Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I’ll just lock it for now.
Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable
It’s their own fault. They didn’t have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn’t have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.
They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.
I’m really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants
There’s this toxic idea in the business world, that in order to be successful you can’t just make money and be profitable, but your profits have to keep increasing year after year. This kind of runaway, cancerous growth is poison to the country and the world.
The founders want to be billionaires, as if being a multimillionaire would not be enough.
This is like if a Grocery chain said that they need to stop selling Lemons to little girls because the lemonade stands were profitable and they aren’t. The scale of the two businesses is not the same… none of these apps have millions of dollars in VC funds or thousands of employees.
But Reddit doesn’t need these thousands of employees, they’re already getting the brunt of the workforce for free (the mods). Like the other guy said, one hundred engineers to manage the platform, 100 customer service to help the mods/do admin and off you go, you just need a few unobtrusive ads to finance that. But that’s way too open and won’t turn you into a billion dollar business nor get you any love from advertisers or VCs, let alone going IPO, so we are where we are.
Agreed. What are all their employees doing? Is reddit basically an adult daycare?
As someone who’s 4 weeks into new job with very unclear duties, there’s definitely a point where a company loses a lot of efficiency because there’s too many people who don’t seem to do much for the company, even those who want to do more for the company.
On the upside its a very low stress job with very good pay and benefits, plus I’m getting to do things like leading trainings that I might not otherwise get to do at this stage of my career
and im willing to pay for API access. If Reddit started charging me a buck or two i would be ok with that. I recognize that servers are not free, and their profit has to come from somewhere.
But charging app devs $20,000,000 a year is NOT the solution.
I would have accepted it… Not anymore. They burned this bridge.
And the Apollo dev said there were things they could have done, but the combination of 30 days notice, and the number of subscribers Apollo had who had prepaid for a year, (at a much lower price) the was no way to make that work. Plus Reddit had promised them no API changes just a few months ago.
They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them.
THIS!
Here’s your API passkey. If we catch your app not displaying ads, your passkey be invalidated.
Bobs your uncle, all the browser apps are now delivering your ads.
They also could have saved money by remaining a link aggregator/discussion board instead of deciding to host media as well. Any surge in costs is their own fault.
This is the big issue with growth investment or whatever the hell its called. Instead of being happy with a steady revenue, big companies have to always grow until they become completely unsustainable.
It blows my mind that Reddit can look at 90% of its communities going dark in some way and think, “yeah, this is fine.”
EDIT (AGAIN): Thank you all for the comments on total subs. It’s still clearly not 90%, but it still appears to be a significant portion of the active Reddit community. For the interested, check out the comments below for stats. :)
That’s what Huffman was saying BEFORE the blackout. Now that 8476/8838 subreddits are currently dark, I wonder what he would say now? I don’t really see how Reddit recovers from this. It’s sad because I loved it and there’s nothing else like it (yet), but there would need to be some major changes taking place before a lot of people consider venturing back.
Guess I’m sticking with Lemmy, then.
This is the way
This is the way
It’s not that you’re charging for API access; it’s that you’re charging US pharmaceutical industry pricing levels ($12,000 for something that should realistically be $200) and then only giving devs such a short time to implement changes. This was designed to kill 3PApps outright and everyone can see it. What an ass.
That part. No one is saying don’t charge but literally no one can afford to fork over that kind of money. Christian crunched the number to run Apollo for a year and it came out to approximately $20M. Twenty million freaking dollars. How is this reasonable?
I’m so tired of unchecked greed. It ruins everything. US Pharma is a great comparison.
Main reason why I’m gonna try and stick it out with Lemmy.
Hard to corporate greed a decentralised system :D
This! I’m happy to pay more for my Apollo Ultra Subscribtion, but their prices aren’t based in reality, they have the only purpose of driving 3rd Party Apps out of business. And then they also wanna limit NSFW content to the official App and nothing else, that’s affecting a lot of Subs I’m in (a ton more if I count my throwaway porn account) It’s just ridiculous.
Pissing on 3PAs and saying “it’s raining only on reddit”
Cool beans. Thanks spez, for introducing me to lemmy.
RIP Reddit! This was all I needed to see to delete my reddit shortcuts from my phone and computer. let’s gooooo lemmy!
Since I don’t see a link to it in the discussion, here’s an internal email from yesterday that has made its way to the Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman
There is literally no new information in this article and the title implies that it is in response to the acutal blackout, and not the threat of one. Bad article.
Thanks for saving my time
Well Steve, it’s not profitable for me to be a moderator for free either. Feel free to let me know how profitable you think you’ll be after hiring enough staff to replace all the mods that’ll be leaving.
Digg used to be king. People abandoned it in droves when they went a step too far and there was an alternative. Reddit is not immune to the same thing happening to them.
The irony is reddit was that alternative to Digg.
You’d think Huffman would have the wherewithal to realize that no king rules forever.
He’s too into himself to think people would leave… Yet here we are… Over here and not there
wow, what a crazy way to see it, but at the end of the day it’s true.
The problem is that Reddit is much bigger than Digg ever was. They are entrenched. Getting people to switch will be difficult when all we have to offer is ”Its like Reddit but way more of a clusterfuck.”
Normies are going to take one look at the list of Lemmy instance and say ”nope.” So that leaves mostly us technical minded folks. So then, why would I use Lemmy over HN?
That’s the biggest problem that I see for Lemmy’s future. We should be asking ourselves ”What can we do that other platforms cannot?” We cannot survive if we’re just a clone of Reddit.
Give us “normies” a little credit. I’m not technical minded AT ALL and I’m still willing to stick around and figure out how this shit works. Do I understand it? Hardly. Does the app I’m using (Jerboa) work? Barely. (Although today’s new release has improved it greatly, thanks guys!). But I’m still floundering around here and it’s a bit frustrating. I’m still going to give it a go though. I’m confident that improvements will come that make it easier here for everyone like me that uses the internet a lot but doesn’t really understand the internet that much.
But maybe I’m just willing to stick it out because I was only looking for an excuse to leave Reddit and the means to do so. I admit I don’t really care about the recent debacle, I just miss the old Reddit of 10-15 years ago and I don’t like what it’s become (a place full of memes, TikTok videos, dumb jokes, and hardly any real conversation anymore). It took this most recent fiasco for people to start talking about alternatives and that’s when I finally learned about the fediverse and made the move. It has been a lot easier to leave when I knew where I could go.
Precisely, you don’t have to be deeply technical to understand this, you just have to be willing to put in a little bit of work.
I also found it a little complex and daunting at first as it was my first contact with the fedirverse, and I’ve been on the internet since pretty much the start.
We’ll make it a great place to be, and other people will see the benefits and put in the same work too.
Normies are going to take one look at the list of Lemmy instance and say ”nope.” So that leaves mostly us technical minded folks. So then, why would I use Lemmy over HN?
To be honest, I (as a techy myself) thought the same when I checked out Lemmy for the first time. Once I realized that most of the big instances are already federated anyway and that I can see all their posts when I browse All, my doubts were gone. It’s really not that much of a hurdle, even for non tech savvy people.
Exactly. I’m a normie, and I’m here with no problem.
What’s HN?
Hacker News, a link aggregator similar to oldschool reddit before subreddits were introduced. I find it often has some interesting discussions but it’s not for everybody.
User education will be key. Let’s face it, old time “Redditors” will look at the simplicity of creating an account, and looking at sub-reddits and say “I’m too old to learn a new way. This is too much”.
The seniors won’t leave, and the younger who don’t follow basic tech will be in the same boat. Just look around some of the subs there - they are entrenched.
They really should have just found out what the 3rd party apps -COULD PAY-. If it covered the cost of their usage and there was some profit on the top, it would at least bring in some money. Based on what I read by the Apollo dev, there was back and forth communication about pricing for a while until he broke the news.
It astounds me that they chose to cut them off entirely by offering impossible pricing. Isn’t some money better than no money?
It’s because the planned IPO. Allowing third party apps, that are better designed, show no ads and don’t collect the same amount of telemetry data (seriously the official app spies constantly for user data), doesn’t look good in the eyes of potential investors.
Also, the API feed doesn’t push ads, so 3rd party ads don’t have anything to show. Reddit should have redesigned their API so ads could get pushed out.
The idea was to kill 3rd party apps, duh.
Idk I use relay and he thinks he can do it for 3 dollars a month, but that’s still giving into reddit. I’d rather then switch and start making Lemmy apps, or adapt their app over, might be unreasonable but just a thought
3 dollars a month for a lesser experience, mind. What with reddit stopping access to NSFW/explicit stuff via non-official apps.
But honestly, even if my app of choice - Sync - could do it, I’m not about to pay a corporation for content generated for free by us. The whole thing stinks of the slow slide of social media into the gutter. Happened with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit is no different.
Federated social media might take a little while to take off, but it will be so much less toxic and much more enjoyable without the ever expanding need of a corporation to deliver more and more profit at the expense of the user.
I’m not about to pay a corporation for content generated for free by us
That’s actually a good point. I don’t mind paying for access to an app, since it costs money to maintain, but our posts draw people into the site to read advice, news, and funny stuff. If Reddit is going full-monetization, there should at least be some payment for… upvotes? Views?
Not really a good point. Servers, bandwidth and employees cost money. Even if content is generated for free, those things cost money. A reasonable price is totally fair for an ad-free experience.
This. For those that understand that standing up the infrastructure costs money, I don’t think paying a reasonable price would be out of the realm. Even the Apollo dev was stating that API should not be free, but reasonable.
I feel like there’s a weird disconnect in the way that a lot of people perceive physical and digital infrastructure.
For something like a road, it’s natural to assume that maintaining it costs money - after all, you can see the wear and tear on it, you can see the guys patching it, etc. Because of this, things like paying tolls are an annoyance, but most everybody accepts it as the cost of keeping things running.
For a website, though, almost everything is hidden from the end user. You don’t know how the server is doing beyond “is it up or down,” you don’t know how big the dev team was or how many people maintain it, or what costs they incur… And so, people seem to be more prone to assuming that “it just works,” without considering the costs behind it.
Right, but the content is also what draws people in. Not just the infrastructure. So if some of that money made its way back to mods and top posters then they would be feeding the community instead of charging them for the content that brings in more viewers.
Others have speculated that the API pricing model is built around customers who want to use the data for AI training, not customers who want to build apps for public use. The $20M price tag is what they’re hoping a mega corp will pay for data access and don’t care about anyone who can’t afford that much. Some money is better than no money, but for a lot of people the “chance” at BIG money is better than some money lol
If this is the case, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just separate into tiers, where mass data usage to feed into a language model is priced differently than people legitimately using and contributing content to the site.
they still have a lot to gain by killing the 3rd party apps and forcing the remaining users to the platform that will benefit their valuation the most. the pricing is to court the big whales to sell data to and the forcing people to use the native app is to improve the quality of the data they want to sell.
Precisely. Investors like apps because users cannot change their user experience, disable telemetry, block ads easily, and so on. They receive push notifications which drive engagement and allow easier tracking across accounts.
I think it’s simply that they want to funnel all of their users to official channels. All of this “discussion” is a poorly veiled attempt at public justification. 30 days notice at the quoted price tag was very intentional. My hope is that Reddit seriously miscalculated the amount of damage this would cause. My suspicion is that /u/spez doesn’t care and is willing to nuke the site for a one-time payout at maximum valuation.
This is what happens when a bunch of MBAs are detached from the product they’re working on.
Hubris by the new execs they hired.
“We are not profitable”
Says the one who wants the money of 3rd party developers.
Also not a great thing for the CEO to say right before their IPO.
Not at all. Most tech startups (if not all) are unprofitable at IPO. Plus they have to make their finances public, so it’s not something that was a secret before.
The alt-right is having a great time right now on Reddit. Tons of their posts from r/conservative on the front page.
