Basically they forgot they built a site built on community and then tried to sell those communities like inanimate objects. No surprise it blew up in there face.
I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of engineers - we can't really evaluate until much further down the road.
We will see in few months what is the situation and if someone manages to advertise an alternative for millions of people.
Then, Reddit IPO is doomed. If there is no new significant alternative where people will go, then IPO will probably continue as planned and API change went well from the Reddit’s perspective.
Because there are a great many people that have legitimately used Reddit as their "frontpage of the internet" for years and don't enjoy the form factor that other websites / apps provide. Places like Twitter and TikTok aren't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content.
My take is that this type of person is more likely to not need to replace their feed fix with another feed and is more likely to pursue fulfillment in other areas of life.
Worthless under their current model. What if their new model is to simulate other users with ChatGPT? Many users don't engage with comments beyond voting/reading. How long would it take them to notice, and if they notice would they care?
Can Huffman coast to IPO, grab the money, then bail?
We (and reddit) also don't know whether users will return, ie: will this just blow over?
From Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
Nothing blew up in their face. It's almost as if the vast majority of users simply don't care about this kind of drama.
This is the funniest because it shows how little they're actually able to generate from people using their product
No, they're charging exorbitant rates for API access lol. I honestly can't understand how people can look at $2.50 / month per user for a few JSON responses and think "wow now that's reasonable."
If their infrastructure is that bad that it costs even on the order of a dollar per month per user to serve API requests, then I'd be horrified to imagine how much it costs them to send entire HTML pages to the millions of people that use desktop exclusively.
He did not say that, he said
> Apollo's price would be approximately $2.50 per month per user
which is an estimate of how much they'd have to pay Reddit for each user in API costs alone. But it doesn't take into account cost of Apollo's own servers and infrastructure, Apple's fees, or the fact that there are people with paid for yearly subscriptions that'd have to be served:
> Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even. > > Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible.
(quoted from https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...)
All in all it's a much different thing if Reddit said they want to charge the users $2.5/mo for API access, given them their own key and let use whatever 3rd party app they want. They want to charge the 3rd party apps directly, which is a whole different story that can't really be summed up as to "$2.5 is not that high if people really want to use third party apps"
Of course the CEO during an IPO year is going to downplay the shutdown. That said, there's no way the shutdown is going to change reddit in this case. They will replace the mods on the bigger subs.
And yes, due to these kinds of numbers, the shutdown will do nothing. Hell, many subs opened up today and r/all is back to normal.
> Amir Shevat, Twitter’s former head of product for the developer platform, who
> lives in Round Rock, was responsible for ensuring that the tools Twitter
> provided independent software developers using the platform met their needs.
> He said about 17 percent of engagement on Twitter, historically, was through
> third-party apps, which played a vital role in defining Twitter’s identity.
That's 17% of _engagement._ I strongly expect that with both Twitter and Reddit there's a sort of double Pareto distribution going on: the majority of _users_ go through the first-party site/tools/clients, but the majority of _valuable_ users go through the third-party site/tools/clients. The users who are invested enough in the platform to have strong opinions about how things should be done and who use the platform enough that they seek out tools that actively meet their needs rather than just taking the default tools, are also users who are worth, at the very least, _placating_ because those are also the users most able to cause problems if the platform stabs them in the face the way Reddit and Twitter have done.
Apollo et al are different in that they are packaging up the entire experience wholesale, they are not ancillary. There is no way for Reddit the company to show ads through third party clients (the client could simply block ad posts if they wanted to).
They could have changed NOTHING about the move except their messaging and attitude and things would've gone a lot better.
But what I'm more curious about is that this memo went out not even a day after the protests started. Both revenue indicators and impact itself might be delayed, especially now that many subreddits chose to extend the protest indefinitely
It was all about getting the message out.
Real "shutdown" comes when the good moderators decides they had enough and stops being active, so reddit becomes run by shitty mods.
Only then will the users leave. So it will take many months before the effect is visible in user count.
Well...
I'm not even saying he's lying. He could be telling the absolute truth. However, that post would not constitute evidence for him telling the truth, because it is what he would say if it was the truth, and it is what he would say if traffic dropped 98%.
This sort of thing is true of a lot of corporate and political communications. The only thing that carries information content is things they didn't have to say and couldn't be predicted in advance.
In this case, the only tidbit of information in that post is that they still intend to ignore the community(/communities).