The real question is how much is Reddit willing to pay third-party app developers for making the Reddit UX tolerable enough for people to stick around?
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Reddit is going to get so much money when it goes IPO that it couldn't care less about its users and/or 3rd party devs.
Only if there's a community left there to sell! 😅
You're right though. As many people as there are fleeing, there are many times that who will stick around and endure whatever changes Reddit makes. Reddit will have plenty of eyeballs left to sell ads against. Now, will the people generating content and moderating still be around? What happens long-term if they aren't? That remains to be seen…
I had this discussion in here before and I think it's for the better that the majority doesn't leave reddit, for both sides.
The vast majority of redditors are lurkers. It's a small minority that actually care enough to post the content and engange in conversations. Coincidentally, this same minority is the only one that cares enough to leave so I am expecting the most engaging people to migrate to other platforms like this one right here and I expect that Reddit is going to be left with lurkers and no one to drive the communities forward.
Granted, they will still be able to sell ads to lurkers but who cares? That's not why most of us were in Reddit.
I was there to get more news and educate myself. If that's gone, I'm gone. I'm happy to do this here, as well.
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What really stands out from reddit's statements is the conspicuous lack of disagreement about the alleged charges to 3rd party apps. They can keep trying to characterize it as fair but the factual numbers in the conversation make it plainly obvious that they are instituting a model that makes it impossible for existing 3rd party apps to survive.
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I pray they don't change their minds and continue with these plans. It's so stupid of them and I love it.
Yeah, I agree. I'm loving lemmy and haven't spent more than 10-15 min. on Reddit over the past week.
I'm not really browsing reddit anymore. Just checking in on a few niche communities once in a while. The community on the fediverse is much better than I had anticipated.
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I'm still on Reddit to upvote anything that talks about this shitshow, and recommending Lemmy.
I'm on kbin, but this all seems to be a decent replacement. Pretty cool I can sub to Lemmy posts
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It reall is pretty good, I hope a lot more people can find their way to it. I'm a lurker most of the time, but I want to start engaging more, because I think the Devs have done a good job here.
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Yeah I'm out for good.
I have requested the moderation of one familiar community of mine here and intent on putting in the effort here.
I have also contributed to the lemmy github in the form of pull requests.
If reddit doesn't care about the users I won't. I will care for something that offers something back to me and the community.
They can insist on being fairly paid, but the users have to think the transaction is fair as well. Ask Digg how much their platform was worth when all of the users were gone.
I would say the majority of posts on Reddit are admin ran karma bots and scammers. Just a bunch of bots talking to themselves.
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Reddit still doesn't quite understand where their value is derived from.
I can imagine bunch of idiots making user base and profit/loss projections without even opening reddit for once.
What do they say?
When your opponent is making mistakes, let them.
Its an unfortunate ideology that everything in the world should be optimized around profit.
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At this point I hope they crash & burn. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ
Absolutely. I want it to be a clear consequence of their anti-user policies. And I want Netflix to crash and burn for taking away account sharing. At the moment, the power is fully in the hands of corporations and stakeholders. We need to show that users can organise and have the power to pull the plug on a service or community if they are being treated like cash cows.
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I remember when Reddit's FAQ had the question "Is there a mobile app for Reddit?" and the answer was "No, we don't have a mobile app and have no intention to develop one, but you can choose from a list of third-party clients". And what do they mean by "not fairly paid", does Reddit not already have a working monetization system with paid awards and profile customizations? Not enough people paying $80 to put a sticker next to a comment?
$0.24 per 1000 requests is not being "fairly paid". It's an abusive price and it's at least 10000x their actual server cost
Wow. I had not done the math. That's an obscene amount of money. 1000 requests is nothing for a web app like Reddit, even with agreeing over-fetching.
The crazy thing is that they might have gotten away with it if they had structured it right. Set up the infastructure themselves to charge the individual user directly for their API use rather than the App creators. Carve out exceptions for moderation APIs and known moderation bots. I probably would have paid a few bucks a month to keep using Relay. I would have grumbled about it... but I would have done it.
Now I'm just gonna leave, lol.
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Reddit is lemmy's marketing department
The entire company is delusional wtf
They're trying to prepare for an IPO but it seems they've chosen the Twitter business plan
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Exactly, they depend on thousands of people working from free (from people that post stuff to the moderators that don't even get proper tools), and then they try to extort them. And in the middle of this I think people running some social media companies don't understand that active users are both their suppliers and main asset, and that they should do everything in their power to not piss them off.
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"Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app," the Reddit worker said.
Uhh... Plenty of services charge less than half of that for the same number of API calls, and they are still able to make money. I would imagine that as large as Reddit is, their cost per 1k calls is way less than $0.10, unless their API is poorly engineered and inefficient AF. This is 100% them just trying to drive third parties out so they can get that sweet sweet ad revenue.
So they expect less than 4166 API calls per user per month, or 138 per day? That doesn't sound like much.
I just loaded reddit.org and my browser did 57 XHR requests. I clicked on a post with zero comments and it went up to 84. Clicked on a second one with 430 comments and I'm already at 137 requests...
For context, it looks like "Apollo requires ~345 requests per user per day".
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Exactly what it looks like to me. This is clearly an attempt at driving up revenue for the upcoming IPO, but I think there’s a little more to it.
We all know that Reddit depended on third party apps for years before releasing their own, which is full of ads and all the other features they cram in there that long-term users don’t care for.
To me it looks like they’ve planned for this move to drive out long-term users, who remember old Reddit before the crazy amounts of ads, and will still have the people who will tolerate the official app, and the many people who have only ever used new Reddit and the app, and of course are used to the ads.
I think they’ve underestimated just how many of their mods and content contributors are using/dependent on third party apps.
laughs in lemmy and adblock if have to use reddit
If you're going to use the official app, AdGuard Home or AdGuard Private DNS.
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Then Reddit should look around its industry and set a competitive, fair price, not 15-20x the industry standard.
They're cutting a lot more than 5% of their free workforce.
Then they should set a reasonable price, not $20 million dollars for allowing access to data in useful volumes. I wonder how long it's gonna take until reddit starts collapsing fully, the first few proverbial chains have broken so the ball is rolling.
They could have easily instituted a "pay for gold and get unlimited API access", and then have Apollo etc show users how to make a devkey and put it in Apollo.
That would have covered costs easily, and show real subscriber. But nope.
I hope they cannibalize themselves in this race to the bottom for their IPO :D
They fire 90 employees but plan to hire another 100 before the end of the year?
Typical corporate bullshit? Searching, finding, hiring and training new employees is more expensive than keeping the old ones....
Not if they're outsourced and earning a fraction of the previous salary
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Do you guys think the higher ups will be able to retire to Reddit Island after they sell their shares? 🤣
Sounds like they haven't been able to invest dev time on how their API works for years.
It's never been about the API. Third party apps are undercutting Reddit's as revenue. They could never ban the apps outright so they set an obscene cost for API calls to indirectly kill them. They have probably factored in the potential loss of users already and it probably ain't much.
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