How Reddit became the enemy [video]
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It's unfortunate, but when you hitch your wagon to a corporation's API, you are taking the risk that one day they wake up and say ok we're ready to control our narrative and turn off the API (or set exorbitant prices to access)
Writing was on the wall when facebook/instagram did this years ago.
If you're ever in a situation where this happens, consider it you're big flashing warning sign about trying to run a competing offering!
(Mac users of a certain age will remember Apple buying SoundJam MP.)
It came with a stereo RCA to 1/8th inch adapter cable, for digitizing audio files straight from your record player / cassette player.
I also remember being bummed that iTunes never properly supported aliases [0] when running under Mac OS 9. And I remember Audion [1]. Heady days indeed!
0. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...
If not, then there isn't much to complain about
The same can't be said for the Meta properties, and so I'd argue we're seeing something different/worse here.
If you don't think you're taking a major risk, then you're just being naive.
(I'm not defending Reddit here, but I am saying anyone should have been planning for this highly probable outcome.)
It's well known that most online communities are 1% super-contributors, 9% modest contributors, and 90% lurkers/occasional contributors.
"Third party app users" are far more likely to be 1% and 9% users. They're committed to the platform enough that they're willing to seek out or even make software to improve their experience on it. The lurkers will just download the official app if it's the top match in the App Store and deal with the inconveniences.
So if you take that away, you disproportionately punish your most valuable users. Note I say "valuable" not in terms of "they click a lot of ads", but rather "they bring the content that makes the other 90% of users stick around and click ads."
It feels like a bar cancelling "Free Drinks Ladies' Night" because they figure that the 10 female patrons will buy 20 bottles of beer, then acting surprised when the 50 men who would come in to hit on them (and buy four beers each) don't show.
You’re speculating at this while the Reddit team just has all of the data and knows exactly where traffic comes from.
Also maybe the 3p app user, while being the most prolific poster, is simultaneously a high % of toxicity.
It is a perfectly reasonable and rational thing to do. They are not thinking in the same terms and caring about the same priorities.
We can discuss how reprehensible or short sighted that is but business is ultimately about making as much money in as short time as possible. And that is exactly what they are doing (and what they have been trained for in those MBA courses).
The business world has been forever changed by the creation of the institutional investor, which was largely created by pensions, 401k's and other such funds where by the actual people putting in the money is several steps removed from the people investing that money.
So now the business world, for public companies, lives and dies on the quartely report.
Apple could license off a bunch of crap. Boeing could sell assets and designs. Toyota could just rebadge cheaper vehicles and sell all of their factories.. all of those could make record “profits”.
Are we doomed to everything just being a pump and dump scheme from here on out because why shouldn’t everything just be speculation?
Reddit is none of those things. It's a VC Frankenstein at this point and it's probably never going to make real money, so it makes sense that they're trying to change the recipe to at least get something back.
I worked at one of the larger UK social networks and people there were terrified to make changes in case it suddenly stopped working.
From what I’ve heard the old Twitter management didn’t understand why it worked and were therefore very conservative with making changes. Mind you, the new management also doesn’t understand why it worked but are quick to make changes, and we’ve all seen how well that’s going.
Fast forward only a few months and they are now:
1. Charging exorbitant prices for the API. 2. Removing the ability for apps to display ads to free users. 3. Removing NSFW subreddits and content from the API.
Said in another way, they are:
1. Decreasing app revenue (no ads). 2. Increasing app expenses (paid API). 3. Making third party apps worse (removing NSFW from the API).
That's...about as close to "ruining the API" as you can get.
Edit: As many metaphors do, it works on multiple levels, but the fundamental message is don’t be a chump.
What made Lucy like that?! I often think of the trope in the context of US politics, and specifically progressive capitulation to capital. I find it one of the darkest and yet prescient parts of Schultzes lore.. (Snoopy being an adult with a long, colorful history yet still treated as a dog, being another)
1) if you export your data (yes, your data!) they don't include contact's email.
2) The can refuse to give you API access to your own data.
Even the way that Old Reddit showed ads was so quaint. If you look at Old Reddit without an ad blocker, you'll see an ad in the list of 25 items, but it has a different background color so you can easily visually differentiate it from the real content along with two high-contrast things noting that it's an ad. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have been minimizing your ability to differentiate ads from content by making them look nearly identical with a tiny, low-contrast marking that they're ads. Of course, New Reddit shows ads with the same tiny, low-contrast marking that other companies use. But unlike others, Reddit still allows you to choose the Old Reddit experience.
Yes, in some ways the writing has always been on the wall. In other ways, Reddit has been a bit different. They've largely ignored the kinds of things that other sites have gone after. Yes, when you've hitched your wagon to a company's site, you're at a certain amount of risk. That's also true of users who might find the site infested with ads or changing how they're allowed to do things. At the same time, Reddit has resisted that direction for so long that most people assumed it would continue. Why now? Why not 5 years ago?
It seems like the thing people are reacting to is the culture shock. Instagram was never open. They wouldn't even let companies schedule posts for a long time. Facebook was barely open, but never had the kind of ecosystem that Reddit had (and often fought against third party access). Reddit's policies felt really different and they aren't changing in a gradual fashion. It's not like Reddit told Apollo, "we're going to start charging 20 cents per month per user" and Apollo only works for those paying $1.50/mo for Apollo Ultra (and then a year later Reddit wants 50 cents and then a dollar and slowly Apollo Ultra goes up in price and more people move away from it). It's not like Reddit put in limits like "you only get 100 API calls per day per user" which would be 30% of an average Apollo users' usage. That would start bleeding users from Apollo over time, but not feel like slamming the door shut - and maybe Reddit charges $1/mo for unlimited API calls for the user and only those paying a subscription fee can get the unlimited calls. That would offer a way forward that users might grumble about, but could work with. Free users could still get a decent amount of usage and people who really cared could subscribe to a new Apollo Ultra at $2/mo. In fact, it could drive sales of Apollo Ultra - maybe 5-10x more people start paying for Apollo Ultra.
I think the big shock is that Reddit went from so open to so closed in one step while Reddit had historically accommodated the community's resistance to monetization. Old Reddit has stuck around for half a decade now. Despite being one of the most visited websites, a lot of monetization opportunities seemed to be ignored. Condé Nast/Advanced Publications seemed to mostly ignore the site. It was spun-out with Advanced Publications remaining owner and just kinda went along. Even after raising $200M in 2017, Advanced Publications was still the majority owner (and I think they're still today even after Reddit raised another billion dollars).
Lots of younger sites/networks have gone public with a lot less traffic and aggressively moved to monetize. I'm not saying this was the case, but it always seemed to users that Reddit's owners were a bit disinterested in its potential monetization and were mostly fine ignoring it - allowing users to easily block ads, keeping Old Reddit around, allowing free access for ad-less third-party apps, etc. In that environment, it does come as a shock. Reddit felt like this hidden place (that also everyone knew about). It just felt different.
You're not wrong that building on someone else's site is risky. At the same time, I can see the shock from such a sudden change to a site whose reputation was quite different.
He did. Apollo has a freemium model, and if the API pricing was reasonable, he coult take the hit using the subscribers to subsidize the free users. The problem is the exhorbitant pricing, meaning all his users should be paying four times what the usual suscription costs, just to pay Reddit. It's bonkers.
The problem, everyone seems to think Reddit doesn't provide enough value to be worth $5 a month to enjoy without ads and a nice UI.
Reddit wants about $0,00024 an API request. To think that isn't reasonable, seems odd. Sendgrid wants $0.0399 per email. ScrapingBee wants $0.098 an API request. Docraptor wants $0.4 an API request/pdf. I'm sure I could carry on and find more and more sites that cost more per API request, I didn't find one that was cheaper.
$10/month to use a free website on your phone is just not a very attractive deal at the end of the day.
$2.50 would be the API costs per user. So $5 would cover, take in some money and pay appstore feeds. And if you're looking at 10% of his userbase, that would be about 4 million a month income with 2 million being for Reddit. Based off his claims of 20 million a month with a $2.50 cost per user.
I'm sure he'll be able to survive off $1,000,000 a month profit.
Edit corrected the numbers:
$2.50 a user for API costs.
$5.00 a month subscription would cover that cost.
$1.50 going to AppleTax.
$1.00 a user to the indie hacker
If 5% of users that would cost $20MM sign up for $5 a month it would be $2,000,000 a month overall revenue.
$1,000,000 to Reddit.
$600,000 to AppleTax
$400,000 a month to the indie hacker.
And there is also probably a part of him that doesn't want to be greedy. But is it greedy to sell your software for $5 a month? I don't think so.
Dang, maybe there’s room to make a Reddit app, haha.
He says that he can charge more and still make a living. However, the price change goes into effect July 1st of this year. That’s less than 30 days from now.
The issue is all the current premium users who have 2-12mo left on their subscription suddenly become a huge liability. He cannot suddenly ask for more (against apple rules), and he must not remove features they paid for (apple will issue a refund to them).
It's a spectacularly stupid move, almost on a par with Musk >50% of Twitter's value and Waves trying to force their customers onto a subscription model by making old versions obsolete.
Reddit will lose a huge number of users, its brand will be trashed, and the app companies will be forced out of business.
There is no way this can't end up as a net loss.
Reddit will lose a bunch of deadbeat users, who generate little to no income for the company but cost money to serve. In business, these are the sort of people you don't want.
Who do you think will spend hundreds of millions a year to replace Reddit so that deadbeat users can use it? There would be no money in serving those users and any attempt to serve them and monetize later will result in the same thing that is happening at Reddit. The days of VCs burning money for social networks seems to be over.
I would suspect Reddit has done the maths. And saw that most content generators use their app or the website to post.
And every big decision they've made has made it worse, not better. Do you use new reddit?
I've cancelled my subscription.
Some form of “tough break kid welcome to the real world”
There’s a pervasive “if you can’t beat them join them“ attitude about these antisocial financial and social structures.
We need more people to say “Here’s an alternative to that model” instead of just throwing their hands up.
Stop excusing it. Start pushing for alternative ways to organize.
Because it's the right one.
> Some form of “tough break kid welcome to the real world”
Yes.
> There’s a pervasive “if you can’t beat them join them“ attitude about these antisocial financial and social structures.
The argument would be sound, if and only if others weren't making a business off the free to one side of the equation.
> We need more people to say “Here’s an alternative to that model” instead of just throwing their hands up.
You have no alternative until you offer free compute, storage, hosting, for reddit, Twitter, Google, etc., as far as I can tell, you do none of these things, nor will you be able to fundamentally break physics to do so.
> Stop excusing it. Start pushing for alternative ways to organize.
Pay me.
You are totally right.
This shit attitude needs to change.
It's increasingly hard not to be cynical but I've been through the cynicism phase a few times and I know how useless it is.
It's not ONLY Christian but creators of apps like RiF, Relay and others face a similar destiny..
I haven't read any reactions from those creators regarding this Reddit Vs. Apollo saga since they're also "saga-ed".
Update 3: Reddit effectively kills off third party apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36170143 - June 2023 (21 comments)
Reddit sparks outrage after it demands app developer pay $20M/yr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166236 - June 2023 (75 comments)
Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162235 - June 2023 (404 comments)
Ask HN: Could Usenet get revived, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36153565 - June 2023 (148 comments)
Teddit – An alternative Reddit front-end focused on privacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36144211 - May 2023 (91 comments)
Historical code from reddit.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142971 - May 2023 (64 comments)
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 - May 2023 (1273 comments)
Second, it's been tried, multiple times. Saidit was one, I think. Ruqqus was another, and there have been more, all claiming to be censor free and all failing to achieve a solid following. Saidit was (and still appears to be) a cesspool of trolling, conspiracy theory and anti-everything-ism.
Third, it'll miss moderation, so it will probably follow in saidit's footsteps.
Possible related?
People don't actually want censorship free.
The trouble these alternatives have is their userbase have to be, in bulk, the users banned from the centralized social media apps. But if Apollo takes THEIR userbase, then those people arn't negatively selected. They're just people who have phones.
It's a better alternative to dying. Diversifying support for multiple backends could serve to protect you. Non trivial but it seems necessary at this point.
A RedReader/Apollo/etc. run alternative wouldn't exist for that reason so I think it would stand more of a chance.
I don't think Reddit will give them enough runway to have time to set that up though.
A direct centralized reddit clone without the god awful UI, dark patterns, and increasing poor leadership decisions would probably be an immediate success. Apollo for mobile plus old.reddit on the desktop would hit a million users in weeks.
Later Spez gave an interview where he proudly extorted how he had all his users darkest secrets, with a maniacal laugh for effect (now deleted). The blatant hazing and censoring of certain groups was the final act that killed Reddit.
Or, alternatively, have everything be decentralized lie the fediverse, although until that becomes more user friendly I don't see it taking off.
A lot of people were suggesting the apollo developer write his own backend and setup an alternative to reddit, and I sure hope he considered doing so.
If there were multiple /r/news pages and none were a default that might work, but that has always been Reddit's big structural weakness.
The thing about Reddit is that it's "the front page of the internet", and the "front page" has been captured by special interests in collaboration with Reddit, Inc.
/r/onguardforthee/ has ~270K users, /r/Canada has 1.76M. That counts as a success. Most similar replacements never got off the ground.
1. Niche refreshing or funny subreddit becomes popular. Power mods request to join the mod team, are rejected by the mods of the sub, who are just normal people like you and me.
2. It hits 100k users, becoming subject to more stringent rules from the admins
3. Incestuous relationship between powermods/astroturfers/reddit admins is used to get the original mod banned (at least accused of "allowing hateful content" or some other false flag)
4. Powermods take over the sub, keep some old mods, but ban anyone speaking up
5. The subreddit is now under the full control of powermods, and becomes an astroturfed echo chamber like the rest of the reddit front page. Sub's front page becomes a mix between the original content and the marketing page for ShareBlue-like organizations.
Afraid that can't ever work.
Who manages the managers? A hierarchy that terminates at a single responsible party the stakeholders, the board, can control.
I think that's the organization structure that everyone complains is responsible for some of the most sociopathic behavior in the world. Or at least sociopathic behavior at the largest scale.
Human beings have no new ideas on how to organize things, and so they keep going back to the same old ideas that have been proven defective. In this case, defective in exactly the ways they claim to want to avoid. It's a little bizarre.
Who do you report mods to? Other mods?
There is no one to report them to.
The trouble is that people demand that the discourse remain pleasant and unobjectionable. That it drives on in a direction that they agree with. And good, human conversation can't ever do that. We have unpleasant things to discuss, and we have objections. The direction can and should be capable of changing at any time.
But because most people are cowards and children, you strive like little eusocial insects to deconstruct and destroy conversations like that. It bothers you. And the biggest and best tool for that is the moderator, some unintelligent busybody with grudges.
Until the one day of course that you yourself realize the there is something unpleasant to be said. Until the direction should be different. Until there are objections to be made. Then you get banhammered and you want to cry about the very juggernaut you helped to enable.
The confusing part is why you think that the solution could be an ever larger juggernaut? Why do you think that could ever help? How do you even propose creating it?
Admins.
This isn't nearly as complicated an issue as you're trying to make it out to be.
Strict moderation is always controversial. I tend to prefer it.
If anything, expect things to be like now, but more so. They clearly intend to increase the intensity of the policies you dislike, they just haven't figured out how to do that yet.
I wonder if we will see a shift in engagement to smaller, more curated communities centred around the curators instead of discussion happening under broad sweeping discussion boards. Perhaps it's better for discussion to happen under categories within a community curated by somebody with intention. In this scenario, the expectation going in is that there would be a level of controlled oversight.
I've been working on a platform to help content creators offer their communities for this sort of thing where their communities can become a sort of privatized social network curated by them.
If they're trying to go public, they're going to want to show revenue growth and show that they're able to get more money per user.
You've called Apollo an "important partner", but are they a partner for Reddit or a rival? In terms of Reddit's revenue, they seem to be a rival.
This is certainly terrible for users and I'm sure Reddit will face a decent amount of backlash over it. At the same time, I'm not really sure about categorizing Apollo as an important partner. Is Apollo kinda like YouTube Vanced? A better app for users that also means less revenue for the service? To an extent, who wants Reddit's ad-infested app when they could have Apollo?
If you're Reddit and looking to have a good IPO and grow your revenue, Apollo and other apps are standing in the way of that. They're offering a better, ad-free experience of Reddit. Over time, more and more people would want to use ad-free apps like Apollo instead of the official Reddit app as more people realize they exist so it's not like the problem would be shrinking for Reddit.
I think LLMs might be a convenient excuse, but I think the bigger issue is likely that they want to grow the revenue they're getting from their user base and they can't do that when people are using apps that get around their monetization. Reddit is following what most similar sites have done.
It's a technicality that just adds to your point though.
Things are worth what you're willing to pay for them.
Look at the recent job postings for mobile developers. See talk about adding multimedia interactive widgets to sub reddits. The current product is not sticky enough apparently.
This customizable widget tech is unlikely to be easily supported by third parties and will slow down the adoption and rebirth of Reddit as a sticky profit cow.
Edit: and their video playback has been notorious for years now
https://www.amazon.com/Without-Their-Permission-Reddit-Bluep...
The cost of 0,00024 per request seems reasonable, and according to Apollo’s creator the cost per app user would be just 2,5 a month. Keep in mind that currently this app probably has no incentive to go light on the requests, so with some tinkering the creator could probably get that down. Maybe some proxy caching or what not.
Of course free is going away, but paying users at say 5/mo or 50/yr should still work for Apollo.
I'm not a user of that App so excuse me if I am mistaken, if Apollo is currently free and without ads then the developer had a lot less to worry about then than now.
Additionally the outrage, as far as I am aware, has less to do with Reddit needing to make money rather it's way of going about making money is killing the user experience which kills the point of the website.
> Additionally the outrage, as far as I am aware, has less to do with Reddit needing to make money rather it's way of going about making money is killing the user experience which kills the point of the website.
It's not killing the user experience, it's making the nice user experience "just" more expensive, which I covered in my first comment.
So there's a point where that price is too high for people to bother paying. 13/year maybe acceptable, is 26/year?
This will lose Reddit users which loses the point of the site (for the users). Which is killing the user experience.
Some default subs and moderator accounts probably constitute a billion dollar industry.
This will spread the $ load down to peanuts per user and be similar to the original ($1/mo) WhatsApp pricing model.
The short answer is that he is left hanging due to the fact that many of his existing paying users have already paid for the year and thus, when the new API rate hits, will be costing him money long before he can recoup their costs through a subscription hike --- presuming 100% of them renew at the higher price, which would be an extraordinarily optimistic presumption.
Basically a dev would sell a Reddit client for a fixed amount and when the user would fire it up to view Reddit, then that would trigger a native Reddit's API subscription, paid by the user directly to Reddit.
This can be streamlined to be nearly zero-friction IF it's supported on the Reddit end.
2.5 million != 7 billion.
So how is Apollo not on that chart?
And we know the complainers will just keep using it because they are addicted. 0% of them will leave the platform despite their complaining.
If you want to find the gold, you need to get off of default reddit and onto niche interest reddit.
I mod three small (at most 5k) subs. I'm alone on two of them, and there's two of us for the third one. We've already decided that the subs will be locked and closed once 3rd party apps lose access.