
|
| https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
|
| Oddly enough I can't find it actually on his blog.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| >I wonder if there is a "fediverse" for something like
| forums?
|
| Closest thing I can think of is the .win communities which
| are very reddit-like in interface, but unfortunately mostly
| uh.... radical.
|
| Reddit itself was open-source until 2018. I wonder if someone
| could easily spin up a docker container that allows one to
| self-host a local instance (e.g. one subreddit)
| proto_lambda wrote:
| Something like that could probably be built on top of the
| matrix protocol, I'm not aware of anything concrete though.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.discourse.org/ with a discovery mechanism?
| Would be cool to get Keybase out of Zoom to use for pki
| identity across various communities. Seems like all the
| primitives are there, just a lot of grind to do it.
|
| Users->Discovery Mechanism->Topics->Threads with all of the
| trimmings.
| rapnie wrote:
| 3 different forum softwares are working on ActivityPub
| support: Discourse (via The Pavilion), Flarum, and
| nodeBB.
| azemetre wrote:
| That's cool, will definitely be checking back on it from
| time to time.
| omnibrain wrote:
| > I wonder if there is a "fediverse" for something like
| forums? I can never get into mastodon because it's not like
| forums and conversations between people are quite hard if you
| don't follow them.
|
| Usenet. But it fell out of fashion around the turn of the
| millenium.
| pembrook wrote:
| > _Ever since learning the phrase "enshittification" [1] from
| Cory Doctorow it becomes more apparent when it happens around
| you._
|
| This is just the natural lifecycle of all things involving
| humans. Why people want the same stuff to remain dominant
| forever is baffling to me. I can imagine nothing worse.
| Reddit dying off to leave space for something new and fresh
| is a good thing.
|
| Social media sites do seem to go through the cycle even
| faster though--probably because they're essentially digital
| nightclubs. We all know of that one hip club that everybody
| waited in line for in our 20s, and then suddenly the drinks
| get too expensive and the crowd gets older and uncool...and
| then suddenly there's no line out front anymore. And there's
| a new spot in town where the young people cluster.
|
| Before Reddit there was Digg. After Reddit, I'm confident
| there will be something else.
| m463 wrote:
| enshittification might be more like the ship of theseus. The
| original reddit was started by an interesting group of people
| with different ideas and ideals than who is there now.
|
| The people making up reddit might have been replaced with
| completely different people - with different motivations,
| behaviors, and expectations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
| azemetre wrote:
| Not in my view. Enshittification is more about the business
| cycle of sucking everything dry for the pursuit of money.
| Users be damned. At least that's how I read it, ship of
| theseus is more of an interesting thought experiment but
| not exactly related.
| 7v3x3n3sem9vv wrote:
| check out Lemmy https://join-lemmy.org/
| nullindividual wrote:
| Last I checked the main instance became a haven for US
| domestic terrorists and like-minded ilk.
| jrflowers wrote:
| [flagged]
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Perhaps, however the tech works. The point of the
| fediverse is you can choose who to federate with.
| Undrafted7 wrote:
| [dead]
| lolinder wrote:
| > So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active
| users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. ... With
| the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost
| $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what
| each users brings Reddit in revenue.
|
| This is 20x higher than what each user _currently_ brings Reddit
| in revenue, but I 'm betting that Reddit is going to be cranking
| up the monetization hard in the next few months.
|
| Reddit Premium is currently $5.99/mo, so the bean counters
| probably see $2.50/mo for API access for a competing app as long
| overdue rent. I'd be very surprised if we didn't also see a big
| push to drive up the ad revenue on free accounts (more pushes to
| get on the app, ad-blocker-blockers, etc.)
| kenhwang wrote:
| I suspect API users are the much more valuable users to Reddit,
| the users that generate or moderate content, can afford to pay
| for apps, or tend to be ad adverse. Those are valuable to
| Reddit or advertisers.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Without a doubt, this is another step in Reddit's demise. It will
| really go into freefall when they go public later this year,
| after which I'm certain you'll start seeing more intrusive
| monetization. The window just opened for someone to develop the
| replacement. It will rip itself apart over the next few years and
| all 52 million users will be looking for a new home.
|
| Reddit's product is authenticity. Monetization is the antithesis
| of authenticity. The two cannot coexist, as they're about to find
| out.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > It will really go into freefall when they go public later
| this year,
|
| I mean the only thing the founders/investors want is to cash
| out, nothing more. they don't care about what reddit becomes
| after they IPO.
|
| > Reddit's product is authenticity.
|
| It has not been authentic since Trump's election. It has become
| a PAC, tangentially something else, but mainly a way to push
| partisan politics on every single subreddits including the subs
| that have nothing to do with partisanship.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > It will really go into freefall when they go public later
| this year, after which I'm certain you'll start seeing more
| intrusive monetization.
|
| Yep, and with more intrusive monetization comes stricter
| content controls. Once Reddit bans NSFW content -- which is
| "when" not "if" at this point -- it's going to lose its
| relevance as a platform.
| yreg wrote:
| What's up with the markets disliking NSFW content? I thought
| sex sells...
|
| I would rather invest in reddit with NSFW content allowed
| than in reddit with NSFW content banned.
| kitebive wrote:
| There's a replacement already (maybe not as good,
| unfortunately): Lemmy*, which is decentralized and integrated
| with Mastodon.
|
| * https://lemmy.ml
| rozab wrote:
| It's a tragedy, because reddit is the last source of publicly
| available _truth_ on the internet. I can search for anything
| with site:reddit.com and see actual human beings ' opinions on
| the matter.
|
| All other truth is locked down in unindexed chats, and all
| other search results are SEO'd AI written articles shilling
| referral links.
| witchesindublin wrote:
| Reddit stopped being the "truth" when the moderation became
| too extreme. It created echochamber that were mass market and
| strongly biased to the far-left, and with that the
| echochamber also resulted in a very strong bias towards
| American users - most international subreddits are utterly
| stupid because they are dominated by American interests.
|
| Quora used to be more centrist. And it had a major boarder
| appeal globally. But it too has been turning towards a Reddit
| style moderation within the past few years.
| kredd wrote:
| All I can say is, don't take any product advice from Reddit,
| since it's fairly mainstream now. Basically every company
| does astroturfing and marketing in every possible way over
| there without disclosure. From what I was told, the most
| common ones are "try x, y, z" and "y" is the advertised
| product, but since it's between other two, it looks like an
| organic comment.
|
| Source: a friend working in marketing, so it's not really
| reliable data point.
| tpmx wrote:
| _truth_
|
| Hah. Reddit "truth" is sold and bought at every level for
| anything popular enough. It's just the illusion of truth.
| Your site:reddit.com strategy stopped making sense 2-3 years
| ago.
|
| I will not be sad when reddit essentially dies in a few years
| from now. Good riddance.
| tomviner wrote:
| What's your alternative?
| tpmx wrote:
| Honestly: HN - until it also jumps the shark, at least in
| this regard.
|
| I've seen an influx of political redditors making their
| way here to fight e.g. nuclear power over the past few
| years. I can't imagine the professionals working on
| protecting/pushing brands are very far behind.
| witchesindublin wrote:
| Reddit has never been good for "truth". It was good for
| discussions for the period between the end of forum
| culture and the 2016 presidential election, but since
| 2016 the website has been increasingly moderated to the
| point that right-wingers, moderates and most non-US users
| aren't represented more than a tiny percentage, and it is
| a mass market appeal website.
|
| Quora was good for more centrist and international
| comments, but it too has been destroyed by poor
| development combined with politically motivated
| moderation.
| rjh29 wrote:
| It's hilariously easy to spot astroturfing comments and
| posts on reddit vs. actual opinions. Real posters don't
| spend years frequenting the same niche subs writing
| multiple paragraph comments about the same topic. Sure
| those opinions may be influenced and biased in their own
| way, but if you read enough of them you can form a pretty
| good summary.
| LapsangGuzzler wrote:
| > for anything popular enough
|
| There is still a ton of value in the more niche Reddit
| communities. I don't spend much time in the default subs,
| but the smaller interest-based subs are great and most of
| them are too small for the karma farmers to really care
| about.
|
| Might as well get off the entire internet because all of
| the popular sites are sold and bought at every level.
| witchesindublin wrote:
| If all you are into is niche reddit communities, then why
| not have a forum for each community instead?
| tpmx wrote:
| Yeah, your subreddit is safe as long as
|
| a) there is no political aspect to it
|
| and
|
| b) there is no commercial aspect to it
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Apollo needs to go open-source and pivot into a feeder app that
| connects to Reddit, Twitter, Substack, RSS feeds, etc. Allow
| users to connect their keys and pay the API themselves. Think
| of that as the subscription. The Apollo UI is killer and can
| make other social apps better.
|
| Once the new app is being used by power users paying for their
| own usage, Apollo builds a Reddit alternative. It will fit into
| the feeder app just like the rest.
| bigthymer wrote:
| I don't think that will work because there will not be enough
| paid users to build critical mass. Enough of the never paying
| users provide sufficient value that I don't think there is a
| viable alternative without them. If there is going to be a
| reddit alternative, it is going to have to happen now or very
| soon after the paid Reddit API goes live.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Note you can't just make a New Digg and move people over - it
| will be something next-gen compared to what it is. And 100m
| babies are born each year, that's double what's their userbase.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Someone should invest in Apollo, build a reddit clone and just
| let the app run on that. Screw the "actual" reddit.
|
| The Apollo app has a huge install base anyway. Problem is only,
| how long will this all take?
| clmckinley wrote:
| Yes, get some limited funding to build out the infrastructure.
| We can build a platform that is better for the users and that
| will get them all to come. We will make it modern and very easy
| for third parties to help build on top of it this will increase
| value and uptake.
|
| We will need to pay for servers and dev time so maybe we can
| allow our users to donate to upkeep. Maybe call it new service
| platinum. Unfortunately, most people don't pay so maybe we can
| have a limited number of non-intrusive ads on the site. Well
| now people with equity want some money back so we need to
| figure out how to make some more money. These third party apps
| aren't showing our ads, so lots of our power users use these
| third party apps and lots of companies are leveraging our
| service to make lots of money. The obvious answer is to get
| some money back from the api users. I shall call this site
| reddit.
| wvenable wrote:
| A lot of time, money, and effort. It is fairly infeasible.
|
| And even if you build it, it will start out empty.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| An average Apollo user is causing 344 API requests per day?
| That's a lot! I wonder if Apollo should prioritise reducing that
| number. I'd bet anything there is a lot of low hanging fruit to
| be had with aggressive caching and general tidying up.
| askafriend wrote:
| Apollo users are also probably more likely to be Reddit power
| users.
|
| Think about it - who would go out of their way to download a
| un-official app?
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I've downloaded an unofficial app and I'm by no means a power
| user. I just don't like the official app.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Selig isn't exactly new to this rodeo, I would honestly wager
| there's no low-hanging fruit in this regard.
|
| Edit: and certainly nowhere near enough to offset that kind of
| price increase.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| That is exactly a Reddit admins response, and I can't even
| begin to process how irresponsible, unprofessional and
| downright moronic of a take that is.
|
| Other apps are around that ballpark, and that's every before
| considering that Apollo users tend to be heavily power users.
| Over 7000 moderators of 20k+ users subs for starters, means a
| lot of requests.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Sorry if you think this take is "moronic" but I've gone
| through the exercise of cutting back usage on chatty APIs
| several times and it's real, meaningful work that makes a
| difference.
|
| I'm not a reddit admin. Please try to engage in good faith on
| this website. I'd suggest reading the "In Comments" section
| of the hacker news guidelines if you're unsure.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| pseg134 wrote:
| You implied that no work had already gone into optimizing
| it with no basis for the assertion. Then you misinterpreted
| him saying that a Reddit admin made the same response on
| the thread in question and accused him of bad faith. Maybe
| you should also take a minute to review the guidelines that
| you also included in your post.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I implied no such thing.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| [flagged]
| leovander wrote:
| Infinite doom scrolling, clicking into threads, load more
| comments, replying/making comments, etc. It adds up.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Losing my free/ad-free client got me to delete a Twitter account
| (and habit) I'd had for 12 years, didn't really want anymore, but
| would likely not have ditched proactively.
|
| If the same thing happens with Reddit I'll be ecstatic.
| racl101 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm out.
|
| I'm not using Reddit on its own app nor the browser.
|
| The app is huge and clunky.
|
| The browser is turtle slow.
|
| Neither gives me the granularity that Apollo gives me. The swipe
| controls are slick and so are the filters.
|
| If I can't consume it with Apollo then it ain't worth it to me.
| And I already paid for the app. I refuse to pay more for
| something that is not a necessity.
|
| Apollo would have to become a subscription to be sustainable and
| in a time where everybody wants to make a subscription out of
| everything I, on the other hand, am in a shut down everything
| that is not essential mode.
|
| This is not essential. Neither is Netflix. Neither is Disney
| Plus. I'm looking for more to cut. And while, i can currently
| afford all this, that might not always be the case and I'm sick
| of subscriptions that just are just leeching out of our $$$ our
| bank accounts month to month and that eventually add up.
|
| Also, I've been considering cutting back on toxic social media
| and maybe this is just the right push I need.
|
| Oh well. Had a good run.
|
| *shrugs*
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I have paid for Apollo, and Apollo is the only way I am using
| reddit. Should they go ahead, i will message Christian, send
| him my regards and gratitude, and nope the f out of reddit
| forever.
|
| I too am sick of subscriptions, and may find myself in the same
| seas I found myself at 14.
| activiation wrote:
| Old.reddit.com isn't too bad
| probably_wrong wrote:
| My prediction as a former i.reddit.com user is: don't get too
| attached.
|
| old.reddit is showing the same issues that i.reddit had, such
| as redirecting you to "regular" reddit if you click on a
| title instead of the comments. I think old.reddit will keep
| accumulating small papercuts like these until enough users
| give up, at which point it will be shut down without
| recourse. Reddit can't do this right now because some
| moderation features don't work well outside of old.reddit,
| but the fact that everything outside the "official" website
| is being degraded or shut down should give you pause.
| wombarly wrote:
| i.reddit.com was great, miss it dearly.
| Klonoar wrote:
| I would wager most people who are serious about using
| old.reddit are doing it via extensions, since that approach
| works even when signed out - so many don't notice e.g that
| title bug.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > redirecting you to "regular" reddit if you click on a
| title instead of the comments
|
| Old reddit has been working exactly the same for quite a
| few years now and I can't remember it ever redirecting me
| to the new version. Perhaps this happens if you're logged
| in and have the new version set as default or something?
| nostromo wrote:
| i.reddit.com was different than old.reddit.com - it was
| designed for easy use on mobile.
|
| It was recently killed, just like old.reddit.com will be.
| dilippkumar wrote:
| ew.reddit.com is even better.
| rlpb wrote:
| old.reddit.com is fine. The alternatives are awful. So when
| old.reddit.com is removed, I'll be leaving Reddit.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I suspect that will also go away soon.
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| [dead]
| spurgu wrote:
| Yeah. Can nowadays also be toggled in the settings so you
| don't have to setup any redirect extension. Which makes me
| hopeful that it might not be going away but I'm not holding
| my breath.
|
| Without old Reddit (and third-party apps on mobile) I'd stop
| using Reddit completely, I have zero doubts about that.
| Klonoar wrote:
| You still want a redirect extension since that forces it
| even if you're in, say, an incognito tab. The settings
| piece will only work if you're signed in.
| spurgu wrote:
| Good point. I haven't had any need for incognito Reddit
| since I discovered the setting.
| alvarezbjm-hn wrote:
| Another option is firefox with ublock origin.
|
| Reddit subscription is $60 a year. That removes ads.
| eshack94 wrote:
| Imagine paying $60 to remove ads from Reddit. In what
| possible world would that seem like an investment worth
| making?
| jjulius wrote:
| The question is how long it'll be for "isn't" to become
| "wasn't".
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| I actually want that to happen, it will probably be the
| thing to finally make me kick my reddit addiction.
| s1k3s wrote:
| old.* is the next thing that will be removed.
| yunohn wrote:
| > And I already paid for the app. I refuse to pay more for
| something that is not a necessity.
|
| To be fair, paying for Apollo unfortunately doesn't support the
| future of Reddit. They need some way to keep the business
| afloat.
| eshack94 wrote:
| Just because one can afford it doesn't mean they should.
| Consumers must send a clear message to these companies that
| continue to price gouge with nonsense policies, and deciding
| not to spend money on their services sends the loudest message.
|
| I'm of the exact same opinion as you. Too many services trying
| to leech too much $$$ from the consumer right now. With
| inflation and other essential living expenses as high as they
| are, cutting these other "nice-to-have" services is a no-
| brainer.
|
| To each their own of course, but I hope more people (even folks
| with the financial means) will choose to vote with their
| wallets, because some of these policies are quite frankly
| getting out of hand.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| If the average users app is doing 10K requests a month I'd
| wager it's a good thing they're over it but $5/month probably
| isn't much for the addicts. Avg HN latte for a day.
| slipshady wrote:
| > The browser is turtle slow.
|
| Are you using old reddit? [1] Do you find that slow as well??
|
| [1] -
| https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/o67vzg/how_tro_get_ba...
| uoaei wrote:
| Mobile reddit takes minimum 5 seconds to load on the latest
| Android using a fork of Firefox called Mull. I suspect the
| slow load is retaliation for preventing analytics, under the
| guise of "this script is waiting for a response, won't time
| out immediately". I'm always confronted with a "this
| experience is better in the app!" pop up. Signed in on old
| reddit.
| sen wrote:
| They've recently killed i.Reddit and /.compact (the mobile
| versions of old.reddit) and have also gimped old.reddit
| immensely over the last year, with things like images being
| force-embedded into the new layout even if you access the raw
| image path (!!), among other things. There's absolutely no
| way old.reddit lasts much longer.
| pier25 wrote:
| The moment they kill old.reddit.com I'm out.
|
| I only use Reddit on desktop and the SPA React app they
| made is still garbage.
| elpool2 wrote:
| I use the old.reddit desktop mode on my phone. I can see 20
| stories at once compared to 4 on the normal mobile layout
| (The text is small but still pretty readable). The minute
| they get rid of old reddit I'll probably just stop using
| the site.
| permo-w wrote:
| old.reddit.com is streets faster, but I'm not a fan of the UI
| and realistically they're gonna discontinue it at any moment
| syntheticnature wrote:
| As someone replied to in the comments there, Apollo adding a
| mandatory subscription -- which doesn't sound like what the dev
| wants to do, anyhow -- is basically just doing a passthru
| subscription to Reddit. It's the same sort of thing with
| certain fees in US companies that get passed to
| broadcasters/regional sports networks.
| fencepost wrote:
| I'm surprised they didn't take the approach of "API access for
| paid accounts only, and with limits to restrict LLM scraping". If
| they'd added that to Premium, plus a lower-tier "API" pricing at
| $1-2/month they'd likely have cleaned up.
|
| I'm curious what percentage of Reddit Premium subscribers are
| also users of third-party apps - seems to me that if you're a
| power user you're more likely to be in both camps. Also
| moderators - apparently lots of mods do so through the apps
| instead of the website, so there may be plenty of subs that have
| issues as well.
| dmix wrote:
| Reddit is trying to IPO so they are looking for every possible
| way to make money.
| Havoc wrote:
| Seems like a straight attempt to kill 3rd party apps. Just like
| their ever more aggressive attempts to force browser users to use
| their app.
|
| Ever since new reddit it's all be user hostile steaming garbage.
| But they have the user base and their content so the value and
| network effects are there even with shit UX.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| I deleted the Twitter app a while ago, and if my only way to
| access Reddit is with their official app... I guess I'll be a
| little more productive this year.
| WWLink wrote:
| You'll still be able to access the website, for now. I wouldn't
| be surprised if they tried killing that, too. If I were a
| profit-above-all bastard that was trying to squeeze my users
| for telemetry, I'd force them to use the mobile app exclusively
| to access my service.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| There are a large portion of moderators who will quit if they
| cannot use RedditIsFun because the official app is complete crap
| for moderators.
|
| I really don't know why it has to be API use based anyway. We all
| log in to our individual accounts through the API. For clients
| they should be able to determine requests/account or let users
| pay for their own usage or something. They're in full batshit MBA
| mode.
| debacle wrote:
| I don't disagree with either party here. $12k for 50 million
| requests is not egregious, but $2.50 per user for something that
| is probably cheap/free to users is a non starter.
|
| Reddit has failed to adequately monetize their userbase, they've
| run into the same "politics and porn" issue that every social
| media platform has, and they've raised way, way too much money.
|
| The worst part? I couldn't tell you the last legitimate ad that I
| saw on reddit. Facebook shows semi-relevant ads, sometimes
| location based. Reddit ads are visual flotsam.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| Personally, Facebook/Instagram show me really good ads, while
| Reddit-ads are always a complete miss.
| chrisan wrote:
| I might have too much privacy stuff enabled but Facebook
| could not be further from what I am interested in.
|
| I'm pretty sure FB thinks I'm a republican country hunter
| with a big beard who loves driving his huge truck to
| crossfit. Because of where I live possibly?
| Eavolution wrote:
| Another subscription. Great. The reddit client I use is brilliant
| (relay for reddit pro), not sure what they're doing about this
| but I'm not using the official client and I only use reddit on my
| phone. I'm really sick of subscriptions though, I'd rather just
| pay up front and not have another subscription
| jquery wrote:
| My long time reddit account got permabanned because I argued with
| the mod of a popular subreddit (I disagreed with him about the
| localization of a Japanese game, really trivial stuff). It was a
| veteran, seasoned account with lots of awards, karma, and "reddit
| coins" ($hundreds of dollars worth). The permaban message said I
| could use my other reddit accounts as long as I followed the
| rules on them. As soon as I tried using my other veteran Reddit
| accounts, *all* my accounts were immediately banned for "ban
| evasion". Poof.
|
| I tried to appeal but when you're permabanned you are limited to
| only using a small appeal form with 250 characters maximum. I
| tried to bypass this by linking to a google doc. Nobody visited
| my google doc and yet reddit said they "reviewed my appeal" and
| "will not be lifting the permaban".
|
| I'm not a troll, I never harassed anyone, used slurs, called for
| violence, etc. My only offense was arguing with a powercrazed mod
| (hated by most of his own subreddit), and my Reddit accounts are
| all wiped. When I try to create a new account, they get
| permabanned too after a day or so, so I gotta give reddit's
| "platform integrity" team some credit, merely using a VPN isn't
| sufficient. I just wish they'd treat customers who've given them
| hundreds of dollars the courtesy of a phone call or a human
| review. I really hate how some big tech companies feel they're
| totally above providing any level of customer support. Reddit
| isn't alone here. I can't even get refunded by my CC company
| because the coins were purchased over 6 months ago.
|
| At least I still have HN.
| [deleted]
| kioleanu wrote:
| I'll be using Teddit until they decide to cut RSS feeds too and
| then maybe I'll be able to cut out this black hole from my life.
| It's eaten so many hours of my life...
| tpmx wrote:
| It's business. While I do hate reddit with the passion of a
| thousand burning suns I acknowledge their right to set their API
| prices however they wish. They are not a monopolist by any
| stretch of the word.
| brookst wrote:
| Sure, but nobody suggested otherwise.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| [dead]
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| Reddit is a sexist, racist, free speech bait & switching website
| owned by the second richest family on the planet.
|
| The sooner it's gone, the better.
| jrflowers wrote:
| [flagged]
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| The Newhouse family are certainly multibillionaires, but they
| don't even crack top 10 richest from what I can tell.
| rattus wrote:
| weirdly seems driven by AI training data IP, which if the case, I
| don't even get the argument.
| quacked wrote:
| Someone else in this thread mentioned the "boiling frog" effect.
| Personally, I'll keep using Reddit until they remove support for
| old.reddit.com. Then this frog is out of the pot!
| davesmylie wrote:
| I feel much the same way.
|
| Looking at one of the subs I run though - old.reddit.com
| accounts for 5% of total traffic. Whilst 5% is not nothing,
| it's also not really all that much. I doubt they'd notice much
| impact even if half of the old.reddit.com users left.
| quacked wrote:
| Wow, I wonder if the 95% of reddit users for your sub that
| use the new format are net new to the site, or if there
| actually are a lot of old-reddit users that happily converted
| to the new UI.
|
| Don't get me wrong, the old UI was awful, but it was much
| more information-dense, so I prefer it. I think it's unlikely
| that anyone that's not already a turbo-nerd would come as a
| completely new Reddit user, compare the two, and pick the old
| UI.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Can someone give me a couple reasons why it does not make sense
| to buy Apollo out, and make it the default iOS app?
|
| It is currently maintained by one excellent developer, is
| featured by the Apple App Store for design... what's the
| downside?
| SnorkelTan wrote:
| Why spend millions when you can just shut off their api access?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| The downside is the developer has pride and cares about
| building a good product. Not about whatever insanity the Reddit
| "leadership" wants done to their platform.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Sunk costs.
|
| They've worked really hard on making sure their official app is
| an actual piece of garbage. I am truly impressed at the amount
| of work it takes to make something that is that bad. People
| being paid for the existence of that app make me feel good in
| that no matter how bad I can get, no matter how senile and
| incompetent I'll become, there'll be a job for me somewhere.
| Paid absurdly well, too.
| Terretta wrote:
| I'm having trouble remembering right now but I think that's how
| they got a prior app. Or maybe Twitter. Or Gmail getting an iOS
| app with amazing search...
|
| These firms hirebuy (like acquihire but more money) a single
| dev with an amazing tool, and not long after the tool is
| terrible and the dev is out of there.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| Alien Blue. I was a user back when I had an iPhone and it was
| wonderful.
| mastercheif wrote:
| Reddit bought Alien Blue, which functionally was the Apollo
| equivalent in 2014, with the intention of using it as their
| new official app.
|
| Instead they jerked around the developer, ditched all the
| code, and shut down the app in 2016.
| joshjob42 wrote:
| It is insane how absolutely shit the Reddit app is and how
| great Apollo is. It's bizarre as hell that reddit doesn't just
| offer to acquihire him for like $10M cash and $1M/yr salary and
| be done with it.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| They bought Alien Blue and its dev, then fired him and shut
| down the app.
|
| I think the key problem with all the theorycrafting in this
| thread about how Reddit could approach this in a better way
| is that these better strategies are fundamentally
| incompatible with whatever is broken in Reddit's management.
| busymom0 wrote:
| First, they will kill Apollo by squeezing it out of API costs.
| Once it's dead, they will buy it for cheap.
| consumer451 wrote:
| After I hit the add comment button to post the question, this
| was one of my thoughts. Giving an API price like that is an
| instant devaluation of every 3rd party Reddit app.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I wouldn't call it "devaluation" because what Reddit is
| basically saying is that Apollo is worth $20 million at
| least. Won't be surprised if they first squeeze the third
| party apps out of business, then buy them for super cheap.
| delfinom wrote:
| They already did that once. They bought Alien Blue which was
| the top iOS client for reddit.
|
| Proceeded to shut it down and basically fire the developer.
| They don't want anything but their reddit mobile app they have
| had top minds figuring out how to data mine you harder and show
| you ads. That's it. That's their goal.
| lxchase wrote:
| The downside is what makes Apollo great, is the time to content
| for the consumer. It is in Reddit's best interest in their
| current business model to have the user spend as much time on a
| page as possible, in a format that has advertising. Apollo does
| not have advertising. The official Reddit app does.
| api_or_ipa wrote:
| The reality is that Apollo doesn't serve intrusive ads, and thus,
| every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is
| lost revenue. Unfortunately, reddit is in that late stage
| monetization step where they need to prove they are capable of
| big revenue to justify a high IPO share price.
|
| One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one
| that killed Digg. So far, reddit has been very careful raising
| the temperature so as to not scare the frog before it's dead.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| in my opinion, a good middle ground would be to make third-
| party apps only usable if you're subscribed to Reddit Premium.
|
| That way you don't give the data freely, you could make each
| API keys provided to the user with limits that won't impact
| normal navigation but would cripple automated data capture, and
| you'd solve the issue where third-party apps aren't fed ads by
| sustaining the platform through subscription.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I remain shocked this wasn't Musk's approach with Twitter;
| make API access part of Twitter Blue.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Considering Twitter Blue isn't ad-free, not that surprised.
| I'd rather have ad-free paid option than what I get
| currently with Blue.
| babypuncher wrote:
| What even is the point of Blue?
|
| We already know that the "verification" it provides is
| functionally worthless.
|
| These days it seems like anyone with a blue checkmark is
| just asking to get made fun of.
| bmarquez wrote:
| Blue seems to be a "less likely to be a bot" badge.
|
| Considering that I've seen ChatGPT-type comments in
| various subreddits, I expect paid social media like
| Twitter Blue, Reddit Premium and Discord Nitro being
| pushed even more in the future.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Blue seems to be a "less likely to be a bot" badge.
|
| It's not working. https://imgur.com/a/6blpTqF
| LightBug1 wrote:
| https://i.kym-
| cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/475/688/ae0...
|
| /obligatory
| to11mtm wrote:
| My guess is that keeping API access behind a paywall is a
| money maker for a few specific client sets; the ones that
| immediately come to mind are Trading Companies (both
| traditional and crypto,) marketing companies (analyze
| trends/etc,) as well as large orgs with some form of
| reputation to uphold (i.e. large enough where just one
| person manning the account is not feasible.)
| robotnikman wrote:
| Yep, Reddit has reached the enshittification stage as a company
| marcod wrote:
| I was just thinking of how when Digg died, Reddit was there for
| us. Onto the next best thing!
| ProAm wrote:
| Why would they IPO? Just take the money you make now and be
| happy. They need to pay back the VC money they stupidly took
| very late, but it's not like they need to fund future dev?
| Another bad redesign? Many people use these alternative apps
| because the UI on Reddit is pretty bad. They should force ads
| into the api stream and just call it a day. These 3rd party
| developers are doing the work for you that the reddit employees
| cannot figure out on their own.
| gnt_thr wrote:
| >The reality is that Apollo doesn't serve intrusive ads
|
| Because they aren't having to pay for hosting.
|
| The only way to replace reddit is with a distributed system
| like aether: https://getaether.net/
|
| Or if you absolutely want a centralized system, something
| community run like ao3:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own
|
| But given the absolute hostility and hate _users_ of reddit
| give those two sites for not banning everything they find
| offensive a site like reddit is just not possible any more.
| xavdid wrote:
| > every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps
| is lost revenue
|
| That's maybe true as a first-order effect.
|
| But, for the ads that everyone else sees to be worth anything,
| the site has to be worth visiting at all. If your most
| dedicated/prolific users mainly post/comment using third party
| apps, then making their experience worse will reduce the
| quality of the site overall (even if you start getting revenue
| on behalf of those dedicated users).
|
| It strikes me as a very shortsighted move.
| babypuncher wrote:
| This is exactly what we've seen on Twitter. The already low
| bar for quality took a nosedive once they started ruining
| blue checkmarks and banning third party apps.
|
| Twitter still maintains a critical mass of users and
| corporate accounts, but all the most talented creators (at
| least the ones I followed) have reduced their Twitter usage
| substantially or moved on completely.
|
| Eventually new readers will stop showing up because there is
| no worthwhile content.
| onion2k wrote:
| _If your most dedicated /prolific users mainly post/comment
| using third party apps..._
|
| Thats really easy for Reddit to measure. Why are you assuming
| they haven't?
|
| _It strikes me as a very shortsighted move._
|
| If you stop assuming that Reddit is run by idiots, and you
| consider the likely probability that they've modelled this
| stuff in some depth, it's easy to believe that your initial
| assumption is wrong, and that the users are on 1st party apps
| (or will be if others shut down), and that many will stay and
| continue to post rather than leave or stop posting.
|
| Your premise is based wholly on the belief that you know more
| about Reddit users than Reddit does. That seems dubious to
| me.
| loktarogar wrote:
| There's another possibility - they have measured it, and
| have assumed the draw to Reddit will be stronger than their
| ties to the third-party apps.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Customers knowing more about the effects of decisions than
| the actual decision makers at a company is fairly normal.
| There is a reason they send out all those surveys. They're
| hoping you'll let them know about their mistakes.
| packetlost wrote:
| Short-sighted is presumably what they want: pump and dump
| onto the public market so early investors and founders get
| their payday and ride off into the sunset on bags of money
| while "the market" eats the losses and the slow (or maybe
| fast and painful) demise carries on for the next 3-10 years.
| superfrank wrote:
| > One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one
| that killed Digg.
|
| I think a critical part of the Digg exodus was that most people
| already saw Reddit as a clear #2 in the space. When Digg fucked
| up, there was an obvious place for everyone to migrate to. I
| don't see that right now. Facebook isn't cool anymore, Twitter
| has a large number of people who won't use it because of Elon,
| Mastodon isn't mature enough to gain casual users.
|
| Bascially, the problem I see is that if people leave reddit,
| there isn't an obvious place for them to go? TikTok maybe? I
| just don't see an Pepsi to Reddit's Coke.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Single interest web-bbs systems is a definite option. Can
| always self-host discourse open-source. There's also many
| other options, including the Lamernews (HN clone) app.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| Reddit is just a backend to apolo, if they make their own
| backend, a lot of people would switch.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| Discord seems the most likely, it matches the subreddit model
| and a lot of Reddit communities already have a discord.
|
| Obviously Discord is chat focused so not a one-to-one
| replacement but I am not sure that the younger generations
| will care.
|
| Plus there is the possibility of discord adding a
| Reddit/forum like feature, since they already have the
| mindshare.
| ctvo wrote:
| > Discord seems the most likely
|
| Reddit is about discovering content. How would you discover
| anything on Discord? Is there a trending list to see the
| top messages? Is there a way to list Discord communities so
| you can discover ones matching your interest?
|
| I'm at a lost to how the two are similar in any way except
| for the "young generations" use them both.
| witchesindublin wrote:
| I doubt anyone actually used the front page to discover
| things, most likely they will stick to a handful of
| subreddits.
| nagyf wrote:
| I use the "Home" and the "Popular" tabs every day to
| discover things on reddit. I can't be alone with this
| teolandon wrote:
| You can search for public servers in the Discord app by
| keyword, but not for specific posts across all servers.
| It's more comparable to Reddit but without the frontpage,
| or structured posts.
| rhtgrg wrote:
| Discord already has forums.
|
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/6208479917079-...
| SllX wrote:
| Discord ties together Reddit, YouTube, Twitch and other web
| communities too: podcasts, webcomics, Patreon.
|
| Only issue I'm having with it is discoverability of new
| communities.
| Etrnl_President wrote:
| Discord stopped being cool when it started censoring subs
| for wrongthink, about 4 years ago.
| chillfox wrote:
| Discord already has a forum feature, it's just rarely used.
| Vexs wrote:
| Please god no. So much info is already getting dumped to
| discord and nowhere else making searching or archiving
| impossible, we don't need more of that.
| Nathanba wrote:
| that's part of the appeal nowadays, it seems websites and
| apps don't see the point of making themselves freely
| searchable anymore
| Etrnl_President wrote:
| [dead]
| elpool2 wrote:
| The key thing reddit has is subreddits. Maybe they could be
| implemented using BlueSky's custom feeds?
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Mh, it feels like there has been little to no innovation and
| competition between companies about social media that are
| primarily text-based. Mastodon is in essence a decentralized
| Twitter. All new social networks seem to be about media other
| than text. The only text-centric new entry that comes to mind
| is Substack, but that's not really a social network product.
| Maybe it's time for a new innovator?
| nkjnlknlk wrote:
| seems that text-based social media are not profitable
| (enough).
| jamilton wrote:
| Is the math that the dev did broadly accurate? If it is, it
| seems they could safely charge 10-19x less and get more revenue
| per-user than they do from ads alone... assuming that even a
| 10x lower cost would be affordable for third-party clients,
| which isn't a given.
| aembleton wrote:
| Those users might be worth 10x as much as the average user
| though.
| kypro wrote:
| > every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps
| is lost revenue.
|
| This isn't true if they're charging for API access. At best
| it's a question of whether the lost ad revenue is being
| compensated for by API revenue.
|
| If you want to attribute an ulterior motive here I'm guessing
| it's more about control. They want their users to use Reddit as
| they want them to use Reddit, or at least they'd like to
| reserve the right to that power.
| lldb wrote:
| I think I saw somewhere the average user generates
| $0.12/month in ad revenue for Reddit. The proposed API rate
| is over 10x that.
| gaudat wrote:
| I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest
| internet forums in my language.
|
| About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the
| forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd
| party clients on the App Store or Android Market.
|
| Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked,
| because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or
| something about caching and stealing ad revenue.
|
| Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs
| launched its own forum reusing the third-party client's name. It
| exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular
| message board among the youth.
|
| The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to
| it.
|
| I hope to see Apollo go down this route.
|
| Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard
| as reddit going to paid awards and memberships.
|
| One more thought: Keep the Apollo UI or whatever thing the users
| are most familiar with. Most of them do not care if it is
| fediverse or open source or backed by k8s, they only want it to
| just work (tm) and to post things on it. Eat the lunch you
| prepared yourself.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This is sort of just the cycle of social media though. Facebook
| has the same stigma, it's unavoidable as the first wave ages.
| [deleted]
| ipaddr wrote:
| Soon another 3rd party client will be made that hammers the new
| site. That gets blocked and the circle goes on
| armchairhacker wrote:
| This is such a good idea even without Reddit's monetization and
| potentially blocking NSFW content. To me it seems obvious. It's
| also something that's actually likely to succeed and within the
| community's control, unlike getting Reddit to change their
| stance. Like, there's nothing stopping this from developing
| right now.
|
| - "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a
| good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users are more than enough,
| especially considering most of them are power users. I believe
| HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way
| better than Reddit.
|
| - "Making a social network is hard." Yes, but it's not too
| hard. Scaling is hard, but we're _not_ scaling to Reddit 's
| size (100+ million); and Mastodon has issues with scaling, but
| that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort
| to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks). HN
| runs on 2 servers and uses a LISP dialect
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); even though HN
| is text-only and Apollo would have images or videos, I'm 100%
| certain there are enough dedicated Reddit users who can make
| this a reality.
|
| - Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than
| Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a
| lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-
| corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most
| of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). There's
| absolutely going to be an exodus if Reddit does anything non-
| negligible, the only reason Reddit is even considering moving
| ahead with these changes is because they don't care.
| SSLy wrote:
| was it taptalk?
| sockaddr wrote:
| Yup. I'd join Apollo if it was substantially similar. They
| could not possibly make a worse UI than the current "new"
| reddit web UI so the bar is pretty low.
| foo1024 wrote:
| I have recently searched for some open source alternative to
| reddit. Lemmy.ml seems to be a fediverse alternative, and
| have a nice web UI and apps, though the site is pretty much
| empty. If popular 3rd party app could join force and
| migrating to lemmy because of reddit's brain-dead pricing. It
| will be interesting.
| wswope wrote:
| If you're talking about a self-hostable Reddit-like
| service, Tildes' platform might be a good option if it
| suits your taste.
|
| https://docs.tildes.net/
| popcalc wrote:
| You could always co-opt Dread ;)
| ziziyO wrote:
| This Tapatalk by chance? I only remember it because it would
| sign your posts with a little ad.
| gaudat wrote:
| Nope, the forums are not in English. I thought Tapatalk is
| more like a generic mobile client addon to forum wares than
| being a forum itself. I remember that nagging banner when I
| was on XDA years ago...
| renewiltord wrote:
| That was the one that I thought of too. I didn't understand
| why every Invision forum would pop that up as the client to
| use. Seemed like they were giving away the keys to the castle
| for free. Crazy.
| detrist wrote:
| Why not charge the user instead for the "privilege" of using a
| third-party app?
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| My understanding is that LLMs use Reddit comments as training
| data. These LLMs are often well funded and Reddit is using this
| to their advantage. Suddenly, a decade or so of this kind of data
| has turned to gold and damned if a company soon to travel down an
| IPO pathway is passing this cash cow up.
| digitalsushi wrote:
| A party is the people experiencing it. The free red plastic cups
| of beer and ranch dip and chips are ancillary.
|
| Redditors are now perking their ears for the next person to yell
| "next party at my house!"
| post_break wrote:
| This is exactly what I'm doing. I was there for the digg
| migration, and this feels just like it.
| e40 wrote:
| This means the end of a lot of my reddit use. Sure, I'll use it
| on my computer in a browser, but no more on my phone. This is
| probably a good thing, but I have gotten a lot of enjoyment out
| of some communities. And I pay for Apollo premium and just
| reupped. The app is a complete joy to use. The app developer is
| first rate. For how complex the app is, it is both easy to use
| and surprisingly bug free. (I know there are bugs, from the
| release notes for new versions, but I've never seen one.)
| stainablesteel wrote:
| on the bright side, it looks like it will be cheaper to make your
| own platform
|
| there's plenty of areas you can improve upon functionally for a
| modern forum
| 58x14 wrote:
| I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly
| responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to
| restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think
| these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than
| a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase.
|
| Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms
| and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests,
| and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive
| per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is
| cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC
| platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party
| applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high
| baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM
| clients.
|
| Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be
| developing its own first-party language model, and any other
| model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially
| existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it
| economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to
| arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay
| these much higher rates.
|
| Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the
| open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear
| who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are
| losing.
| amelius wrote:
| Can't they pull the data from archive.org?
| notacoward wrote:
| That would be worse.
| SllX wrote:
| Archive.org is a non-profit without the capacity to serve
| that many requests. An excellent resource for people to use
| carefully, but not a treasure trove for bots to scrape down
| to the last bit.
| KuiN wrote:
| Archive.org was knocked offline the other day due to some AI
| startup scraping it to death. It's not a good thing.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| LLMs have nothing to do with it. Someone skilled enough and
| rich enough to develop and train an LLM is absolutely capable
| of reverse-engineering your private API or scraping your web UI
| and defeating whatever protections you have.
| quartz wrote:
| Yes it's this. This has nothing to do with 3rd party app
| operation and everything to do with generally closing the gate
| to the data garden.
|
| The value of reddit's content to non-reddit entities is rapidly
| increasing as its monetizable use shifts from a set of signals
| on which to build first-party ad targeting (which they never
| really figured out) to generally useful llm training data.
| dirtyid wrote:
| I find myself remoting to desktop chrome+userscript more and more
| to get any semblance of enjoyable experience in last few years.
| sverona wrote:
| Nobody mention that their RSS feeds still work...
| aquova wrote:
| While I use RSS for many things, I find Reddit's RSS feeds
| rather useless due to the large volume of posts, even on
| moderately small subreddits. If there is some way to limit it
| to just the top posts of the day I would consider using it, but
| AFAIK it's all or nothing.
| skrause wrote:
| You can subscribe to the "top" page of the last week, on
| average this feed will only have 3-4 new entries per day.
|
| Example RSS feed:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/top/.rss?sort=top&t=week
| tech234a wrote:
| Changes go into effect July 1.
| Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 wrote:
| Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage
| is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like
| Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase
| their revenue, they're doubling down on bad decisions and
| alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their
| own history and why the Digg exodus happened.
|
| Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to
| third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have
| all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the
| APIs to inject them.
| nightpool wrote:
| You cannot just "change the APIs" to inject ads--ads require a
| lot of external verifiable measurement and have specific
| requirements over display and placement that third-party apps
| can't provide. Injecting ads into existing third-party apps
| would mean putting specific requirements for measurement SDKs
| (binary third-party code from trusted adstech vendors) and
| developing a lot of new APIs for reporting that that third-
| party developers would have to implement
| raydev wrote:
| > If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject
| them.
|
| Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their
| app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source
| of revenue for them.
|
| If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's
| harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users
| will see ads or new features.
|
| Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party clients,
| but to appease advertisers Reddit has to make guarantees around
| visibility. It's not enough to check if third parties are
| calling the correct API, they will actually need to regularly
| audit all third party clients.
|
| It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge
| third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.
| kodah wrote:
| There's an obvious solution here, which is to stop
| participating on platforms that are ad-funded. Charging user
| subscriptions and fees to businesses should be sufficient to
| cover costs. If it's not, maybe it shouldn't exist.
| qwytw wrote:
| People generally tend to use the platforms which other
| people are using and it's virtually impossible to build an
| audience unless you're "free".
| FullstakBlogger wrote:
| I feel like this is Conway's Law at play. People would
| create high quality paid apps if the users that want to
| pay for them could find them, but if somebody makes
| something that's perfect for you, how do you discover
| that it even exists? The organizational structure of the
| web is the problem.
|
| Google and social media platforms have shaped the web to
| be entirely advertisement driven. If they were capable of
| showing you things you wanted to buy, without the
| creators paying to be seen, they'd never make any money.
|
| Almost anything you ever want to do, someone else has
| already done well, but despite that, it's hard to find
| snippets of code you can include in your projects. It's
| easier to just write it all yourself. If the usefulness
| of ChatGPT is an indicator of anything, it should be an
| indicator of how much is out there that you never get to
| see. The sad part is realizing that that's intentional.
| nologic01 wrote:
| An obvious way to fund ad-free platforms is as a public
| good / utility.
|
| Nowadays with the brain damage that has been inflicted by
| adtech social media over decades it is hard to imaging
| mass adoption of such a publicly funded outlet. People
| have become literally social media junkies. Unless you do
| a tiktok like race to the bottom you can't disrupt the
| incumbents.
|
| But establishing the principle is important even if its a
| small audience. 2% of billions is still a large
| population. Just like public TV being typically of higher
| quality (where it exists) such platforms could be really
| interesting, worthwhile places.
|
| If the experiment succeeds one can start thinking of
| introducing user fees and other funding mechanisms and
| eventually maybe restoring sanity and delegating the
| targeted adtech industry in the darkest corner of hell
| where it belongs.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Same reason why Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
| don't have alternative clients.
|
| Nothing unusual.
|
| Reddit is proceeding along the well-trodden path to
| monetization optimization.
| rvz wrote:
| Yes. I don't see how this is a problem. It is their service
| which is subject to change at anytime. Either make money
| and pay for access to the API or shutdown.
|
| Realistically, it was only a matter of time. Also predicted
| here: [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447084
| pierat wrote:
| > Either make money and pay for access to the API or
| shutdown.
|
| I agree. And I think people should also keep in mind that
| OSes also have APIs as well, and should be wary of
| systems that try to prevent user freedom.
|
| Then again, I've been running Linux for ages now. And I
| don't have to worry about anti-user garbageware on a
| forced update coming my way, or updates that de-feature
| my system.
| [deleted]
| chongli wrote:
| _you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of
| ad views_
|
| Except that's not what Reddit is doing here. They're charging
| 3rd party clients ~21X what they lose in ad views, pricing
| them completely out of the market.
| giobox wrote:
| This is a story practically as old as the internet at this
| point. Grow with open API and third party client ecosystem,
| but ultimately shut the hatches and revert to single in-
| house client stacks to maximize control of the user
| experience and advertising opportunities. Mainly the 2nd
| part.
|
| To look to the Twitter example, even when I used a third
| party Twitter client before Elon came onboard, old Twitter
| were regularly playing silly games with issuing auth tokens
| to third party clients, for all of the same reasons.
|
| At this stage I view third party clients as nice to have
| for major free web service APIs, with the expectation one
| day it will probably stop working. Reddit doesn't owe
| anyone a public API, as much as I will miss third party
| clients (big Narwhal user here).
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > Reddit doesn't owe anyone a public API.
|
| And maybe they will soon learn that they are not owed an
| audience.
| giobox wrote:
| Maybe, but I'd still take the other side of this bet
| sadly. Is there any data on usage rates for third party
| Reddit clients? Anecdotally, I don't know anyone outside
| of tech who would even notice this change, really.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| On Google Play I see 100M+ downloads of the official
| Reddit app. 5M+ downloads of Reddit is Fun, 1M+ each for
| Boost, Bacon, Sync, and Relay. Many more in the 100K+
| range. Thats maybe 10% at most.
|
| I wonder how many power users, heavy users, or content
| generating users use unofficial apps. The passive lurkers
| are great for ad revenue, but the people who comment make
| the site worth browsing.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Wouldn't that mean there's no good business case for
| Reddit to do this in the first place?
| giobox wrote:
| Debatable - supporting a small number of users on the
| public API _may_ be a legitimate technical debt issue,
| and a running cost as the API can 't change without a lot
| of documentation, release planning to support all those
| third party stakeholders etc. Your future internal work
| has to remain compatible with legacy design choices if
| you don't want to shutdown/change the existing public end
| points - the list of issues has potential to be pretty
| big. Public APIs by their nature can't introduce major
| change too often without upsetting existing communities.
|
| If the API is solely for your own consumption, this can
| be simpler, and of course third party clients are harder
| to monetize as the kinds of ads you can serve are going
| to be restricted to what you can force a third party
| client to receive and render.
|
| If the number of users on third party clients is really
| low, all of the above can carry more weight in internal
| business case style discussions too.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Seems to me just better to entirely stop supporting the
| public api than to make the costs so ridiculously high. I
| mean then you're _still_ supporting it, yet you've
| basically scared almost all customers away. Charging a
| ridiculously high amount seems maybe like the worst
| approach of all.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Reddit was the only thing that resembles social media I
| ever used. Was a long time RiF user, as I absolutely
| hated the default interface. Even moderated a couple of
| subreddits back in the day (although I sort of dropped
| Reddit in the past couple of years, so I may be out of
| the loop).
|
| My fellow mods and all prominent users I interacted with
| (the vast majority of them not from tech as it was not a
| tech focused community) were all well aware of 3rd party
| clients, and many used them.
|
| This is very anecdotal, but amongst Reddit more "intense"
| user base, I would be surprised if 3rd party client usage
| was low.
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| difference: Twitter's native web clients work, do not
| force you to go to an app, and are feature complete.
| [deleted]
| raydev wrote:
| A big claim like this requires a source and not handwavy
| estimates from the person who is impacted by this change
| (and upset for good reason!).
|
| Otherwise I will ignore this claim because we simply don't
| know what ad revenue per user is, and we don't know what
| Reddit's projected future revenue per user is, which I
| would also expect to be covered by this pricing.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > ~21X what they lose in ad views
|
| Credible citation needed
|
| EDIT: Okay I see the 20x figure in the article
| SSLy wrote:
| Conjecture only but above in this thread
| chongli wrote:
| That comes right from the article.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| > Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of
| their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge
| (primary?) source of revenue for them.
|
| And they do. Over time they have become less and less
| distinguishable from post of humans.
|
| I wonder what's going to happen with Apollo.
|
| And what about my script to randomize my posts after a while?
| Yea, it doesn't do a lot, but still...
| londons_explore wrote:
| It does seem fair to charge third parties approximately the
| same in ad revenue that you would have gotten from the same
| users on a first party app.
|
| Then the third party app can choose between adding their own
| ads, or charging a subscription.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Why not let users bring their own keys? I wouldn't mind
| paying $2-3 to use Apollo. Apollo has to also pay 30% of
| their revenue to Apple so their subscription fee will be
| way higher and not feasible for most users.
| raydev wrote:
| This also seems like the most reasonable solution to me,
| the guy who is generally supportive of Reddit trying to
| make money.
|
| But having worked on platforms like this, this solution
| opens up yet another support vector. A cost that works
| for the most potential buyers may not be high enough to
| actually pay for support requests.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| That's a good point. Apollo does charge a one-time fee to
| create posts. They also have a subreddit so the community
| offers support. I think Apollo should pivot into a feed
| app that connects to Reddit, Twitter, RSS feeds,
| Substack, etc. and lets users bring their own keys.
| aaomidi wrote:
| > It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just
| charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.
|
| I really want to be the fly in the room looking at their
| grafana for monthly active users and see what happens to it
| in the coming months.
|
| I'm someone with ADHD and obsessive behavior is kinda one of
| the main symptoms of it. I think with this change, it's not
| going to be hard for someone like me to drop it.
|
| I suspect that because of these changes, Reddit is also going
| to make it harder for search engines to index them - which is
| going to further reduce how useful Reddit is for information
| discovery.
|
| This is going to hurt reddit, and I personally don't think
| the growth is going to be as strong as it has been once they
| take these actions. Social media sites depend on their users,
| and arguably only a small portion of their users create
| content. And a smaller portion that than create useful
| content. Once you've pissed off and pushed away that small %,
| you're not recovering.
|
| I'm guessing this is some decisions made by MBAs who have
| learned some theoretical stuff, but don't realize their
| courses haven't really covered businesses like Reddit,
| Twitter, StackOverflow etc. They're in for a rude awakening.
|
| Remember that Tumblr effectively died once they made some
| decisions.
| raydev wrote:
| > Social media sites depend on their users, and arguably
| only a small portion of their users create content
|
| What evidence do you have that a majority of these users
| are not already using the first party app?
| aaomidi wrote:
| A gut feeling. I don't have access to their internals.
| It's just a guess from my side.
|
| I guess if they go through with it we'll see what impact
| it has.
| Klonoar wrote:
| _> and why the Digg exodus happened_
|
| They may suspect they're larger than Digg ever was, and can
| simply weather that storm.
|
| They may be right, to be honest.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| Reddit has seemed rudderless for a long time.
|
| Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their
| competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all.
|
| Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to
| blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close
| to content deemed inappropriate.
| numpad0 wrote:
| None of those social media are rudderless, just that, money's
| circulating in hyperspace and the lower dimension slice of
| those just has to be mostly consistent on time axis. We are
| looking at a cross section at ballast deck of a ship.
| martin8412 wrote:
| A lot of subreddits blanket ban you if you've posted in other
| subreddits that the mods don't like.
| bri3d wrote:
| This is has always been an interesting aspect of Reddit.
|
| On the one hand, this is fine: Reddit is supposed to be a
| collection of independently moderated sub-communities with
| their own rules and administration. On the other hand, you
| have a unified identity and content history across those
| communities, so it's a lot easier for one community to take
| action based on your history in another, which is a strange
| dynamic.
|
| I actually think Facebook Groups are onto something with
| the way post history and profiles work: each Facebook Group
| a user posts in creates a separate sub-profile for that
| user which is specific to the Group. Users in that Group
| can see a user's post history in that Group, and that
| user's "main" profile depending on their privacy settings,
| but a user can't walk "across" to see a user's post history
| in other Groups unless they search from that other Group.
|
| I feel like per-subreddit post histories along with a
| global user profile would help move Reddit more towards the
| "sub-community" vision if that's the direction they want to
| go.
|
| The issues Reddit have are:
|
| * Cross-stalking, as discussed above.
|
| * Content discovery. This is the same problem every user-
| generated content platform has. What sub-communities get
| surfaced on the logged-out front page? Cross-pollinated to
| existing users? Every type of content will be objectionable
| to someone, so deciding what to show is always going to be
| a lightning-rod issue with advertiser dollars at stake.
|
| * Global moderation. What's "bad" enough to get a user
| banned from _all_ of Reddit? What happens when that user is
| completely banned (do all of their old posts disappear?)
| Should large-scale content moderation like spam be handled
| at a platform or a community level?
| barking_biscuit wrote:
| > What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of
| Reddit?
|
| explicit deepfakes
| delecti wrote:
| Not to victim-blame, but which subreddits? I pop into new
| subreddits from time to time, and I don't know that I've
| ever been banned from a subreddit in my accounts 14+ year
| history. I'm also less sympathetic if the bans were because
| you posted somewhere like the_donald (I can't think of a
| more timely controversial sub) vs somewhere innocuous like
| r/gaming or r/technology.
| [deleted]
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| Ikr. I feel like there's lots of problematic folks? doing
| a lot of heckin wrongthink out there in the current
| climate? and its making me feel like so unsafe?
| delecti wrote:
| A moderator's job is to keep their subreddit a
| functioning community. It seems entirely reasonable to me
| that they might notice a pattern and cast a wide net to
| save themselves a lot of hassle.
| SlimyHog wrote:
| I got banned from some subreddit that I've never visited
| for making fun of someone in /r/conservative, just because
| I posted there.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| Reddit Admin itself will blanket ban accounts in entire
| sub-threads with no recourse or explanation.
|
| Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy,
| but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant?
|
| Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be
| blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive
| a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you
| were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a
| worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal
| your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.
| delfinom wrote:
| >Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional
| accounts.
|
| Worse, they use browser fingerprinting AND IP.
| waboremo wrote:
| Yeah they track quite a lot of bits of data for users.
| It's the very reason why most new users are found
| bemoaning how annoying it is to start posting on reddit.
|
| It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser
| fingerprint info, search terms, information from their
| partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit,
| what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on
| reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these
| to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes
| and so on.
|
| Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on
| reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots,
| people harassing you, completely unrelated comments,
| report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much
| data.
| granshaw wrote:
| Far from it. They have great recent user growth and everybody
| is appending "Reddit" to the end of their google searches in
| the quest for non-gamed search results
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| I didn't say anything about user growth. I said their ads
| platform is trash, which is evident to anyone who has
| attempted to use it.
| granshaw wrote:
| Fair enough. I did notice the distinction when rereading
| your comment
| vGPU wrote:
| Primarily because google has become completely useless. I
| get more accurate search results with Yandex, Brave, and
| bing, in that order. That's how bad it is. And I hate
| Yandex. They're always making me do captcha challenges.
| asdff wrote:
| It's not a sustainable position though. Advertisers aren't
| idiots, the market will adjust as it makes sense to adjust.
| You already have bot accounts flooding certain keywords on
| reddit with product placement. If everyone ends up on
| reddit, that's where the SEO spam crap you see today will
| follow them. If everyones on twitter, it goes there. If
| everyone goes to mastodon, so be it, there be the bots. It
| almost doesn't matter what the service is exactly, once it
| hits a critical mass it gets enshittified just because of
| the business opportunity it presents.
| flutas wrote:
| > Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to
| blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread
| close to content deemed inappropriate.
|
| I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but
| apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn
| to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy,
| and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting
| a 3 day ban.
|
| I'm out.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I mean for Reddit that is "abuse of the report button".
| It's a very tame comment compared to a lot of what's posted
| and considered acceptable. What did you expect or think
| should have been the outcome of reporting that?
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| I've gotten permabanned for calling mods idiots. _shrugs_
| delfinom wrote:
| I got permabanned for having an alt account with auto
| generated name...that contained 88 in it because "hate
| group symbolsim".
|
| Literally a name reddit generated for me and I paid no mind
| to it.
|
| Fun fact, reddit uses browser fingerprinting to ban all
| your accounts afterwards. Also fun fact, there is a way to
| get innocent users banned as a result too.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I feel sorry for anyone born in 88
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| I reported a bot for spreading links to malware.
|
| I got banned for false reporting.
|
| Clicking the link through to the reported comment showed
| ... a deleted comment from a deleted account.
|
| Lesson learned!
| sorenjan wrote:
| You can't report to the moderators, they're just anonymous
| users that for some reason wants to work for free for
| Reddit. Often times they have their own agendas, I've used
| third party sites to show deleted comments that makes it
| clear some mods support calls for violence against certain
| groups, depending on which subreddit it is.
|
| I've reported threats of violence similar to what you
| describes over at https://www.reddit.com/report and they
| removed it after a day or two, even comments that were
| highly upvoted.
| nifoc wrote:
| I used to have a (long) list of posts/comments that they
| refused to remove after I reported them. Most of these were
| (at least to me) _very_ obvious cases of being against the
| TOS (and the law).
|
| I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their
| support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered
| my email.
|
| I truly believe they just don't care.
| pierat wrote:
| Whereas I had 3 accounts permanently suspended for
| calling someone an idiot on /r/idiotsincars for
| "harassing speech". I have other accounts, but they took
| out 1 old account and a squatted account. Like, really?
| For using the term "idiot" on a subreddit with that very
| word?
|
| I have here, Masto, and a few other places that at least
| have mostly sane policies. All I know is that reddit is
| definitely on the decline. And this whole API debacle is
| going to be their own Digg V4 moment.
| waboremo wrote:
| There is no sane middle ground on most of reddit. There
| are subs where you'll get reprimanded far quicker for
| "annoying mods" by bothering to report anything, and then
| there are the other subs that are so uptight and intense
| that your comments can only be fluff anything else gets
| slapped down for one of the vague rules it has. Good luck
| debating subreddit mods for their vague rules, you'll
| just annoy them and admins do not care in the slightest
| to resolve these petty things.
|
| They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for
| everyone involved.
|
| Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit
| just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way
| reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious
| automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if
| "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling
| absolutely dead.
| fooey wrote:
| Yeah, reporting abuse on reddit is a minefield
|
| The lesson I learned is not to report anything because
| trying to be helpful is not worth the risk of blowback
| mnd999 wrote:
| They don't want people training LLMs with their data without
| paying for it. Blame the AI bros for stealing all their data.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| It's not "their" data in the same way that last mile network
| access isn't "their" (telco's) pipes.
|
| If value in a platform comes from third parties choosing to
| use the service, and those third parties are free to use
| alternatives, then platforms should be very careful about how
| greedy they get in exploiting their users.
|
| Most of the platform value actually comes from _future_ ,
| _continued_ use.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Maybe, legally it probably is their data but your point
| still correct, they only have it because people choose to
| give it to them.
|
| But it doesn't matter what is, it matters what they think
| and they've got AI cash fomo.
| renlo wrote:
| It is their data but your copyrighted work :P
|
| Seems to me this is more them trying to push ads on
| people; apps like Apollo do not serve ads (or, as a long
| time user of Apollo, I've never seen them). I think this
| has been a long time in the works, before all of the LLM
| buzz.
| tivert wrote:
| > But it doesn't matter what is, it matters what they
| think and they've got AI cash fomo.
|
| Aren't they closing the barn door after the horse has
| gotten out? Literally _all_ their data from 2005 to March
| 2023 is still available via torrent.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > Most of the platform value actually comes from future,
| continued use.
|
| OpenAI should start a clone, make it nice, and train their
| LLMs off of it. If discussion boards have immense future
| value from hosting humans interacting, clearly the cost of
| hosting them is worth it.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| If that's the real issue, then offer two licenses. One that
| allows you to use the data to train an AI. Another that
| doesn't and says that if you do they will permaban your API
| access and sue your pants off.
|
| Third-party client apps can keep doing what they do, knowing
| that attempting to use the data to train an AI would destroy
| their business forever. Companies that want to train an AI
| can use the other license and pay big stacks of money.
| therealmarv wrote:
| But I wonder if they really fulfil this goal. How do they
| solve the unsolved problem of allowing scraping / SEO
| (Google, Bing etc.) but not teaching their LLMs?
|
| It's obvious or an open secret that Alphabet/Google and
| Microsoft will use their web copy for teaching their AI.
| jeron wrote:
| I don't know if they're trying to eliminate access but rather
| make more money/push people towards their own client
| emodendroket wrote:
| Think like someone who wants to run a business to make money
| and has no interest in the site as a community for a moment.
| Why would you ever elect to have no control over the site's
| presentation?
| yojo wrote:
| Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0],
| and 6x that in the US. Which is honestly kind of stunning.
| Reddit is presumably much less than that, but they might be
| reasonably gunning for a number better than Pinterest, with an
| ARPU of ~$1.50[1].
|
| To put the pricing post into the same context, we're talking
| $7.50 per Apollo user/quarter, which is closer to what Facebook
| makes per user than Pinterest.
|
| That said, presumably 3rd party client users are especially
| active and would skew higher ARPU than the average Redditor,
| and it wouldn't surprise me if they were more likely to live in
| developed countries.
|
| I dunno. I started running the numbers expecting to be
| outraged, but the cost doesn't seem crazy far from what Reddit
| could conceivably hope to earn off these users. I doubt Reddit
| is monetizing anywhere near that well right now, but if they're
| pricing the API in a forward-looking way, rather than planning
| to ratchet it up every quarter inline with monetization
| efforts, it could make sense.
|
| 0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-
| average...
|
| 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/995251/pinterest-
| quarter...
| donmcronald wrote:
| > Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is
| ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US.
|
| Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if
| every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads
| once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to
| acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?
|
| My first though was that maybe 1% of users buy something in a
| given year, but that's $24k to acquire a customer and is so
| far from reality that my perspective must be way off.
| waboremo wrote:
| Meta's reach is gigantic, their data is detailed and
| expansive. You're actually paying less on average when
| spending on Meta platforms than you are elsewhere, and
| likely getting more back. This is why companies are
| comfortable with throwing an ad campaign on Meta platforms
| just to get email signups, there was a blog on Shopify
| where a smaller company talked about spending $5000 for a
| newsletter ad, and per new subscriber they only spent $1.50
| on the ad campaign. Even though technically they've really
| lost money on such a situation, they feel comfortable doing
| it again on calculations for future revenue.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Not quite $240, but Netflix apparently spends about $100
| for customer acquisition [1] (data is a few years old). I
| imagine the other streaming sites have similar unit
| economics.
|
| In consumer finance, CACs are even higher. For standard
| credit cards it's around $200 but can be over $1000 for
| premium cards.
|
| [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/01/23/netflixs-83-m
| illio... [2]https://www.unifimoney.com/blog/changing-the-
| vicious-cycle-o...
| treis wrote:
| Our CAC is higher than $240. Lots of services are. When you
| start thinking about a customer being worth multiples of
| their revenue (not even profit) it makes a lot of sense.
|
| Also, online advertising can lead to in store sales. When
| you look at those dollars people spend a couple orders of
| magnitude more than $240 on stuff every year.
| importantbrian wrote:
| There are tons of businesses where $240+ is a great CAC.
| tivert wrote:
| >> Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is
| ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US.
|
| > Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even
| if every single person on Facebook buys a product because
| of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are
| paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth
| that?
|
| 1. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of businesses lose money
| on their Facebook ads, but either don't realize it or
| Facebook has enough churn that it doesn't matter if the
| quit (e.g. a revolving door of unsophisticated local
| businesses spending money on Facebook because it's the
| biggest game in town).
|
| 2. A lot of advertising is broad "brand awareness," and I
| imagine it's actually very hard to determine if it's
| actually working in many cases.
| paxys wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. People ask for paid options in lieu of
| ads and tracking, but when sites like YouTube and Reddit
| offer paid plans at reasonable prices ($3-$10/mo) there is an
| equal amount of outrage. You will never be able to please
| users who simply want to pay nothing.
| _dan wrote:
| The outrage is usually because those sites deliberately go
| out of their way to compromise the experience for those
| that don't pay.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Reddit doesn't supply a valuable service. They basically
| just ran and squatted on the concept of "internet forum"
| and used VC/network effects to bully almost all the normal
| forums into (temporary) nonexistence.
|
| Anyone reading this can make their own Reddit-esque forum
| on a VPS and serve a few thousand people for a few bucks a
| month. And if Reddit ever kicks out all the polished app
| users/old.reddit users, you'll see that start happening a
| hell of a lot more
| _hypx wrote:
| Which is funny because Internet forums used to be a
| software package you acquire and run on your own servers.
| No one really asked for a centralized system where you
| didn't have any control. It seems pretty straight-forward
| to go back to that original idea.
| SSLy wrote:
| Anyone reading this can spin a discord namespace
| ("guild"/"server") and that's what reddit is competing
| with, even if they don't realize that.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I think youre right. People are always trying to imagine
| the next reddit and its not going to be some clone like
| voat or whatever. Hackernews is actually a lot like
| reddit used to be but its not going to scale to reddits
| size without subreddits, or the like.
|
| I dont know if anything will overtake Reddit for a very
| long time because of network effects. But discord is
| probably the best guess. Although I actually think people
| do want centralization. They want 1 login to 1 website
| that has everything.
| pb7 wrote:
| Discord is tomorrow's Reddit, except it's even more
| siloed and it can't be indexed.
| SSLy wrote:
| Yes, true. I'm not a defender or proponent of discord by
| any measure, but I do see them as the most serious
| competitor for the same kind of communities that hang out
| on the more focused subreddits.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Half of my reddit usage is "X review Reddit". Discord
| would never fill in that niche.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| I had the same thoughts, that Reddit's reasons must stem from
| opportunity cost.
|
| The Apollo developer does however address this in his post
| and he claims that Reddit's ARPU is only $0.36/quarter.
| Reddit has likely been doubling down their efforts on Ad
| Targeting, etc and perhaps forecasts much higher.
|
| Christian's reddit post only addresses ads though, but Reddit
| has been trying to diversify and create multiple products and
| revenue streams. They have gold for purchase and if I recall
| they were trying to launch some Clubhouse-esque product.
| Point is, it's hard to push any of these things if so many
| users are on 3rd party clients that don't support such
| features.
| t_sawyer wrote:
| Reddit wants to make money on the backs of their unpaid mods. I
| really don't like them, but: Reddit has a ton of infrastructure
| costs they need to cover due to the centralization of these
| communities.
|
| I do not like telegram or discord communities due to history
| issues. Same with Facebook. Reddit posts popping up on Google
| searches is really great.
|
| I really wish we could go back to forums. The thing Reddit gave
| us was a central place to find communities as well as a unified
| login and feed. I feel like an aggregator of forums could help
| with finding communities. Forums that support oauth and rss
| would help bridge the gap of unified login and a central feed.
| The nice thing about forums is that their infra costs only need
| to scale with their community.
| hosh wrote:
| They are probably pricing this for people who want to use
| Reddit data to train their AI.
| cheshire137 wrote:
| What I don't get is they acquired Alien Blue, which was an
| amazing app, yet the official Reddit app is nowhere near the
| quality that AB had years ago.
| Spoom wrote:
| They're not optimizing for quality.
| frodowtf wrote:
| It's probably because their backend sucks as well.
| paddw wrote:
| From a business perspective, it never made sense for Reddit to
| support free API access for third party apps for as long as they
| did. Now, they are effectively killing those apps. The thing "not
| based in reality" was expecting it to go on as long as it did.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Social networks are a two-sided marketplace.
|
| In the case of Twitter, power users who posted the best content
| almost _exclusively_ use third-party apps for the extra
| features and usability they provide, and the ban on those
| amplified Twitter 's quality issues.
|
| You have many people in this very submission saying they will
| quit Reddit if Apollo becomes defunct.
| bagels wrote:
| Link to some discussion without context. Apparently this is about
| Apollo which is some alternative Reddit app.
|
| https://apolloapp.io/
| durandal1 wrote:
| I don't understand the outrage at all. So he is saying that the
| average user will cost him $2.50 in API fees/month. Since Apollo
| users are probably significantly more active than the average
| reddit user I can only assume that the same user is worth
| significantly in add revenue per month to Reddit. Apollo could
| easily be a $5/month app as a premium experience and make money.
| robotburrito wrote:
| Sites like reddit and discord will have trouble surviving
| eventually I think. The communities that rely on it may as well
| just host their own alternative at this point. It will allow them
| to have more control. However, I do admit that maybe doing such a
| thing is a bit much for many non technical communities.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| RIF (android) / apollo (iphone) are the only reasons reddit is
| usable on mobile since the official apps and new web view are
| absolutely terrible lol. If reddit kills the viewing experience,
| i can finally get off that site.
|
| The reddit api is also essential because reddit offers so little
| functionality. I have used my own bots before to search my own
| comments and delete my own content en masse.
| secabeen wrote:
| Sadly, the RIF team has been silent on this issue for a long
| time. I would be very interested to hear what their plans are
| in the transparent way the Apollo developer has been.
| Arcorann wrote:
| RIF dev just posted an official update on the changes: https:
| //old.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_de...
|
| As the URL suggests, at this pricing RIF will simply die.
| secabeen wrote:
| Finally, thanks!
| pugworthy wrote:
| I use the standard app - no complaints. I guess it's all in the
| eye (or opinion) of the holder.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| if rif stops working, ill stop using reddit. their UI sucks
| tristanb wrote:
| Reddits mobile app, and website are one of the worst UX
| experiences I've encountered on a UGC site. Terribly bad. I they
| should be working with people who can make products people want
| to use to consume their content, not killing them off with absurd
| pricing.
| ftth_finland wrote:
| As soon as Reddit kills RSS feeds it is dead to me.
| pkulak wrote:
| I've been very happy with Ivory:
|
| https://tapbots.com/ivory/
|
| Every few months I kick a couple bucks to my homeserver (which is
| currently running a pretty large surplus or I'd do more) and
| that's the end of it.
| bmarquez wrote:
| Ivory is for Mastodon. Lemmy is the Fediverse replacement for
| Reddit.
|
| The only iOS app for Lemmy is Remmel which is dead and no
| longer available on the App Store.
| [deleted]
| robbiet480 wrote:
| Reddit has posted their own announcements now
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...
| and
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...
| minimaxir wrote:
| Apollo's developer also commented on that:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...
| [deleted]
| ccooffee wrote:
| > Finally, to ensure that all regulatory requirements are met
| in the handling of mature content, we will be limiting access
| to sexually explicit content for third-party apps starting on
| July 5, 2023, except for moderation needs.
|
| Reddit really buried "no nsfw outside official reddit apps"
| (from the end of your first link). Didn't Tumblr do something
| similar and lose a significant fraction of its userbase and
| revenues?
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Is that only for not-logged-in users? I don't see how
| limiting access to the official app does anything special
| from a regulatory standpoint. If an account is
| approved/authorized for nsfw content who cares which app the
| account is using?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I can only assume Reddit wants to kill NSFW altogether. They
| require you to authenticate now if you want to see any of it
| (though of course they promise that somehow this will still
| be "anonymous"). Once they turn off old.reddit.com, I think
| that'll be the end of NSFW content on Reddit altogether.
|
| I assume they hope to attract more advertising money this
| way.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| They no longer require you to authenticate to see NSFW
| content. There's a big "I'm over 18" button below the login
| button.
|
| There was a few months where it was required, but it isn't
| anymore.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| In the US, the seem to no longer require logging in. If
| they geo-locate your IP to anywhere else, they show "Log
| In" and "I'm not over 18" buttons.
| lelandfe wrote:
| They subject all of their dark patterns to multivariate
| testing. I suspect this is to elicit feedback like yours,
| and suppress the ability to respond to it, as they have
| never in _years_ promoted any of it to general
| availability.
|
| I've been in tests where the _entire_ site is gated,
| demanding I download the app. I've been in tests where
| SFW content is marked as NSFW, demanding I log in. Etc.
| zakember wrote:
| I just see two buttons: One that says "Log in", another
| that says "I'm not over 18"
| yieldcrv wrote:
| its completely depends
|
| I still routinely run into it on my phone where I cannot
| view the site at all unless I download the reddit app,
| especially if its a NSFW subreddit
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Once they get rid of old.reddit.com I'm off for good, their
| new UI is just so frustrating to use it's not worth it.
| cloudking wrote:
| teddit.net is your friend
| pelagic_sky wrote:
| Its either getting hammered or it just takes ages to
| load.
| bink wrote:
| Did they really remove their own post describing the changes? I
| haven't seen that before.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| > As of July 1, 2023, we will enforce two different rate limits
| for the free access tier:
|
| > If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per
| minute per OAuth client id
|
| > If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per
| minute
|
| So... doesn't this mean that each logged in Apollo/3rd party
| client user can make 100 requests per minute for free?
|
| The Apollo developer says his average user makes less than 400
| requests per day and it's somehow going to average $2.50 per
| user per month. I must be missing something.
| jsnell wrote:
| The client id is per-app, not per enduser.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Really? That's super dumb of Reddit. Maybe Apollo can just
| let users drop in their own API keys.
| 16bitvoid wrote:
| No. That's the limit of how many queries can be made per
| minute on the free tier, but it doesn't state what the free
| tier entails or what it can be used for. My guess, based on
| Christian's post, is that third-party clients would not be
| eligible for the free tier and that the free tier is for uses
| like bots.
| dizhn wrote:
| They would be eligible but they can't be useful if their
| allocation is just 100 requests per minute. That would be
| like 10 concurrent users tops. Probably even less.
| [deleted]
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Maybe open source clients would be eligible to use the free
| tier and it's that Apollo is a commercial actor.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I saw the original thread on Reddit and I don't get what the
| problem is really.
|
| Make Apollo a paid-only app. Change the price for Apollo to $10
| per month. That's still a drop in the bucket for anyone that
| cares enough to really want Apollo in the first place.
| srndsnd wrote:
| I'm more surprised that reddit has maintained features like
| old.reddit.com and their API for this long. To me, this is
| textbook enshittification. Either die unprofitable or live long
| enough to see yourself rip features from TikTok.
| [deleted]
| shmde wrote:
| old.reddit.com will be phased within 1 year. i.reddit.com went
| out this year and old.reddit.com will go out too, guaranteed.
| tumult wrote:
| Reddit is a website. Just make normal browser requests. You don't
| have to use their "sanctioned" "API."
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Unfortunately, that turns your app from "load consistent data"
| to "parse HTML that could change daily and try to keep up with
| a perpetually moving shit pie".
|
| Not the greatest of experience, both for devs and users.
| tumult wrote:
| In theory, maybe. In practice, I've not found that to be the
| case.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| It would be really interesting to hear what the founders think
| about the current state of Reddit, given that we know they're HN
| users as well.
| BudaDude wrote:
| https://media.tenor.com/80zMDyE85hAAAAAC/money-crying.gif
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| [flagged]
| nonrepeating wrote:
| Let me take a moment to express gratitude that I have no idea
| what "DID," "tradcath," and "groyper" mean. Seems like I've
| made the right choice to eschew Twitter and Reddit.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Without googling, tradcath sounds like traditional catholic,
| similar to the term "tradcon" for traditional conservative.
| None4U wrote:
| "DID" stands for "dissociative identity disorder".
| treeman79 wrote:
| [flagged]
| sosodev wrote:
| This is such an absurd statement. I have to assume that you're
| trolling.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Have you used Reddit or Twitter recently? They're basically
| open air insane asylums.
|
| You should spend 0% of your life talking about being a "Based
| Alpha Male." You absolutely should not use the same website
| as a "Based Alpha Male" influencer.
|
| I can come up with left wing equivalents if you're more into
| that?
| d1str0 wrote:
| You're comparing internet communities with real life
| institutions. You do realize there is a difference between
| real life and the internet?
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Elevating extremism is harmful, and when it's this large
| it's an emergency.
|
| However, this comment doesn't make a ton of sense but
| you're not engaging in Good Faith so I'm done with this
| thread.
| rvz wrote:
| You are totally correct.
|
| What I can say is that there are _some_ extremists on
| both Twitter and Reddit on both sides and as also found
| in other communities. Unfortunately, the commenters you
| are replying to choose to pretend that it is not the case
| with ridiculous anecdotes such as _' on my feed'_, _' not
| for me though'_ to dodge and as another question without
| answering yours.
|
| As soon as one uses an anecdote, it is safe to
| immediately dismiss their comment.
| TwoNineA wrote:
| I don't see any of that crap you are talking about on my
| feed. I am subscribed to tech, news, soccer, some linux
| subreddits, a few game subreddits like Dyson Sphere
| Program, Diablo and finally programmer memes. I browse
| "home", ignore "all" or "popular". It's a really nice tool
| that is being destroyed by incompetence.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That's a smart strategy. If you allow your feed to have
| things from whitepeopletwitter, blackpeopletwitter,
| politics, news, damnthatsinteresting (and other similar
| things), then you get a really awful experience. Every
| bit as bad as some people claim.
|
| But if you filter all those out and go for smaller,
| targeted subreddits in your interest area, you might as
| well be on an entirely different site, it isn't the same
| at all.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Having spent too much time on Reddit recently, I'm not
| entirely sure. The comment is hyperbolic, to be sure, but on
| the other hand the most popular subreddits _have_ gone
| largely insane. Quite noticeably in the last year. Every
| subreddit now has a political ideological stance, and some
| quite overtly threaten your access if you don 't toe the
| line.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Whether or not "toe the line on the subreddit's political
| stance or be banned" is insane depends heavily on what the
| political stance is. Saying you can't post your Nazi
| grandpa in SS gear in r/oldschoolcool is a "political
| stance" but it makes total sense to force users to toe that
| line.
| sosodev wrote:
| I don't think this is a Reddit problem. All social media
| platforms have increasingly large groups of crazy people.
| However, I highly suspect that those groups are just a very
| vocal minority and not hundreds of millions of people as
| the OP said.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| If I recall the statistics, and assume them to be
| accurate, something like 1 out of 100 people make almost
| all the posts you see on a site like Reddit. Which means
| if anyone who looks at Reddit thinks the thoughts &
| opinions they are reading are representative of the
| population at large, they are very mistaken.
|
| I think after a while a lot of the quieter people get so
| turned off by the whole experience they just step away
| altogether. I strongly suspect that a subreddit claiming
| to have a million subscribers probably has _at least_ two
| orders of magnitude fewer in reality. And that may still
| be an overestimate.
| vasco wrote:
| The cause are the people not the platforms. The same people
| will move over to "digg version 3" once reddit finishes
| shooting itself in the foot and you'll add a new name to your
| list of "problematic" platforms. It's the minds that need
| changing, not the CSS or the domain name of a website that is
| effectively lists of URLs and comments.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Wont everyone just go to those "chan" sites? I don't know much
| about them but they seem similar and sound pretty bad to me
| too.
| pcurve wrote:
| I have no idea what the actual cost incurred by Reddit is, but
| they're asking for $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. (basically fetching
| content)
|
| Does anyone have a ballpark?
| dgacmu wrote:
| Ballpark: depends how you want to depreciate servers but under
| a penny.
|
| They're not charging for cost; they're charging ad revenue
| replacement for users using apps. It's pretty clear in the way
| the Apollo costs would be about $2.50 per month, which isn't
| that far from the $7/mo for reddit premium.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| That's probably the end of me using Reddit on mobile, then.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| The data is all fully public and easily scraped from APIs (both
| reddit and twitter). Who is the audience for these paid plans? Is
| this for oauth enabled access on behalf of users?
| dboreham wrote:
| People who want to manage legal and interdiction risks?
| minimaxir wrote:
| In Reddit's case data scraping is soon to be against the Terms
| of Service (which is already the case for Twitter), which will
| earn you a Cease and Desist if you try to make a business off
| the data.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Then don't sign in? See the LinkedIn legal precident, ToS
| only applies to scrapers if the scraper had to 'click' the
| agree button in order to sign up.
| minimaxir wrote:
| You're still going to get a Cease and Desist.
|
| You _might_ have better odds in court with a precedent but
| you 'll still be out legal fees.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| So the AI companies secretly scraping the data and
| without producing a direct attribution or affiliation are
| precisely the ones unaffected by this, meanwhile devs
| trying to make complementary tooling (and thus fully
| public who they are and thus targets of C&D's) are
| negatively impacted.
|
| What a lovely model.
| [deleted]
| moooo99 wrote:
| I like reddit, I really do. So it's sad to see them taking a page
| out of the twitter playbook and are taking active measures to
| destroy their thriving ecosystem.
|
| The official reddit app is an absolute nightmare and essentially
| unusable. Their "new" website also completely sucks and is even
| worse on mobile than it is on desktop. If this actually gets
| implemented as is, I'll definitely have a very productive rest of
| my year. I have no data to back this up, but I feel like with
| reddit, even more users only rely on third party clients than it
| was on twitter.
| neilv wrote:
| For individual users (not voracious LLM and data mining and
| surveillance), is there any reason an app can't just be a
| "specialized Web browser", scraping subreddit
| memberships/posts/comments just-in-time, as a user browses
| interactively, with that access pattern and pacing?
|
| Or a plugin of improvements for a general-purpose Web browser?
|
| (It could even preserve ads.)
|
| The reason for such an app would be that a lot of people like
| parts of Reddit community content, but much fewer people like
| many of the UI attempts that Reddit has made of the years (for
| desktop, mobile Web, and apps).
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Reddit's Terms of Service.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Not to go all "I told you so" but I do recall Christian talking
| about how Reddit would never do anything like this and how much
| trust he had in their developer relations team now, oh, sometime
| earlier this year. Hope he took the suggestion to have a backup
| plan seriously...relying on the whims of a single company is a
| hard way to make your income. Doesn't mean you can't try it but
| it is fundamentally pretty risky.
| lapcat wrote:
| Everything in life is risky. Show me the 100% reliable path to
| financial prosperity and happiness. You could get laid off
| tomorrow by your current employer. The stock market could
| crash, and any investments you made could amount to nothing.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| And in the replies to the thread, the admin is now publicly
| back-and-forthing with Christian about the number of requests
| made by his app and how "other bots and apps" are more
| efficient.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I found this attitude from Christian really off-putting.
|
| Dude, you run an interface to another company's core business.
| You cannot make any guarantees about what they may or may not
| do.
| parhamn wrote:
| Im genuinely curious, how much value should reddit be extracting
| per user via third-party-clients for their services given they
| can't serve them ads and what not themselves?
|
| Facebook's ARPU is $58.77 in the US/Canada so $5/month. According
| to them, Apollo's Pro clients would earn reddit $2.50/month. Is
| the right number $1? I imagine that would still kill Apollo.
|
| It seems like the problem more generally is that third-party
| clients cannot extract the same value from users that first-party
| clients can.
|
| Has anyone tried to solve this differently? What if Reddit gave
| you a libAds to add in your application where you build and
| control the other 90% of the interface and do a profit sharing
| system with them.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I think reddit is being naive by charging per API request. Do
| that, and application developers will try to reduce them - for
| example, caching popular subreddits or posts (ie. "this is
| /r/technology as it looked when we last crawled 15 minutes ago").
|
| If Christian added a cache layer on his own server he could
| easily make the finances work.
|
| But... Thats in nobodies interest - Users end up with stale
| content, Reddit looses users due to stale content and loses
| revenue due to Christian extending caching times to save money.
| Also, Christian will make uncachable requests, like for example
| voting, hard to do, which again hurts reddit as a platform.
| ksala_ wrote:
| Either Reddit is happy about the caching as you cost them less,
| or they're not happy about it and they just block your app if
| you do that. Now, people could scrape the website or allow
| users to bring their own API keys, but then it becomes a cat
| and mouse game. And if you're trying to sell your app on any of
| the app stores, Reddit could likely get it taken down/take
| legal actions.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Does the API work that way now? The part on your own server
| used to only be for authentication and clients would then
| interact with reddit's servers directly. (Haven't done anything
| recently but used to maintain a moderation bot).
| londons_explore wrote:
| _Currently_ clients talk direct to reddit 's servers. But if
| reddit started billing for API requests, you can bet every
| appmaker would run a caching server to reduce the number of
| API requests.
|
| Or they'd do some kind of peer-to-peer caching between
| clients.
| danijelb wrote:
| The web went in the wrong direction when we abandoned the initial
| concepts of user agents, which was that the browser has the
| ultimate choice of what to render and how. That concept,
| transferred to today's world of apps would simply mean that any
| client like Apollo is essentially a browser locked on Reddit's
| website, parsing HTML (which has the role of an API) and
| rendering the content in a native interface. As long as the user
| can access the HTML for free, they should be able to use any
| application (a browser or a special app) and render the content
| however they wish.
|
| Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML
| directly, but with the recent resurgence of server-side rendering
| we may soon be able to get rendered HTML with one HTTP request.
| And then the only hurdles will be legal.
| numpad0 wrote:
| App Store. It's the App Store and iPhone that killed the web.
| leros wrote:
| Seems like you could still a meta UI that drives the underlying
| SPA in a hidden browser but it would be a pain. Maybe a
| framework for that will be built one day
| bearjaws wrote:
| Seems like we're always missing a fusion of:
|
| 1. SPA that you can run on your phone or desktop
|
| 2. Centralized User Management, need some way to block known
| bad actors
|
| 3. Signing posts / comments
|
| 4. Distribution of posts and comments over DHT?
|
| 5. Hosting images, videos and lengthy text posts on torrents
|
| 6. A whack ton of content moderation software to somehow make
| decentralized moderation work.
|
| 7. Image recognition for gore / CP that inevitably will get
| spammed
|
| This would enable people to help host the subreddits they are
| subscribed to, but murder battery life on mobile
| unfortunately.
| paulcole wrote:
| > As long as the user can access the HTML for free, they should
| be able to use any application (a browser or a special app) and
| render the content however they wish.
|
| You can see how the end game of this is HTML no longer being
| free, right?
| teej wrote:
| There was a 15 year period where many websites were only
| compatible with Internet Explorer. The dream of clients in
| control is worth fighting for, but it's never been reality.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the
| HTML directly
|
| It works the other way: with today's SPAs the API (that powers
| the frontend) is exposed for us to use directly, without going
| through the HTML - just use your browser's devtools to inspect
| the network/fetch/XHR requests and build your own client.
|
| -----
|
| On an related-but-unrelated note: I don't know why so many
| website companies aren't _allowing_ users to pay to use their
| own client: it 's win-win-win: the service operator gets new
| revenue to make-up for the lack of ads in third-party clients,
| it doesn't cost the operator anything (because their web-
| services and APIs are already going to be well-documented,
| right?), and makes the user/consumer-base happy because they
| can use a specialized client.
|
| Where would Twitter be today if we could continue to use
| Tweetbot and other clients with our own single-user API-key or
| so?
| nomel wrote:
| > inspect the network/fetch/XHR requests and build your own
| client
|
| The purpose of an API is the agreement, more than the access.
| You can always reverse engineer something, but your users
| won't be too happy when things randomly stop working,
| whenever reddit chooses.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > allowing users to pay to use their own client
|
| On the user side you need to:
|
| - pay the service a recurring fee
|
| - pay the client probably a recurring fee (x2 or x3 if you
| use multiple clients on different platform)
|
| - mix and match the above and manage when it falls out of
| sync
|
| It's totally possible, but how many users are willing to go
| that route ? Weather apps could be an example of that with
| the pluggable data sources, but that's to me a crazy small
| niche.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| There's two reasons why they don't want third-party clients
| as a pro feature:
|
| - It's a very niche thing to charge for, and merely charging
| for something means having to support it, so you can be
| underwater on support costs alone
|
| - Users on third-party clients are resistant to
| enshittification
|
| The business model of any Internet platform is to
| reintermediate: find a transaction that is being done direct-
| to-consumer, create a platform for that transaction, and get
| everyone on both ends of the transaction to use your platform
| yourself. You get people hooked to your platform by shifting
| your _surpluses_ around, until everyone 's hooked and you can
| skim 30% for yourself. But you can't really do this if a good
| chunk of your users have third-party clients.
|
| This is usually phrased as "third-party clients don't show
| ads", but it extends way broader than that. If it was just
| ads, you could just charge $x.99/mo and make it profitable.
| But there's plenty of other ways to make money off users that
| isn't ads. For example, you might want to open a new vertical
| on your site to attract new creators. Think like Facebook's
| "pivot to video", how every social network added Stories, or
| YouTube Shorts. Those sorts of strategic moves are very
| unlikely to be properly supported by third-party clients,
| because nobody actually wants Twitter to become Snapchat. So
| your most valuable power users would be paying you money in
| order to... become less valuable users!
|
| If social media businesses worked how they _said_ they
| worked, then yes, this would actually be a good idea. But it
| isn 't. Platform capitalism is entirely a game of butting
| yourself in to every transaction and extracting a few pennies
| off the top of everything.
| poyu wrote:
| > Where would Twitter be today if we could continue to use
| Tweetbot and other clients with our own single-user API-key
| or so?
|
| So like OAuth? IIRC Twitter used that with all the 3rd party
| clients. I think the problem is that 3rd party clients
| filters out ad posts one way or the other. Your other point
| still stands though, just charge the user API access.
| renewiltord wrote:
| > _I don 't know why so many website companies aren't
| allowing users to pay to use their own client..._
|
| If you do that, I'm going to make a client that uses a
| rotating set of accounts and masquerades as a different
| client. I am then going to make content available through my
| client for free, and I'm going to put ads on it so that I can
| make money. With some small number of accounts, I will serve
| perhaps x1000 users and you can't do anything about it.
|
| In time, perhaps I will lock the users into my platform. They
| will talk about how the community on Reddit doesn't
| understand Reneit and how all the memes come from Reneit. If
| I win, I'll be Reddit over Digg. If I lose I'll be Imgur.
|
| So go ahead. You'll be Invision to Tapatalk and you will die.
| rybosworld wrote:
| I definitely see Reddit going the way of Yahoo!
|
| A slow spiral into irrelevance because of lots of small bad
| decisions. At one point, Reddit felt like a lone champion of free
| speech and conversation in a sea of buzzfeeds.
|
| I think they've moderated the website into ruin. They've put a
| lot of energy into silencing certain kinds of voices/opinions
| while promoting others. What's left is a very liberal echo
| chamber. All of the seemingly worst ideas from the left are
| stated as fact and voicing a dissenting opinion can quite
| literally get you banned.
|
| r/antiwork and r/latestagecapitalism are the most egregious
| examples of this that I can think of. But the attitudes held
| there have leaked into 99% of the other subreddits to some
| degree.
|
| For the record, I lean left. But it really sucks to no longer
| have a town hall where both sides of the aisle can discuss things
| as adults.
|
| If there's one takeaway, I think it's some flavor of: Don't
| overmoderate/show favoritism. You can't have yin without yang, or
| salt without pepper.
|
| What made Reddit awesome was the discourse. Maybe they never
| realized that this was the secret sauce. That is, the clashing of
| ideas. And so they didn't cultivate that. Today, outside of a
| handful of niche/hobby subreddits, it no longer has anything
| close to educated discussions.
| witchesindublin wrote:
| There's also a much more noticeable problem of Reddit being too
| US-centric. The moderation is the cause, but I think it's also
| symbolic of US political culture that fails to take into
| account that politics can work differently across cultural
| lines. In a way the website has become more racist than the
| pre-Trump-election moderation Reddit.
| nocoiner wrote:
| This is really well stated. Sometimes out of morbid curiosity,
| I'll read one of the /r/all posts on a topic where I know the
| discussion is going to be reductive and generally uninformed
| (the example that comes immediately to mind is anything
| involving the energy industry - there's not much to find beyond
| "hurrr durr Exxon bad thorium good"), and every single time
| it's the same type of self-satisfied navel-gazing commentary
| totally untethered from the real world.
|
| I still read it most days (through Apollo) but when/if this
| kicks in, that's the end of it for me.
| dahwolf wrote:
| I think it's a sign of the times, also replicated outside of
| reddit, for example Mastodon. I enjoyed a solid 20 years of
| online discourse that was overall reasonable, and most of it
| not very political.
|
| Now everything is highly politicized with a hard split across
| two camps where before I barely could detect the very concept
| of a camp at all.
|
| There's no detectable reasonable right-wing online, it always
| escalates into 4chan. Hence, the "civil" people clean the
| place, and you'll have centrists and moderate-left remaining.
| Give it time and far-left will dominate as moderates silence
| themselves out of fear.
| nightpool wrote:
| $2.50 / month / user does not seem _that_ insane when it 's put
| into that sort of perspective, but certainly more than I think
| most of the current users of the app would be happy paying.
| Hopefully they can compromise somewhere around $5 / user / year
| which I think most users would happily pay for for a third party
| app.
| finger wrote:
| Was the API free to use before this?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I don't see the issue. Apollo should charge a subscription fee
| that equals (cost of "reasonable API access + desired profit)/.70
| and cap the number of request per user so it remains profitable.
|
| Users should understand and I would gladly pay for Apollo per
| month.
| BudaDude wrote:
| This only works in countries where $5-10 is not much. Also this
| does not account for power users who can easily rack up enough
| API calls to put Christian in the red.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > Also this does not account for power users who can easily
| rack up enough API calls to put Christian in the red.
|
| "... and cap the number of request per user so it remains
| profitable."
| hraedon wrote:
| The current subscription price is $1.50 a month or $10 a year,
| so presuming the same profit the cost would have to jump to a
| bit more than $5 a month or $53 a year. Apollo also had a
| lifetime tier that would have to go away, because it was priced
| without knowing that future costs would be so much higher.
|
| This also entails getting rid of the free tier and imposing
| usage limits on the remaining subscribers since a few people
| could easily blow out the average and drive up costs.
|
| There are definitely people willing to pay those costs (I count
| myself as one of them, as well), but the lack of apps like
| Apollo being successful at that price point probably means that
| it is not a sustainable business.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > Apollo also had a lifetime tier that would have to go away,
| because it was priced without knowing that future costs would
| be so much higher.
|
| A "lifetime" purchase for any app is always a bad idea and is
| a Ponzi scheme. Mobile apps always require maintenance and
| updates.
|
| Now of course I understand that he could have never predicted
| such a price increase.
| bigthymer wrote:
| He should seriously consider starting his own Reddit alternative.
| He has a sea of enthusiastic supporters that potentially have
| enough critical mass to get it started. Unlike attempts to create
| Reddit alternatives in the past, this group isn't full of racists
| and others who were kicked off the site for engaging in
| reprehensible topics.
| paulcole wrote:
| His group is instead full of people who don't want to pay for
| things and who don't like ads. Good luck bootstrapping the next
| Reddit with that.
| buildbot wrote:
| Counterpoint - most of that group paid him money for
| Apollo...
| w-m wrote:
| I don't think that is necessarily true. There's two payed
| tiers of the app, and they seem to sell at least well enough
| to support the development of the app.
| spiderice wrote:
| What makes you think people who use Apollo don't want to pay
| for things? I literally pay for Apollo
| TechnicolorByte wrote:
| Agreed. It's a small but sizable community that, as you said,
| wouldn't cause problems like the group that left Reddit for
| Voat. I realize it's a much bigger challenge as a one man team
| to create a full Reddit clone and not just a nice client for
| it. But I really hope the Apollo dev considers teaming up with
| others to go for it.
| chillfox wrote:
| Can't really say I would continue to use and post on reddit
| without Apollo. Their own mobile experience is absolutely
| garbage, even when paying for premium.
| kup0 wrote:
| Another day, another service driven to madness by the poison of
| advertising
| Eumenes wrote:
| Hopefully this accelerates the death of reddit ... I think once
| they nuke the Google SEO fu they have on questions (they'll screw
| it up, like Quora did), get rid of NSFW content and kill
| old.reddit, they're done. That should reduce traffic by a good
| chunk, and less eyes on their site, less ad money. Ironic,
| because they think these changes will increase ad money.
| imchillyb wrote:
| No Apollo, no reddit.
|
| The entertainment isn't that entertaining.
| a13o wrote:
| These prices are being set by an industry-wide bottleneck around
| online human verification. The cost just shot up because of LLMs.
|
| This is only a temporary reprieve for Reddit, Twitter, et.al. The
| LLMs are going to start simulating user agents and work around
| this. Well-intentioned alternative user agents like Apollo are
| collateral damage.
|
| The root fix is a solution to online human verification. All
| these web products are just trying to hang a "Humans Only" sign
| on the door.
| jsnell wrote:
| What's the granularity of a Reddit API call? Is e.g. loading a
| submission with all the comments, or loading the top 20
| submissions to a subreddit a single request? Or do you actually
| end up doing tens of requests for what's effectively a single
| page load (one for the submission and a few comments, one for the
| each image, one for each additional batch of comments)?
|
| $0.24 for 1000 full page loads wouldn't actually sound insane (if
| you compare to typical CPMs of sites with ads), but it seems hard
| to believe that the average user is doing that 350 times / day.
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