Online platforms ‘can’t just sit on their hands’ – Reddit’s Steve Huffman
mastersofscale.com
mastersofscale.com
Someone implements an attribution model to track which marketing channels have better ROI than others, and then that attribution model informs all investment and strategic decisions.
The issue is that every attribution model has some inherent flaw or limitation (usually quite significant ones too), so by bending your investment to align with the results you see from a model you're forcing the flaws and limitations of the model onto your strategy.
As companies grow and become more risk averse pleasing the attribution model becomes more and more important for teams and the company loses sight of what the attribution model was even trying to model in the first place.
To this day I have strange bugs on the Reddit app. The logo disappears sometimes, and it’s critical for navigation. The interface sometimes stops responding to presses of certain on-screen elements.
And yet this company pushed out third party app developers in an incredibly shitty way rather than hiring them.
I’ll never forgive Steve for the loss of Apollo on iOS and the way Reddit handled the situation.
I actually understand the API restrictions and even believe that they may lead to better privacy for Reddit users. Free API access meant lots of archiving and cloning services out there when ideally the users should be able to delete their comments and posts to be forgotten if they choose. However, I think that better developer communication could have meant that we still have Apollo around, even if it meant a shift to a paid subscription.
If everyone did that, we'd no longer have platforms that mandate using first party apps. A platform would have to answer the question you asked, whereas now they're free to ignore it.
In another alternate universe, the Reddit app is made so well that third party apps can’t compete. Consumer sentiment is high and everyone in the community strongly recommends their premium subscription with their amazing app through word of mouth, and I happily convert to a paid customer.
But in the status quo I am certainly a low-value or potentially negative-value user. I don’t comment, post content, or click on ads. I don’t pay them for premium features. I mostly leech off their content delivery network, and Reddit can’t monetize people like me in the way that Meta can. The proof is in their financial statements.
I’m mostly there for certain subreddits that just aren’t replicated elsewhere and my screen time on the app is dramatically lower than it was with Apollo. My foot is already 3/4 out the door.
But it was just easier to kill them altogether. I was a regular user for 17 years and I quit the platform on July 2023.
The problem is that the best app on iOS, Apollo, had its developer chased away.
And really it was about communication and trust rather than an unwillingness to sell a paid app. He also expressed dismay over the short timeline to adapt his business since he already sold his customers paid versions of his app, so changing everything abruptly or forking the app to being something like “Apollo 2” would be screwing his own customers over.
But if Reddit had communicated the changes more clearly and had treated him better in general I think he would have kept the app. Instead Reddit basically burned the bridge and the dev didn’t need the bullshit anymore.
When did you delete your comments, and have you checked to see if they are still deleted?
In June last year, Reddit was “undeleting” a bunch of comments that users had deleted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36399883
The only account I use now is purely for NSFW reddits, which Reddit will not display advertising for, and I don’t post questions or write comments. They serve me media they host, incurring the costs of storage and data transfer, and get nothing from me in return.
spez when licensing user content to OpenAI and Google for millions of dollars: "A lot of how I think about Reddit, it comes not from the numbers, but from the feel of using the app."
Seems the answer is already in the title: Reddit is so busy trying to chase the future that it can't see what's in front of them.
Until Reddit showed it to be possible, I could never have imagined that a business could employ so many people, and incinerate so much cash but yet have so little to show for it in terms of either profit or a usable product.
Not defending the guy or Reddit which I think are both inherently unethical things. Just that this site also violates GDPR so maybe don’t mention that one.
If you don’t believe me, try to delete your HN account. It’s kinda funny how it works and the response they send about why they can’t delete it.