As an employee do you support the blackout secretly? What is your opinion of things? Some huge subs have migrated to other platforms, how do you think this ends?
General low effort content scrollers
Power users and mods who appreciate creating and contributing to make a community
Advertising interests
The deal was, the ad seeking was for the mainstream strollers, and the contributing power users and mods could opt out of the bs. The community builders get a nice environment for their community, the scrollers get content, and the ad people get to shiw thejir ads.
I always thought spez understood this. Its why the api existed. Its why old.reddit.com existed. It was the commercial machine's compromise to the content generators in exchange for the moderating and commenting.
But he seems to have forgot. I wonder why?
Without the compromise the whole thing falls apart. Reddit becomes digg.
they may tell everyone to piss off and still maintain profitability, or even increase it, since the advertisers like what's happening and the people who are angry aren't angry enough to offset profits.
2030 B-school lesson is: fuck the user, get paid, c.r.e.a.m.
Most likely scenario is spez’s boss wanted better numbers to maximize price at IPO.
I think they decided to cash out when things were very frothy in 2021, and they missed the window. It will be interesting to see if they even get to $10B. I would bet on less than $5B.
According to Wikipedia:
>In October 2014, Reddit raised $50 million in a funding round led by Sam Altman and including investors Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto.[13] Their investment valued the company at $500 million at the time.[14][15] In July 2017, Reddit raised $200 million for a $1.8 billion valuation, with Advance Publications remaining the majority stakeholder.[16] In February 2019, a $300 million funding round led by Tencent brought the company's valuation to $3 billion.[17] In August 2021, a $700 million funding round led by Fidelity Investments raised that valuation to over $10 billion.[18] The company then reportedly filed for an IPO in December 2021 with a valuation of $15 billion.[19][20]
What is missing are the ones that aren't.
r/Boardgamedeals/ has a moderator that has tried to say "go to lemmy.world instead" ( https://lemmy.world/c/boardgamedeals ).
However, the community didn't follow.
r/boardgamedealz was spun up and has had more activity there.
r/soloboardgaming people are slowly moving back to r/boardgames now that one player board games are more socially acceptable within the community since that sub is also restricted.
Big subs that fork to lemmy often have enough people to make it active there.
Small ones that fork and the mod leading the move have more difficulty - especially if all the mod does is moderate and doesn't do any posts.
Many subs exist as part of a greater community. For board games, that's https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/wiki/related_subreddits
It may have been more successful to do what Star Trek did and stand up an instance and host all things related there.
I believe that small subs that don't have enough of a core posters moving or that lack discoverability once this all dies down won't be successful on Lemmy unless they are able to have a more closely affiliated instance to find all things {broader topic}.
While it's not much of a moat, the key thing that Reddit has is discoverability. Reddit occasionally informs you about domain adjacent subs. People on subs frequently suggest domain adjacent subs where the content would also be accepted.
While we often deplore it, tools to drive engagement is what keeps Reddit running. Without solving that, discoverability is a problem on the fediverse that will hinder all but the most dedicated small groups from establishing a lasting community there.
Because as long as the public buys whatever he's selling, he still leaves rich. Nothing about reddit going forward actually has to be successful or functional as long as normal people buy the stock, people who don't know reddit, don't use it, don't understand it, don't CARE about it, etc.
Like many other metrics in the industry (viewability, brand safety, etc.) it's actually the largest brands who are the biggest spenders and the ones you'd think from outside would be the most ruthless about "money in, results out", that care about this stuff the most. The ones that don't are the no-name dropshippers or those "You won't believe this story about X" content mills, but those ones also are willing to pay the least for their ads.
Going by the various takes and stories I read over the last few days, I imagine the deal you describe worked because it was indefinite; however, IPO is not only putting pressure to juice up financial metrics - it's also setting an end date for the deal. Once the company goes public, the leadership can, like investors, just cash out and let the whole thing sink. Even if this was always the plan, as long as the "exit" was a non-specific "at some point in the future", everyone could kind of forget about it. Putting a specific timeframe on it completely changes everyone's perceptions - like with iterated prisoners' dilemma, even if the end is still far away, the game changes its nature the very moment that specific timeframe is set.
I don't think spez cares if this happens. 95% of the content people see on reddit is mindless garbage that is either a repost or from tiktok/some other site. I believe spez is confident that 95% of content will continue on just fine even if every single moderator quit at the same time. Automoderator setups are already very well fine tuned.
You'd lose the more curated subreddits, sure. But that's such a tiny amount of traffic compared to propaganda news posts, animal photos, and tiktok videos.
- "There isn't much clarity around severance and health insurance"
- "This is fine ([fire emoji] [dog emoji] [fire emoji])"
Recent (past month) reviews seem negative: "questionable execs", "micromanaging", "still not mature", "growing pains", "stay away", "mediocre, lack of product vision".
As a reminder Blind the users are verified to be working at the company. It's quite the cesspit of elitism and "I make more than you". But, again, reviews tend to be accurate because it's verified anonymity.
- "I think most rational people agree with the decisions, regardless of possible fumbling"
- "We are living under constant anxiety waiting for the next round of layoffs that’s been planned by leadership at the beginning of the year"
- Another verified user disagreed with the above ^
- "Current employees are afraid to say anything as spez reads Blind and complains about it at all hands. 100% he will try to rat out who is speaking. Not worth it."
Last one seems most interesting. Looks like spez/upper leadership is monitoring what employees say.
> reply
Also, if an exec gives any sh1ts about what is on Blind, they've already failed and are just looking to maximize their image during what is probably a sh1tshow. See Ted Lasso's "Wonderkid".
It reeks of narcissism and gives me that 9V battery taste in my mouth.
Elon buying Twitter is the hyper example here. Morally bankrupt and pathetic, but may end up winning $ because of that whole not having morals part. I can't imagine living that kind of life, gross.
could change that to "if anyone"
my workplace's blind is extremely toxic and rarely rooted in reality.
LMAO. Of course someone so sensitive as to edit comments against him on his own site would obsess over comments on Blind.
Are employees worried he knows someone who works at Blind who can reverse lookup emails? By all appearances, no one's ever been identified on Blind in the 6 or 7 years it's been popular (with the exception of people who shared too much personal info). Seems like Blind really does throw the email away.
Every large corp has email filtering and logs. Easily just look for the employees who received the verification email from signing up to Blind w their work email addy bc you gotta use your corpo email address to join and comment there.
I'd be able to look at our logs and find that in just a few min.
Since it seems Spez is such a lil sensitive c-suite sf bro type, he'd be able to get that info no problem.
But yes if a high enough percentage of employees are signing up, there’s safety in numbers.
Once it arrives on your work device you are free to type it into your phone manually (this is me since I don't value my free time), forward the email elsewhere, or more recently take a phone pic of the url string and have the OS turn into text for you.
But I agree, having spent enough time reading the absurdities on Blind and wondering how some of these people got their $500k+ yearly comp without understanding how computers work, a majority of people are definitely most likely simply clicking the link on their work device.
The phone app is better, though.
If you're doing it at receive time, then adding them to a table, sure, but that doesn't get you a backfill
Well, they're verified to have worked at the company at some point. Blind doesn't make you periodically re-verify your access to your work email account.
Correction: 2000 staff. Question stands.
But RES has stopped feature development in 2021. If it's not there, it's not coming anytime soon.
> It's unfair and unwise to undercut reddit inc.'s development work. Get gold!
This is about Gold but it might be a more general "we do not step on Reddit's toes" kind of rule too.
I bring this up only because I find when I do this blaming of <other non-build people>, I often miss the problem that is actually in front of my face and can actually impact.
From my experience: as a game dev we ALWAYS know when a game sucks. Maybe some director or other director level person strongarmd it, so it's not like engineers can't be blind. But as a general consensus, I've met very few "bad devs" from a technical POV (a vector consumers often like to attack when they see bad gameplay). We work with a bad hand and we almost never get the extra time needed when we try to show publishers. Fortunately, it's a lot easier now to argue for delays than over a decade ago.
I guess this was Elon's thoughts when he laid off most of twitter.
Edit: Found a good answer for Uber on quora: https://qr.ae/py4zBU
are you saying that the Uber-Driver's-App/Backend will communicate with the driver via these different mapping apps? or that so long as they use the Uber-Driver's-App to stay in contact with Uber, that Uber accommodates them also using other mapping software?
Conversely, I would be more than highly surprised if it was. It has all the trappings of an urban myth.
You then need to have a customer support service. That is probably 5,000 employees right there.
Just because a company has 36,000 employees it doesn't mean they have 30,000 people working on the tech. There are lots of jobs that need to be done just to operate day to day. That most people on here wouldn't even think about, like cleaning staff for example. How many people on here even thought about cleaning staff?
I think it's very likely Uber employs cleaners themselves due to costs attached to outsourcing and that they already have the staff to manage that sort of worker.
But 36k still seems absurd.
They now also sell Eurostar tickets (although I don't see the advantage over Eurostars website)
They're sponsored by Uber, that's it - they bought the naming rights. The actual boats are owned and run by the Thames Clipper company.
Their stated goal to supplant as much of the existing TLC infrastructure for the planet as they can get their hands on. You can bet that these organizations (even restricted to those markets they are successful at "disrupting") employ a lot more than 36k people
Uber does a lot more than that! If you want an honest accounting of what Uber's employees are doing you need to start with an honest listing of everything Uber actually does.
Could Uber be built with a lot less now days? Absolutely, but it's also an interesting balance of even if they could, if their cloud bill for X service is 10m a year, and they think their own team of 4 could build X internally for less then that...why not do that?
Maybe two dozen engineers/devops, a dozen support/management people for them, and 50-100 minimum wage-ish admins and their managers/corporate support structure. I can't pretend to know anything about the ad sales part of the business, I guess that's where the other 1800 people live?
Narrowing focus to just engineering: how would you allocate 24 engineers across infra (networking, storage, scaling), backend (API, features), web frontend, design, mobile (iOS & Android), security, ads & monetization, Abuse & internal tooling dev? Or would you allocate 1 or 2 individuals to each (working 60-80 hour weeks) rather than teams (3-5 people, minimum) + line-managers & product folk. Add QA and you realize "2 dozen engineers" isn't a lot, the devil is in the details.
I was being charitable on 3-member teams: noone wants to be on an on-call roster that's only 3-engineers deep. Each of the areas I highlighted likely has multiple teams rather than just one (e.g. infra can be split into parthensized teams - networking, storage, operations/ops), and I intentionally completely ignored R&D functions.
Perhaps the market rewards growth more than it does efficiency? I can't name a single company (post WhatsApp) that has users in the 9-plus-digit-range and has less than a thousand employees.
It seems like investors prefer to have a large (but still profitable) org with a lot of redundancy and clear systems in place than an elite team of superheroes
I'm just annoyed that Spez is running a bloated overweight organization, then using that fact to justify some user-hostile money grubbing
I dislike unnecessary bloat, be it in software or in org design, as much as the next guy, but staking your company's long-term future on superheroes (or superpowers, as it's for some inexplicable reason still fashionable to say) is a recipe for disaster.
There are dozens of unprofitable Internet search engines each made by a handful of people, yet Google somehow employs ~200k people to run a profitable search engine.
I can create (probably build from scratch) a wiki in same amount of time but non-profit Wikipedia is 450(?) people.
The core tech isn’t the driver to headcount, the business model is.
For Reddit, that probably means selling ads and acquiring users. Which probably means a whole lot of ad tech and other optimizations/features to increase visitors to your site. Ad sales, ad tech, etc etc. It probably means ad sales to big clients with complex legal, etc.
In the tech, entire feature groups worth having because it serves important business goals around user retention or growth. Some small percentage of extra eyeballs helps Reddit towards these goals that a site like hacker news wouldn’t care about.
If anything, the fact that they have only 2k employees shows how much free labor the mods provide.
Twitter pre-pandemic: 5000
Wikipedia pre-pandemic: 450
So... maybe 1000.
Under that you are going to have an advertising-related departments both in sales and engineering. Much of the custom engineering focus is going to be directed at ads and how to make money which users will never see. Remember that users are the product, not the customer.
Then there's going to be the forum site itself, and the problem of moderating the moderators via the admins and generating visibility into how mods and users are abusing the system are going to be larger than expected at their scale.
Then there's the problem of trying to keep up with automated bots and straight forwards abuse of the system and that arms race against other people's code.
Then reddit has to interface with government agencies and is now responsible for policing itself when it comes to foreign troll farms. There is likely groups of engineers and managers assigned to dealing with the government.
And there's just the complexities of being such a large global business, and needing to deal with worldwide regulations and being such a large regulatory target, which will complicate everything.
You can try to wave all that away and say that they should just embrace radical free speech and fire 75% of the people, but that would result in the site being taken over by Troll farms, Nazis, and CSAM -- with advertisers fleeing and the US government itching to regulate them.
(Although I'm sure they could fire the useless half of middle management that I'm certain that they've accumulated, but that wouldn't make that enormous of a dent in the headcount)
In general this is an xkcd/793 problem:
Only replace physicists with software engineers. It seems simple because you wave all the concerns you don't care about and you're entirely focused on just building a forum website for users. Without advertisers, bots, bad actors, worldwide regulations, meta-moderation, etc the problem dramatically simplifies itself, but that isn't actually what reddit does.
That said 2k people is a LOT, and it's not like the site itself is very high-tech or really pushing things forward. It's a aggregator of content with comments...nothing really advanced.
Yeah, 2k people is overkill.
Reddit should be ran more like HN or even craigslist. Ppl never wanted a js heavy UI change. they liked the bare bones old school aesthetic. It gave that feeling of nostalgia, one of the last early web apps.
If Reddit never did a redesign, never hired more staff than really need, they'd definitely be profitable by now.
sctb was previously on the mod team, but left YC a few years ago. He's recently reappeared in comments though.
The first entry is "Nacho Fries are back for a limited time only" which I feel is the perfect answer to that question.
Usually when an engineer asks this question, they are starting with the assumption that most everyone who works there is an engineer. That assumption is usually wrong.
I have no inside information at all, but my guess is that engineers make up less than 1/3 of the employees. I'm sure the sales team is large, the product team is large, and the community management team is large. They probably also have a bunch of legal, and we know they have a lobbying group as well. And of course if you're taking people's money, you need a bunch of customer service to handle that.
When I worked there 14 years ago, we had at peak six engineers, and three non-engineers (one sales, one product, one community). But also we had the parent company providing legal (and there was a lot of legal requests even back then!), HR, facilities, finance, and basically all the other support tasks. And also we the engineers did a lot of it. We managed customer service for ads, we managed making t-shirts and plushies, we managed customer service for reddit gold payments, and a bunch of other "non-engineering" tasks.
The site is big and is transactional, which makes it a harder problem to solve. With the near-real-time display of votes and listing changes and comments, it's a lot more like eBay than Slashdot (which is what I would say at the time).
Disney isn't going to just pull up a self service portal to buy ads. :)
I don’t know why you’d jump to the conclusion that the sales people at an ad-supported website would sell ads.
Back then, when there were a dozen of you it was easier to reach an admin when needed than now, heh.
I hear ya. But in their defense, the regulatory environment is way worse now, and back then as an admin we all pretty much knew about every ongoing issue. A current admin can't just answer you back without possibly running afoul of either a regulatory issue or an ongoing project in another group.
who are they selling to? And why so many people?
EDIT: sorry, I read another response, they are selling to ad companies. Does that really demand hunderds, over 1000 people, though? At some point I feel they are costing more than what the next increment can bring in.
I understand your point but even if there was only 100 engineers (which would not be enough) I can't imagine what the other 1900 administrative people are doing. It's an internet forum, and unlike Twitter and other social media (where I assume they simply have hundreds of mods) they successfully outsourced moderation to volunteers.
Is it all just legal suits? The customers are the users and admins are horrible at responding to user requests (be it users or mods), so it doesn't feel lik customer service is using those resources.
This vastly underestimates how much moderating reddit is already doing. When I worked at reddit, we spent at least 50% of all of our resources on fighting spam, harassment, and illegal content. I'm sure reddit is still doing this. What the moderators see is already after the core platform has removed the most obvious offenders. Most of what the volunteer moderators do is remove content that they feel is not in line with their community.
> The customers are the users
The customers are the people who pay, who are mostly advertisers. Customers and users are two different groups with different ideas of what makes reddit good, and sometimes those don't align. It's a fine line to walk between serving the customers and users to try and keep both happy.
I likely am, so thanks for giving me an idea. Admins never really talk about how much they do behind the scenes (and aren't that responsive to the users in general) so its hard to tell.
But as a counterargument: While I'm sure they need more admins now than back in 2010, they also (hopefully) will have automated their spam/illegal filters so it doesn't require 1000x the admin moderators to control 1000x the content. the filter catches maybe 95% of the truly illegal content and then admins can check at a less urgent pace.
>The customers are the people who pay, who are mostly advertisers.
I guess it's more accurate to say that advertisers are the customers, and users are the product. But it's an odd metaphor here since sales would need to appeal to both. Getting ads to show and also getting ads for their own site, to get more products to appeal to more customers.
I do agree that its an odd balancing board, especially with Reddit that is more hostile than usual to inorganic content.
This might be true.
> Most of what the volunteer moderators do is remove content that they feel is not in line with their community.
This is certainly not true for my sub. There's a lot of obvious spam that has to be manually removed. For example, if Reddit enforced the selfpromotion ratio rule programmatically, there'd be an order of magnitude less spam to deal with.
---
Unless Reddit cranks up the removal rate, moderators are still necessary or the /new feed will drown in spam. If /new drowns in spam, what reaches the top will become a lot more chaotic.
There's very little I can think of that seems to have changed about the site in the last 2 years for results from tripling their headcount.
Citation for the old headcount: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro...
Granted, I have no idea what scalability Reddit has done in 2 years. You can even argue it didn't need most of it (some, sure. Pandemic did surge traffic).
It's all too accurate.
Let's add up a few factors - Reddit is an 18yr old startup with Peter Pan syndrome. - Mountains of tech debt, like every other company - Industry incentives promote people to squirt out a feature, receive titles or money, and move on - Freedom of speech brings all the evils with it, like CP, that Reddit has complicated systems to catch and moderate - IPO desires mean financial belt tightening to look as mature as possible - Industry wide layoffs have created a fertile ground of new startups germinating. VCs are actively hunting for the next big AI unicorn. Torrential increases in traffic are hitting the company. And why? Reddit is a curation engine. The data is sorted and labeled to a degree. All this to say, there's a lot of refactoring needed on top of shifting ground created by the intersection of tech debt and IPO aspirations. - Guessing by all public measures, Reddit has a ton of traffic already. Extrapolating from other large companies I have worked for, the infrastructure and transport costs are significant. - 3P apps scrubbing Reddit ads and substituting their own are a brand and liability risk
TL;DR toil from legacy, more complexity than you can imagine, pressure of market
Reminder, while it wasn’t a Twitter scale event, Reddit did announce plans to lay off 5% of its workforce recently.
Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/reddit-layoffs-90-protes...
Discussed at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36237285
Forgot to mention, very much the same for the recent price hikes. Very much a "skill" that executives are now imitating.
The only pattern I see in response is continued innovation and the rise of new platforms. I think a business model resembling a "[public] benefit corporation" [1] (in the USA at least) or a utility company may be more compatible with a social media company immune to enshittification.
[1]: https://www.delawareinc.com/blog/non-profit-corporation-vs-p...
VCs are spooked by anything that’s not your run-of-the-mill C Corp. PBCs are hard to get off the ground.
And the difference is that people truly going for an IPO are trimming costs and getting their ducks in a row on bureaucracy and legal fronts, including confidentiality. Those just using it to dangle as a carrot are... just talking about IPOs without changing internal business processes.
Only someone inside could tell us which one reddit is doing.
Also, chances are you are going to see zero communication from them when they do formally file. Since I think once they actually file they go into something called a quite period where they don't say anything publicly.
Doubtful. Plenty of companies have APIs, and it's not like their actions have strengthened the company all that much.
To clarify - I am not a fan of Reddit’s latest move, I see it as a product of the management hoping to soon be beholden to Wall Street. That necessarily comes with securing of revenue streams.
Could you imagine how it would go down, if reddit had quietly negotiated with developers to allow for user API access and limiting the rates to that which a normal user would consume? (e.g. 400 calls a day or whatever). This would both allow for 3p apps to continue hooking us up with the oldschool forum board we like, WHILE preventing LLM models from scraping 1 Gigabyte of text every day.
Literally everyone would have been happy. Users would have the slight inconvenience of maybe having to re-log into their app, LLM and Researchers would pay for the privilege of getting to scrape 1 Gigabyte of text a day.
The only loophole here is malicious apps scraping the user's data as they browse and selling that black market. But is that really such a big hurdle as to completely discard the approach?
Still probably worth waiting out, but it's not like there's a big payday at the end of this rainbow for most. Could probably negotiate some kind of bonus with new employer to offset that loss, even.
It's a long time and stock can go down during that period.
They are alienating the most engaged users who provide the content and pissing off the moderators who provide free service to keep the communities running. Replacing passionate moderators working for free with disinterested paid staff will reduce quality and significantly increase costs.
Average ppl on Reddit rarely post content, usually plenty of comments, just not content.
If all the content producers leave then you get the same effect as if the subs were still dark.
Let's be serious, Reddit making a profit will decrease the likelihood of massive layoffs. I suspect if Reddit backs down in this protest drama they will be forced to do layoffs to become profitable instead of becoming profitable from making more revenue instead of reducing costs.
> As an employee do you support the blackout secretly?
Well considering the internal memo got leaked, I think there must be someone who supports it.
I feel like this implies a couple of things:
1) A business is ever satisfied with their current profit margin. I'm not sure that's the reality.
2) Company profits going one way or the other affect a company's decision to perform layoff rounds. While maybe partially true, I think all the major tech companies performing layoff rounds has proven this to be mostly untrue.
If you're going to IPO you need to show growth. It's the most important thing. Realistically, making a profit isn't such a big deal if you have a solid plan and are growing. If they can't show that they are able to reign in Reddit users, who are by far the biggest problem for monetization of the platform, then they need to show they're able to get growth other ways. That would be growth in profits.
I think you're in a chicken and egg situation here. The reason you want to see growth is because as an investor you suppose growth is a good indicator for future profits. So the most important thing is actually still... profits.
You seem to be applying basic logic to company valuations while at the same time you probably also understand the finical market is completely fucked up. Amazon lost money for god only knows how long and was extremely valuable and sought after investment for nearly the entire time. Why? Because growth. They don't care what kind of growth they just want growth. While a sane person would say the growth should be in money so they could eventually be profitable, that's not how the markets work.
So they can either show growth in the fact they're growing their customer base to include API customers and revenue streams. Or they can show growth in profits.
Making a wild claim about how much 3rd party apps "cost them", is not the same as actually seeing revenue once those 3rd party apps are closed.
As most people have been saying, the majority of 3rd party app users are the more advanced technical savvy ones.
There may be SOME percentage of the 3rd party app users who transition, but if the 3rd party traffic is as trivially small as Reddit has claimed, not sure how that will overnight magically transform them into being profitable.
I've never seen an Ad on reddit with use of old.reddit.com , RES, and adblockers. I was a primary user of Apollo, and I certainly won't be using the reddit mobile app. I deleted the app off my phone once the writing is on the wall (rip the bandaid off now and detox vs in 9 days), my phone reported my usage is down 19% this week, so that is a plus.
Absent any business plan on how those actions will actually drive profit, everything they've done has had sole effect of alienating their power user, mods, etc. and I don't see how that helps profit.
The cost of the third party apps themselves was trivial, and if they just wanted to recoup those costs they could have proposed a much more reasonable cost per user for third party apps.
It’s about control, not about profit.
$10m isn't trivial unless your operating costs are in the billions.
Moreover, at that cost, less than a dollar per user per year, Apollo could have instituted a $1/year subscription. But instead Reddit wanted over $100 per user per year, two orders of magnitude more than the cost.
It's one of those typically short sighted "oh lets remove this thing costing us" without understanding the long term impact to value.
You don't over burden one single entity with large recurring payments (the app developers themselves), your power users provide revenue, and you can slowly work on your value proposition of "hey we have updated our app to not be as crappy, you can browse reddit for free if you switch back".
he said 97% of users are on the reddit app. he also said there is a significant opportunity cost to having those 3% of users not on the app. so for both of those statements to be true that 3% of users must be very active and providing a lot of content and value.
Perhaps they mean a non-financial opportunity cost, like they could modify their API if they didn't have third parties depending on it, and they're missing out on the benefits such modifications might hypothetically provide.
Or perhaps "significant cost" means, say, $100k per year. Significant at a human scale, insignificant at the scale of a multi-billion-dollar company.
Like, I can type 20 comments on my laptop in the time it would take to type one on my phone, and they'll be more well-thought out too
A competent CEO would have found a way to keep them in the family.
Which is why they're trying to force everyone onto their first party app. If you're not contributing to revenue they do not want you on the site.
They have much more data than we do which leads me to think they have reason to believe most third party app users will switch/the ones that won't arent worth having anyway.
Well... we assumed so. But I highly doubt if it's true.
I think you assume that the only people using it are shutting down while obivously there are lots of profitable companies using the API who will obivously be fine with paying $0.24 per 1,000 API requests.
Then there is obivously OpenAI and other AI based companies that are really the main reason for the change.
Realistically, having Apollo, etc not there drives people to use the main app. Saying that people won't switch over seems naive. There will be some that won't be realistically the vast majority probably will. And those users then go back into monetization drives. Which will increase revenues.
Step one to making a profit is don't burn the house down