Reddit isn’t profitable, despite having more than 50 million daily active users. In preparation for an IPO, CEO Steve Huffman put the platform’s API
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This article is mostly useless. It states the problem, but doesn’t have anything new to add.
The blatant astroturfing is what really icked me out. From day one of the API changes, it was clear that Reddit had spun up the spin machine and had begun to misrepresent the issues.
The main one was how they tried to push the “they just want the API for free”, “we’re entitled to charge for our services” narrative.
There was one comment that really gave me the ‘holy shit, ick corporation’ reaction… in an article about reddit’s traffic going down, a reddit spokesperson said “we do not comment on incorrect statistics from third parties”. Like please, calm down, you’re not a lawyer for a politician on trial here.
They said this about The Verge. Big “you’re liars” energy when journalists reported factually.
Yes, I loved it when Christian Selig let Hoffman (fuck spez) know his lies were exposed because he (Christian) had recorded their conversation… and provided proof. Would love a video of Hoffman’s reaction.
Hoffman’s reaction
Care to share a link if you have it readily available? Otherwise I can hunt around for it :)
Christian is not talking to Huffman there.
Also, fuck spez, but Christian looks pretty bad in that sound bite. The $10 million thing really looked like a threat, and Christian tried to back pedal only after he got called out.
I always interpreted it along the lines of
“Apollo is losing you 20m per year. Buy me out for 10m. You save 10m the first year, and 20m the following years. I make a one-off 10m, which is 50% of what you value my app to be worth per year.”But I agree that whole exchange doesn’t go great.
Easy to misunderstand without hindsight!
However, it is quickly clarified and agreed upon (from both sides) that it’s not a threat.
So, spez takes part of that conversation massively out for context and said Christian threatened Reddit. Which isn’t in good faithI know the full context. It doesn’t really make it any better. Bringing it up in the first place is bad, regardless of any “clarification” (a.k.a. damage control).
Besides, do you really think your interpretation wouldn’t be considered a threat? Reddit won’t say publicly they considered it as one, but it is very clear they took it that way (and, probably, correctly).
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I gladly would have paid $2.50 per month to access reddit as it was. But I guess they didn’t want my money or because they couldn’t have all of my money they weren’t interested.
I was paying $2.50 since Reddit Premium is $30/yr and they still block your API access.
I cancelled it and won’t be going back. I no longer believe in the platform.
TIL reddit premium is a thing… What do you even get? My gut reaction is it’s a waste of money…
Ad blocker and gold. It is mostly a waste of money, but if you believe in the platform, it’s a way of paying back (which is why I cancelled it).
That was super disingenuous and turned me off, too. Like you’re saying, Selig noted that by reddit’s stats, each user cost .12 cents a month and reddit was asking for $2.40. The 3rd party developers provide a service to reddit that reddit could have monetized through various arrangements, such as requiring their ads to be displayed, requiring premium as you said, or a profit sharing arrangement. 3rd party developers were not taking advantage of reddit or demanding free access… they objected to reddit pulling out the rug suddenly and then lying and misrepresenting everything about it.
This has been like going to a restaurant or working somewhere for 8 years and then you finally meet the owner and are WHAT? Fuck that.
It was the setup as well.
Conversations in January saying API and API T&C were not changing anytime soon (clarified to mean multiple years).
The change announced shortly after with 0 concrete details.
Then 6 weeks notice of the details to then implement the changes before costs incurred.6 weeks notice is fine for consumer stuff, but not business-to-business, and not at the scale of $20m.
The narratives you mention in your last para are completely true, that’s what annoys me, IF they had engaged in good faith with users. As it is, it’s like a shopping centre that’s been free to enter saying “right, it’s now €100 to enter and any underwear shops are closed to you unless you wear our uniform.”
Just completely crazy prices for a poor service. No shit that’s unworkable. Just be honest and say you want to bring those users in-house, just fucking say that rather than trying to gaslight everyone into believing that all these competent developers are all unreasonable arseholes who are screwing you, a multi-billion-dollar corporation over.
Yeah that’s my point. The fact they were suddenly asking for astronomical fees was conveniently skimmed over in favor of this ‘greedy 3rd parties want stuff for free’ narrative.
I legitimately would’ve paid for the reddit subscription if it meant keeping Reddit Sync. It’s nonsense. They just wanted the apps out of the picture.
My Reddit use has declined 70% because I only access it from my computer or through Firefox for Android (which is damn near unusable).
You just reminded me to cancel my Reddit Premium subscription. It was $30/year. Not sure what to do with my 75K coins.
Maybe go find some comments recommending Lemmy and gild them?
Make your own comments promoting lemmy and guild them
Thats terrable… l like it
Looks like it’s on sale! How’s that profitablity coming along spez?
I would have happily paid $5 a month for baconreader, probably as high as $10.
In both time and quality, I used it far more a month than netflix, hbo, or hulu.
I don’t know what it would have cost to keep baconreader active with the API changes, but from what I read the price was intentionally design to be unsustainable.
It wasn’t about making 3rd party access to the api profitable, it was about making 3rd party apps go away to push ads and harvest user data.
In the final weeks, myself and many others said we’d be happy to pitch in to keep baconreader alive, and the feeling I got was that just wasn’t an option.
Oh well, I’m here now, and can watch the whole mess from the sidelines while getting to be part of a new and growing community, instead of a bloated dying one.
$10/mo is probably in the ballpark.
I honestly don’t think the pricing was unreasonable. The main issue was the execution.
Only reasonable for an individual, bulk tools need more juce than a reg user, reddit holds a lot of cards for what to do to adress the power users
A lot of the mod tools were exempted. I imagine the ones that weren’t didn’t even try in protest.
A lot of power reddot has over mod tools that want to stay now. No wonder devs left
I agree. reddit acted very poorly; however, you could get your tool exempt by licking their boots.
My reddit use has declined 100% because I refuse to go to that website. And I was spending hours on it a day.
fuck u spez !
From the deepest spubby of my heart, fuck @spez@reddit, have fun playing with yourself as all the other kids have left you alone cuz you yank their hair and throw fits
source, idek
They have TWO THOUSAND PEOPLE working at Reddit and Memmy for Lemmy is a superior product with how many people working on it?? 3?
Spez is an impossibly incompetent Elon Musk wannabe (the person who just flushed $44 BILLION down the toilet due to incompetence). He needs to be drawn and quartered tbh
FOSS does not have an inherent detriment versus corporate products. If enough people want to do it, development of FOSS can in principle move just as quick or quicker than corporate development (and more efficiently too).
The recent interest in Lemmy, largely thanks to Reddit’s incompetence, means that not only is the core software moving very quickly but the app scene is growing quickly as well.
Elon flushed 44B and made 96B just this half year.
The game isn’t right somewhere.
Haha never has been
There’s one interesting thought that never comes up in history class…
What happened to the aristocracy?
They didn’t give back their land holdings (basically anywhere), they didn’t pay reparations, they didn’t give up their investments… In some places, they never stopped getting a stipend.
France and Russia. They killed the aristocracy (although others filled the void). In the Americas, if they existed they were killed and replaced with Europeans. In much of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, locals were raised up to the position.
The US is organized into counties (Counts), territories (Marquis), and states (Duke). There’s a couple commonwealths like Virginia too… Why? What does landowners mean? It’s all over the constitution. A jury of your peers sounds a lot like a group from the peerage. A redress of grievances from the federal government isn’t an option for the common man, but it’s in the bill of rights.
When did it end? Because Lord Fairfax isn’t a title held anymore, but Fairfax county VA most certainly still hosts the Fairfax family, who are extremely wealthy landlords. They called capitalists who rose up from the common people “robber barons” only a few generations ago… Maybe not because they stole from the people (Carnegie and Rockefeller most certainly gave back to the community), maybe because they didn’t come from a certain social class? Name a billionaire or a senator that didn’t come from the “I never have to work” class…I can’t.
Yeah, the game is rigged. It has been since Rome. The lines have been blurred, but they’re still clear if you look for them
The game was rigged from the start.
Always has been.
I wouldn’t say it’s a better product, but it is quicky moving in that direction.
I’m so happy user funded and user controlled is a viable market strategy.
It also works for operating systems ;)
The official Reddit app is just a miserable experience. Take away the ads and bugs and I still don’t like it. Navigation, layout, voting are all inferior to Memmy already and the gap is only widening
If you ask a computer engineer, they would say that’s what you get with and without a product/project manager.
I’m a software dev, I can fairly claim to be a software engineer as well
It’s not just having a product owner. We have a parable…
A manager asks a senior dev how long it will take him to build a thing. He says 9 months. They ask how long if they get another couple devs on it - he says 8 months. He asks how long if they add a dozen people, and he says it will never be finished
There’s plenty of variations, but it’s not a joke - how many people built the Linux kernel? How many built C? How many built Apache, how many built transformers, how many built osX?
The answer to the best technologies is always 1 or 2, maybe with helpers. The more people you add, the harder it is to innovate - you can polish all day long, but 1 sharp person can build something better than a dozen equally sharp people. One brilliant person is more effective than one brilliant person with a dozen helpers
It’s all about quality, quantity only weighs down the process
I think this is somewhat overstated (also a dev), but there’s definitely truth to it. The division of work needs to be clear from the start, and ideally the design done collaborative to really have additional devs help.
Part of the problem is we all think different, so even two brilliant devs can step on each others toes and cause problems if they’re not synced up on what the plan is.
Unix has a similar backstory. Prior to its existence, there was a project called Multics aimed at enabling efficient sharing of a computer among multiple users. However, with a lot of teams involved, the project became overwhelmed by excessive complexity and stalled, eventually being regarded as a costly burden and dismantled.
Later, the guys who would later develop the programming language C joined forces and created Unix. They drew inspiration from Multics but took a much simpler approach, and added some innovative ideas. The result was a remarkable achievement.
Reddit basically lost any semblance of respect the community should have for it. You know, the people who give them all their content and do all their moderation for free.
Fuck 'em high.
They have a new identity that they keep reinforcing with every new decision. They’ve lost their previous identity and become just another web service looking to get the most money possible out of the users they can still attract.
Reddit isn’t profitable, despite having a billion dollars in advertising dollars coming in every year? And someone thinks that spez should remain in charge?
My gut reaction is that a multimedia website the size of reddit must be a juggernaut of server and hosting expenses.
Idk but in my opinion describing red*it as a juggernaut for hosting multimedia is a bit far fetched, since their own image / video hosting platform is pretty shit and most of the media content is actually hosted on other platforms.
I didn’t mean to imply they were good at it, just that the volumes of data involved are certainly not trivial.
Reddit bought imgur though, didn’t they? So that’s part of their expenses.
Oh I actually didn’t know that. That indeed changes my perception a little bit
When did reddit bought it? Wikipedia said owner is MediaLab AI, Inc.
Ok, I wasn’t sure, hence the question mark.
Imgur started out as a convenient way to host images for Reddit, but Reddit did everything they could to make sure Imgur didn’t stay that way. That’s why they introduced their shitty inhouse image hosting.
Imgur just kinda goes on by itself now, fairly successfully it seems.
Also: Nobody is paying the price and they are losing users(this is also the reason why I came here).
With a wopping 0 apps paying those API prices their profit remains less than 0
It lost its identity a long time ago.
The funny thing is… for me it wasn’t even the API changes, it was how Steve reacted to the community feedback. If you need to make your app profitable that’s fine by me, but don’t ignore your customers so bluntly. They could’ve easily worked politely with devs to find an agreeable API price, find alternative funding streams for those devs, etc. They did none of that, instead Steve acted like a jerk.
Yeah, we all see his extremely punchable face. Simultaneously blond and ginger and rat-like. It’s a big reason I’m off reddit.
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Which is incredibly stupid and shortsighted. Third party developers have made the UX actually tolerable, and of course the users are the absolute cornerstone of the whole website
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Honestly if they’d worked with the Apollo dev and he’d turned around and proposed something reasonable like $2 a month to continue using it I’d still be on Reddit.
Treating Reddit users like shit, treating devs who have made their whole business about making Reddit better like shit, fucking with unpaid mods, and finally, this weird manifest destiny attitude that Reddit will succeed despite all of the above turned me to the Fediverse.
Just make it part of reddit premium! Ugh, why wasn’t that the solution.
Because that doesn’t kill the competition.
I have been so spoiled by my 3pa I can’t even look at the old.wasit.com I just see
Ad Post Post Ad Post Post Post Ad Next page.
Idk how people put up with that.
That link is extremely dead, what was it
Reddit was it but not anymore
Stil frustrates me. Being fair about why the business side needs it and then giving a time frame to devs to integrate with premium calls would have been the best option.
There would have been some revolts because of it, but nothing like the last few weeks imo
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Good point! It was not a given, but right now it seems like Reddit’s choices (and related events at Twitter/Meta) have been driving new platforms to emerge. I’m still incredibly suprised by the adoption of Lemmy and Kbin and especially the quaility and diversity of available apps for the platforms. It’s just really cool to see what people can do when they care about communitites of people coming together.
100%, I was mad about the api changes but realistically I would have stayed
But seeing the interviews he gave was just too much. Especially when he was talking about monetizing people who say things on Reddit they wouldn’t say to their therapist. Like, that group specifically you want to milk? Fuck spez
But seeing the interviews he gave was just too much. Especially when he was talking about monetizing people who say things on Reddit they wouldn’t say to their therapist. Like, that group specifically you want to milk?
Wow, I actually hadn’t heard that 🤯 It seems believable based on his other behavior though. It’s honestly a shame, Reddit is a cool forum, but it’s kind of like a nice restaurant where you know the owners are just awful people… And that really just ruins the experience of being there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html
Paywalled but he talks about the value of the data on Reddit for ai training, basically that he wants to get the money from people saying stuff they’d only say in therapy otherwise
Dude is a creep
This precisely. It wasn’t about charging for the API. It was about charging an exorbitant amount for the API, giving devs a tiny amount of time to come up with a solution, and then belittling the user and moderator communities.
I don’t want to be a part of a website that treats its own community with so much disdain and spite.
It’s so true! I’d still be on Reddit too. Social media is not that big of a deal in my life. I never imagined having my nerve struck so hard. That I’d delete a 11yr old account. Loosing Apollo definitely would have lowered the amount of time I would have spent on Reddit, but I changed comments, burned my accounts, and did a gdpr request, when I saw Spez’s AMA and he doubled down against Christian. And Christian easily provided the call recordings. That was so terrible. I don’t want to be anywhere near that.
I still haven’t fully moved on from it. I’m not sure if I’ll delete my account or wipe my comments or not. I don’t think it really hurts much to actually have an account registered with them(?)
There’s also a fair chance that I’ve answered some useful techal support, programming guidance, or career guidance questions on there that would be lost to the search engine gods if I wipe my account… And that seems not so great.
I don’t think everyone needs to be so drastic. And helpful genuine answers on niche topics is how I found reddit in the first place. In a way, for me, reddit became a google alternative. I liked seeing a qualified discussion about something. Especially discussions about things that never feel trustworthy, from life, relationships or even product purchases. I always feel I can distill a conversation down to gain perspective. Lemmy will accomplish that, but it’s going to take time to build it.
I can’t see myself “using” Reddit again. But it will be inescapable to visit the site when I just need a good answer to things from years ago that were arrived upon in some old thread. To me that’s reddits greatest value. What we all contributed. So I totally understand why you can’t so handedly throw it all away.
This sounds a bit like Google’s murdered project Vark.
This is the business world in general. Consumers need to say to businesses in no uncertain terms that they cannot just do whatever they want and still remain profitable. Without users, there is no profit. Charging for the API would be completely acceptable and expected, but they decided to go the most cartoonishly villainous route possible. This is what a lot of companies are doing now. They have gotten far too used to the profits being free. We should teach them a lesson, collectively.
I’m 43. I lived a good amount of my life without the Internet and even more of my life without smart phones. Even after gaining reliable Internet access, I remember the times when the Internet was not just a few big companies. I just rediscovered one of the old forums I used to hang out on is still operating. They have an active IRC channel as well. Don’t think we can’t go back, big tech. It would be so easy to go back. Don’t tempt me with a good time.
e
Fund it with donations, open source all the technical components
reddit did both of those originally
but when they started taking private VC money they had to start making returns on that investment which spiraled into the current situation
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I remember when reddit gold was there to pay server costs. There was a little bar on the side to show how much % was covered per day. I had it for quite awhile. But then I hit financial trouble and had to cancel. By the time I could afford to give back they got greedy and I couldn’t in good faith keep giving them money.
Reddit could have been a non-profit like Wikipedia. But they wanted all the money.
The lost this a while back because they wanted to turn into a social media platform like twitter and facebook. It was originally set to oppose those things and we made memes about those platforms and then we ended up becoming one. Will reddit die? No, i dont think so. But just like Facebook i’ll just not use it.
Too late for that already right? Just like imgur, correct?
I learned about catbox.moe recently. It’s pretty great. Simple interface, uploads up to 200mb, files are kept forever, and when you upload a picture, it gives you the actual direct link to the image; not like every other image hoster that gives you a link to the “image page”, then you have to right click on the image and copy the link address to actually get the direct link.
Only thing that sucks is it doesn’t strip exif data from the pictures uploaded, but not a huge deal since I just use it for memes and random pics anyway.
I wish people would stop using imgur. It’s entirely unnecessary for posting single images. Also, I use noscript and the number of external websites imgur loads scripts from tripled sometime last year, and now it doesn’t even work to display a single image unless you enable who-knows-what sites (most sites, it’s easy to tell which ones are necessary - for imgur, it isn’t). Even worse it flashes the image and then it disappears without JS enabled for whatever domains it needs. So people using imgur is enabling all sorts of ad tech/privacy invasion companies to track whoever clicks on their photo, for no real reason.
Do you have a suggestion for an alternative?
I use https://postimages.org/, it is completily free and almost unlimited (not if you just spam) but idk about their privacy policy or the sites it loads
What’s the likelihood of them sticking around? There were plenty of image sharing sites before imgur but they were not reliable to last.
Risks? They already have. FUCK Spez & Reddit. The latter had a good run but I’ll be happy to watch it burn as greedy spezbags deserve whatever shitstorm happens next.
I’d argue reddit lost their identity days ago. Several iconic communities and features died with the API slaughter. Now it’s just another link aggregator without the things that made reddit unique.
Acutely maybe, but it began years ago. I remember as early as 2013 or so people were saying it was not what it had been before
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I totally agree. Devaluing the product seems to be the way of business during this inflation. On social networks it’s the content creators. In the music industry it’s the plummeting percentage paid to artists over the last 5 years. You see it everywhere. Simultaneously requiring subscriptions. Essentially Reddit was going to force the API into a subscription profit model if Christian Selig went along and kept Apollo alive.
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