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A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 31 May 2023
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Surely a sustainable model. Great move reddit. /s
I never used digg.com and im a bit out of the loop, but wasn't it almost the same issue that essentially killed it?
It's a very bizzare modell to make users pay to access their own created content. I get that hosting costs money and it needs to be paid. but the amount of adds on plebbit has become unbearable / that should get them money enouth to cover hosting. Maybe I'm living under a rock...
I think your perspective and goals simply don't align with those of reddit's admins.
To be clear, I'm 100% in your boat. That said, reddit is becoming a publicly traded company. Its admins now have the goal of maximizing value for potential shareholders rather than fairness to users, community sustainability, etc.
Through that lens, I have difficulty finding flaw with any of reddit's decisions. The number of users will likely be far lower in a year. They will have a crisis in moderation growing before that. I'm sure an admin speaking candidly would agree with all this, but they're doing it anyway because driving users to the official app (and I expect removing old.reddit soon) will at least temporarily boost ad revenue.
For anyone not familiar: Among other factors, stocks price according to a ratio over their earnings (P/E) that varies by industry. Do you know what Facebook's P/E is? Last month it was 30. If that's where reddit's IPO prices out then every $1 of ad revenue they generate over the next couple of months will make them not just that $1 but another $30 at their IPO.
They don't care if it's sustainable because this isn't even about running a profitable business in the long run. This is about amplifying their IPO price to cash out.
My perspective and opinion surely doesn't alling with - who ever is in charge at reddit. Almost exclusively all content is created by users - for free, for others - they provide a platform, moderation etc. yes. but I don't belive "this is the way" - without the content creators, they don't exist.
EDIT: sure sure they have their own app, you can use the website. The official reddit app is unusalbe to me - just for the fact of privacy invasion. I haven't even properly tried it for performance. Essentially shutting the door for developers of 3.party apps - which all together made reddit what it had become ... is like... yea. I'm done.
I recentely had do use reddits via web-browser from a public library computer - no adblockers or anything; I was honestly shocked abou the amount of ads and sponsored posts. It's too much. way to much.
maybe at some point a project - like reddit - just becomes too large to handle in a good way... I don't know. It's sad to see - I like(d?) reddit and I always felt it's a nice and friendly community.
How is it no sustainable? From my understanding, Reddit doesn't make a buck out of the third-party-apps. Let's take Infinity as an example, because I use that app. I don't have an account on Reddit, so I scroll it with an anonymous account on Infinity, so they can't even collect some nice personal data to sell it on the market for money. Now, If Reddit is shutting down these apps with the API-costs, people have two choices, use Reddit frontend, which is hardly usable without an account, or flee to alternatives. I obviously choose to flee, but I believe there are many people to which lemmy isn't yet an alternative. So they would be forced to start using Reddits frontend, for which you basically need an account, personal data will be collected and sold, targeted advertising etc.
To your second point, I read in the post from the apollo dev, that Reddit literally makes enough money already. I think this whole progress to charge for API-access is just a next step, to make even more money, which is a logical step, given that Reddit announced to go public this year.
So as I see it, it's probably sustainable for them to do this, but please tell me If I am mistaken somehow.
They could have, by making third-party apps access available through Reddit Premium as a monetization path without destroying the developers, but they decided to Digg their own grave instead.
The problem is that Lemmy isn't as well-established as Reddit was when Digg died. There's as much of a risk that reddit will just leave a vacuum and it'll get filled... by people doing whatever Reddit demands of them. And Reddit is doing less-horrific stuff than Digg did, if only slightly.
This is sorta how it went with Facebook. I would love to see lemmy or another alternative win, but it might be difficult to dethrone reddit.
I'm in a panic because I hate reddit official and I use RiF exclusively. But I might not have any option but to learn to suffer through reddit offiical.
Ultimately, it comes down to what communities you can either stand to live without and or actively work to build an alternative here. If you're happy here, it doesn't really matter what's going on over there.
That would also have been a good solution.
I'm a pretty active user on the site and I almost exclusively use 3rd party apps because their official apps suck ass.
I'm talking about active in the sense of at least 30 comments a day and 15 posts since the beginning of this year.
I would guess that most power users and mods are using a 3rd party client. So they would lose a lot of users who create content and many communities will die.
Not to mention that they basically want to kill all of NSFW reddit so these communities will die too.
Thanks for pointing that out, I haven't had this view angle because I just lurk and don't post.