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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Technology
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This reminds me of the "average user" Comcast would talk about when they introduced ~~price discrimination~~ metered billing. Just include the long tail of lurkers and signups who almost never use the service, and you can claim that the Apollo users (who are power users) are just outliers who should pay more.
Ultimately for me this is a reminder that when there's a for-profit business ramping up to an IPO, it ultimately has to decide what the products are. Reddit tried to make itself the product with Reddit Gold, but clearly not enough people were paying for it, so it has to make users the product. It's hard to "monetize" users through someone else's app, so they've basically decided that for app users, if the developers figure out how to sell a very expensive service, more power to them, otherwise fuck 'em.
The old saying 'If the site doesn't charge anything, you're the product they're selling' just keeps coming back.
It's not necessarily that "not enough people" were paying for Reddit Gold, but that subscription models like that tend to be great for making a stable profit but not so great for line-go-up-forever endless growth, which is what shareholders always, always want. It doesn't matter to them if reddit is profitable if it's not even more profitable than last year.
Either way, yeah, the reddit users are the product and the free labor and not the customer.
For every publicly traded business, or those that are set to become publicly traded, the product is "shareholder value". All of them. Always.
They're in the business of selling stocks now.
Exactly.
For house users, they create shareholder value by selling ads and by curating their experience in future ways that manipulate them in one way or another.
But for API users, it's murky how to create shareholder value, but one obvious way to do it is to charge a shitload for the API. If that results in an exodus from API users, well, no worries because they weren't creating value anyway.