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A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working
(www.theverge.com)
Goodbye Reddit hello Lemmy
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.
Reddit has gone downhill for some time now. When I joined that website it was a completely different place, but with time it went to shit.
I remember I joined the piracy subreddit to look for some sources, news, resources, etc. but all that was in the subreddit was memes about how much nintendo sucks lmao
This was a year or two ago
Iβve been an avid redditor since 2010ish. Iβve seen many evolutions of Reddit, third party apps, and many plans to defect. This is my first time defecting though. The official apps and desktop are QUITE far removed from the initial user experience that most of us old-blood had. I think Reddit will survive but I expect them to target gen-pop as opposed to more tech advanced crowd from here on out. Basically a bunch of normie bullshit will flood the site and it wonβt be worth sticking around for anyway.
That's seems to be the progression of sites like that. Starts out great but then gets larger and larger until the content quality just isn't the same anymore.
It's the whole reason why I'm here today. The reddit app on android is dogshit and RIF is a much better product. I hope if they go this route then hopefully they end up like digg.
Apparently its planned for July 1st, unless there's enough public backlash. Reddit is I think the last US big-tech site with an open API, so I don't think they'll cave.
I mean I can understand charging for it but make it reasonable. In that Apollo post yesterday he said that he has a deal with imgur (which he says is similar to reddit in API requests) which charges him around $130 per 50 million requests whereas reddit wants $12k. It's an absurd amount of money to ask which convinces me they're doing it specifically to snuff out 3rd party apps forcing their users to use their terrible apps on iOS and Android. If so then I'm perfectly happy deleting my reddit account and using a site like this or something else to get my news/interests.
I'm kind of hoping they don't cave, so that more people move here.
I think they might cave. Think of it like a negotiation.
John: Hey, we make zero from third party reddit apps, we should charge them
Fred: Well, they produce a lot of content, which is what keeps people on the site
John: Hmm, we should charge them anyway. Keep the shareholders happy. $1,000 per 50 million requests.
Fred: But won't there be a big uproar?
John: Well, that will happen regardless of what we charge. If we think we can get away with charging $1000 per 50 million requests, let's announce $12,000 per 50 million. Then we can walk back to $1,000 and everyone will think we're being reasonable. If we started at $1,000 we'd probably have to walk it back to $100, and that's a waste of time.
Fred: You're brilliant, lock it in!
Yeah, that would be the "best case" scenario, but honestly I believe they are too daft too make a "good" compromise.
I hope if they go this route that they end up like digg
Pretty sure they will.
The older crowd who have been there for over a decade is sick of their bullshit. And the younger crowd will just move on to the next thing anyway.
Reddit thinks they are facebook now. lol, good luck with that.
Apollo was the only reason I used Reddit. I really enjoyed Reddit via Apollo but have been around long enough to know itβs time to walk away from Reddit in any form. So here I am testing the waters of Lemmy and trying to figure out how to integrate it with my Mast client Ice Cubes app - if thatβs even possible. Apollo was an awesome app with a solid UX design but itβs obvious Reddit is pulling a Twitter and thereβs no way Iβll support that or their impending IPO.
Apollo was the only reason I used Reddit.
I mostly use reddit on a real computer, that makes it bearable. I wonder how much longer it will last.
I agree, I use mostly Boost on Android and used Apollo on my older iphone (and used many other like Sync, Relay, Slide, Infinity etc), the experience of these 3rd party app are so much nicer that the awful official Reddit app, honestly I just want to access the communities, and I don't care about all the thing Reddit have on their app, I want a clean, nice, fast experience. The current state of Reddit makes me sour.
I hope that there will be the same kind of apps for Lemmy and other instances, for now the Lemmy app on Android seems nice, it isn't as feature rich like the popular reddit ones but it could always be improved.
The RedReader dev is considering turning RedReader into a lemmy client which would be fantastic IMO as its super simple and very accessible to screen reader users
I've never used it before, but that would be a great thing. I would love to have other reddit client like Boost, Sync, Infinity or others to have compatibility with Lemmy π
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/
I've known this for a while too, but it's been hard finding something. I think Beehaw is what I've been looking for, because my first experience of Lemmy was... well let's just say that it's a lot more pleasant on a server that has chosen not to federate with certain other servers... it scared me off for a while.
Apollo was the only reason I used Reddit. Excited for Lemmy to grow!
Something tells me the apollo dev doesn't want to build an application for lemmy. They'll probably stick with reddit unfortunately.
pretty dogshit attitude from them -- easily one of the worst things about reddit is random subs being able to silence people like this. especially at a time like this, we're really bickering on about rule 8a.(b) when the app and site are facing existential threats?
It is unfortunate, because I'd be glad to help them build an app for lemmy, or contribute to the existing ones in development.
wonder if it was the actual dev or one of the random mods on that sub? Their mod list is hidden so who knows how many they actually have?
Tbh the only reason I even use Reddit anymore is to interact with an RP sub.
bruh
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