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Comment by deminature | Hacker News Reader

The answer here is for reddit to make an actually good app and win the market back by simply being the better alternative. The fact that they've decided they can't compete with apps written by individual developers and need to resort to crushing them by fiat is sad and ridiculous, especially for those individual developers who have painstakingly carved out their niche over years.

Presuming they cannot make better software, surely the answer is inserting ads in the API feeds instead of destroying the 3rd party ecosystem entirely (and potentially losing thousands-millions of users)?

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I'm not going to tolerate ads.

Signed, third party app reddit viewer.

coming from a place of curiosity.

Do you expect the website to be free of ads for you, and how do they sustain themselves? engineering work? cost of infra? r&d?

Would you pay to browser reddits ad free?

I would probably pay $1 per month.

I feel that's fair considering I (we) provide 100% of the content and 99% of the moderation.

I can take it or leave it to be honest. If it's free or very cheap I will use it. If it's not, I won't. But I won't tolerate ads.

Also I really should doomscroll less for my own mental health and productivity anyway.

The internet was great before reddit and it'll still be great long after reddit has shittified itself into irrelevance in the pursuit of shareholder returns.

Most forums never need a paid subscription and have very minimal ads, if any at all. Usenet was/is free on your ISP with no ads.

Computing power and network bandwidth have never been cheaper.

There's so much more content out there for free than I could ever consume.

I'm so sorry their dream of becoming millionaires on the back of others content only worked for a limited time.

>r&d

HAHAHA that's a laugh. I guess they need to pay the enshittification engineers.

What has actually improved on reddit over the last 5 years?

Hoping that one of us geeks can come up with a workable open decentralized solution, so we can finally escape the corporate carousel of birth, shittification, death, repeat.

> Hoping that one of us geeks can come up with a workable open decentralized solution, so we can finally escape the corporate carousel of birth, shittification, death, repeat.

lemmy?

5 years i couldnt say. But older versions of reddit often had outages and all sorts of scaling issues when they were using...what was it...Cassandra for their backend.

Yes, actually I remember all the outages. I suppose I was thinking about user-facing improvements.

OK, now they've fixed their scaling issues, what needs to be done?

They certainly haven't made any positive frontend improvements.

Can there be no such thing as a finished product?

They way I see these things is that reddit has captured many communities and is now holding them hostage. I would prefer reddit to die and to be replaced with federated software such as lemmy or even a decentralized solution.

5$/month for premium is fair to remove ads, Youtube has a similar but more expensive option in their app. Removing the ability to use third-party clients altogether is dumb.

Just out of curiosity, how much would a site like reddit cost to run?

From a quick google, they have 55M daily users.

How much data would the average one use, and what would that cost? What about the other costs?

How much would a not-for-profit reddit have to charge users for an ad-free experience?

Has HN ever released data on operating costs? HN is obviously a lot less featurefull than Reddit, but it'd be a good starting point to get an idea of what's possible.

Damn, imagine a stripped down donation-funded text only Reddit clone run by something like the Wikimedia foundation or Archive.org.

same. Also why i ditched Apollo after having the lifetime paid version.

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