Didn't reddit used to be profitable? I think we should start by asking what decisions they made that reduced their profitability. Is it the video player that nobody asked for? Deciding to self-host images? Developing an app that nobody wants to use? It seems to me like they put themselves in this position.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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A few years ago when I could afford it I bought a lot of Reddit coins to award posts. At the end of the day, this is the thanks I get.
In a nutshell:
Imagine if you own a nice Jaguar - keep it in your garage and let the neighbours borrow it to go to the shops. Now you need to do some maintenance, and make up for losses in your taxi service (which might cost $2 per km) so you wanna price this as a premium service. ... so you could charge them $5 takeout fee plus $1 per km, or (if you're greedy) just go for $5 per km.
What Reddit did is say 'Fuck you, you want to use it, you pay $100 per km or fuck off - we don't care'.
The amount of money Reddit makes for you getting advertisements is actually less than $1 per km... The same occurs with YouTube. If you actually click to donate, then you can pay enough to cover thousands of hours of advertisements in one small swipe.
What we need is MICROpayments spread across a wider user-base to balance the ad-supported platform, and then people will accept that small payments are better.
I'm not entirely sure why Reddit was going to charge outlandish fees for the third-party APIs. Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it. It's really a combination of pushing them out of the market and then being a smug little bitch that really nailed it in the coffin for a lot of people.
Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it.
But that is exactly what his goal was. If he really was interested in working with the 3PA devs, this would have been handled completely differently. The fact that it was handled as it was, with essentially zero engagement between the company and the community, and with essentially zero flexibility on the part of the company on the implementation, is pretty clear evidence that their goal all along was to drive the 3PA's out of business.
i don't think they were trying to make money off of the API changes. like others are saying, it has to do with AI and they figured they might as well take the chance and knock out 3rd party in the same swoop so that they can funnel more people onto the official app
they can data harvest much better that way
AI has nothing to do with it other than a convenient, topical scapegoat.
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Reddit killed internet fora. by being easier and cheaper. While making no profit.
If they suddenly do want to make profit,
The terms change, there are alternatives.
I agree. They built a better mouse trap and now they want to go back to the old one because they figured out they can sell cheese. The better mouse trap still exists.
I think it is within the company's right to revenue increasing opportunities. That said I view the slandering of the Apollo creator as the turning point. It was very poor taste and their communication around this has been horrendous. It kick started the migration to the fediverse and a critical mass has adopted it. So now there is no good reason to go back to Reddit even if they reverse their decisions. Heck, had there been a different stimulant to fediverse adoption without any missteps from Reddit, I would still have transitioned my usage to a system where the users are more in control.
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It wasn't what they did it was how they did it. If they wanted to I'm sure they could have worked out a compromise where everyone stayed happy.
A good way to foster resentment is to profit off a bunch of mods and devs donating time for love of community and then spit in their face by forcing them out. I think it's one the most blatantly asshole things I've ever seen a corporation do, one for the history books.
I do wonder if it will really make a difference. I think it might be their undoing. Social media users are a somewhat fickle bunch and can move on to the next big thing, that's historically been the case.
They weren’t going to make everyone happy. They want vastly more money, and every way of squeezing money out of a thing makes the thing suck more. They certainly could have fucked the PR aspect less severely, but no business in history has ever had anyone enjoy the part where VC investors try to get their returns.
IMO the issue that people are upset about, and as a result all the publicity going on, is just related to how much they wanted to charge people for the API.
If they rolled out something reasonable for pricing, and allowed people to use their own individual API keys in third party apps on a free tier, I think a few would have complained here and there, but otherwise it would have been fine.
Obviously they need to make money to pay for costs of running things somehow, there's nothing wrong with that.
And how little time they were giving. And quite frankly, the incredible entitlement spez has shown in the wake of the incident. And honestly from the start as if reddit had cause to be frustrated OpenAI built something cool off of Reddit users' content. As if he built the whole of reddit and all its content without decades worth of free hours from users and mods alike.
He doesn't want to build a platform for communities. He and his company want personal enrichment he already feels entitled to. He's making that pretty clear. Otherwise, IPO tomorrow and use it as a cash infusion rather than a liquidity event.
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Two things would have done it for me. They could have offered a user token subscription that I could port to all my accounts. Sure there could be token sharing with that method, but for a "modest" user cost, I might have been tolerable of it. They would have had to open the third party apps at the same time, but it would have bought time. The second thing would have been extending advertising through the third party app. That might discourage users of the free third party app, but it would also have given time to readjust the market price. Maybe the compromise would be that the free app could still be free of Reddit ads, but it wouldn't be customizable or would be limited in the number of additional subreddits with certain ones that were fixed to those free accounts. The key in both cases would be to work at making Reddit still available to those third party apps via the API and not the way it was brought to those developers. Lose the third party support, lose the support of moderators who have learned to be efficient with their way of using the site, lose the site.
To get rid of the promoted and ads on the reddit website I started using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-ad-remover/cgipdekhdobcdhnobaimhlapmhpgdpjl
That is exactly what he said. It's just not remotely what he intended. Bad faith etc.