I've seen the suggestion "why not let Reddit Premium subscribers access Reddit through third party apps" which seems like a fair compromise - Reddit gets cash in exchange for not being able to serve ads at that particular user.
I'm curious how the laud power users would react to this though. I suspect they won't like it because it's not the same as using the product on VCs dime.
The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money or creative people's content. Unfortunately, the VCs are not into philanthropy but in money making and the creative people need to be compensated too, so this can't last.
I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standart. Paying through extra steps(advertisement) or paying through political power transfer(free curated content with agenda) is bad for the society.
I pay Reddit so that others don't have to, to keep the forums open for the community. Reddit does not seem to understand this, instead spending subscription money on like, avatars, or fake currency, or minting freaking NFTs, or whatever other junk they're spending all their budget on.
> The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money.
Nah, the good old internet was built on reasonable product goals and simple ad revenue. (See every major forum that existed in every little niche, most of which went away when Reddit got popular). In fact, that is what built the original Reddit too. They didn't need any more VC money, they didn't need any of their last round. Reddit literally has a $350+ million yearly revenue. Reddit won, they have a perfectly fine medium-sized business, and one of the few stable/mostly-functional social media experiences still left on the internet. They should be riding off into the sunset.
Instead, they're chasing a stupid IPO. Taking VC money is going to be the thing that kills Reddit.
> I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standard.
If my experience is anything to go by, this will never work. Everything I pay for a subscribtion to, eventually takes VC money anyway, and eventually kills their product trying to chase impossible infinite returns. "Just pay for service" only works if the founders/owners can resist the temptation to gamble with VC's, and so far, none of them seem to.
What are the costs to run what is essentially a big text based site? They already offloaded all of the image hosting to third parties. Desktop ads would be more than enough to support the site indefinitely. Heck, maybe you can build in something to convert Amazon links to referrals or something. Fine, whatever, it's your website.
I'm sad to say it, but I don't think Reddit will be the same powerhouse in ten years. Just like Facebook, people will slowly start to migrate somewhere else. If they had focused on taking care of the community they already have, it didn't need to end like this.
As it evolved, new cool things came because VCs poured money in it.
With Web 1.0 people were sponsored by their parents or institutions and they created the early tools and content. They were not personally looking to profit from it. However early VCs were pouring money into infrastructure or bets, so the thing was getting professional and serious, so can evolve. The most demanded content was content created prior-web, and that content was shared freely(the mp3 and divx era) on platforms created by people who were looking for clout and not necessarily monetary compensation.
With Web 2.0 the content was created by people for free but the platforms were completely VC paid. In this stage everything become professional and as it matured we ended up in this horrible state.
Arguably, HN is a reminiscent of the early stages of Web 2.0 and the place has good quality because it's paid by VC who expect to have reach(to the talent and market). IMHO HN is possible because it's not optimised to it's full monetary potential.
This sounds eerily similar to congestion-based breakdown in data networks, or the impossibility of a 100% efficient windmill. If you squeeze too hard, you end up with ~nothing.
The thing is you'd still be the product even though you'd be paying for premium. Analytics on you would still be collected and sold to third parties
For example, when the thing is not free the onboarding of new users would be much smoother for the non-tracking platform because they won't have to show GDPR and Cooke banners.
That episode is hillarously outdated.
Also, clearly defined APIs take a lot of flexibility away from them, which is yet another thing that beancounters don't want.
I dislike Reddit's narrative -- the Apollo dev himself is visibly gaslit by this one -- that the apps are "generating" API calls.
Nonsense.
Users generate API calls over client(s) of choice.
As soon as you understand that, you can apply first principles to the rest.
I hope they also figure out a way to use apps while preserving the anonymity like revenue sharing or ads etc.
It's easy to detect "abuse" or "commercial use" and we contact those users and license them accordingly for such use cases.
We also went one step further and completely eliminated advertising on RadioReference.com. Given the user base is very niche and highly technical, the goodwill alone we got from that move gave us a sizable increase in premium subscription revenue. Plus, the quality, of Internet advertising has become so poor it's barely worth opening the space up to advertisers.