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I'm a little confused where you're trying to go with this comment. I develop and maintain a service that has been used by millions of people. I make less net profit than a part-time McDonald's employee. Is this not "costs + modest margin"? Where is the abusive pricing?

It only generates about 15k a year in ad revenue. It's fairly low revenue because:

1. Users are spread around the world. This isn't a site with 70% US visitors.

2. The majority of users run ad block, and this continues to rise.

3. Ad rates plummet each year. I earn about 5x less on the site now, than in the past, with the same number of active users, and 3x as many advertisements.

I've tried all the major advertising networks. I setup header bidding and signed direct deals with large networks, such as AppNexus, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, etc. At the end of the day, ads do not pay well for my audience.

Users can pay $3/mo to remove advertising. Yes, I'm aware that's $36/yr, when the average registered user is generating less than $0.50/yr in ad revenue. About 30% of paying users choose to pay higher than $3/mo for no additional benefit (they can pay any amount they wish). I also have some individuals that have paid thousands of dollars.

What would happen if I offered a $1/yr plan for an ad free experience, so it's more inline with ad revenues? I honestly don't know, but I would guess I would lose a few of the $3/mo paying users, and gain less than 100 users paying $1/yr, so it would likely be net negative.

My site has about 30k active registered users a day. The vast majority are long term members that have been on the site for years, so they're quite dedicated to the service. Even so, only about 50 of them pay to remove advertising.

Nope, it doesn't offer any downloads, or questionable content. The site has strict guidelines against any comments even mentioning piracy.

The DMCA notices from Google direct me to the complaint in the Lumen Database. In those notices it lists my domain along with hundreds of others for each complaint, so I'm not alone here.

I'm assuming a third party company is being paid to look after sending DMCA complaints for businesses. If they remove 100,000 URLs by sending DMCA notices, they can charge higher fees or get more contracts compared to other companies that only take down 10,000 URLs. There are no repercussions, so might as well automate the process and aim for big numbers.

I have a forum that receives a high number of DMCA claims. They link to pages on my forum where they claim I'm violating their copyright. However, when I review the pages, the content only mentions the name of a product or service. Imagine I write something here, like how I watched the movie "Inception" last week. A third party then sends me a DMCA request on behalf of Warner Bros, and Google removes this page from their search results. That's what I get, but thousands of them.

It's fairly clear no human is reviewing the content any step of the way, otherwise they would see the only content on the page is a paragraph of plain text with the name of a movie. I feel like I have no recourse though. I don't have the time to make thousands of counter claims for some random forum pages that receive an insignificant amount of search traffic a year.

It feels like a broken system. How can someone pull thousands of my pages from Google, and I'm either forced to spend weeks of my time trying to recover them, or I need to leave them removed? Where is the penalty or punishment for the false claims? Who is going to compensate me for my time?

I think you're right here. I'm forgetting about "entertainment".

This will never replace my visits to HN because it's not efficient. Unless it uses neurolink to beam the information into my mind, that's always going to be the case. It fails in that way.

However, let's consider a podcast. You get 5 people that are entertaining, knowledgeable about technology, well spoken, and have differing opinions, and get them to spend 30 minutes talking about the top HN posts. It's slow, they would most likely not even discuss my favourite posts, but yet, I would consider listening. Is it possible to replicate that with AI? Could AI digest the content and all of the comments, and turn it into an entertaining and educational discussion and debate between a few different AI voices?

I think it's possible, and it changes the idea from being an inefficient method of summarizing content, to a form of entertainment. That could be the right direction to go with this kind of project. However, even if AI perfectly replicates a great podcast, how would I feel listening to it? I think this question applies to most AI content. How important is the human process in the content we consume? Do people only care about the end result, or do they want read a book written by a person, view photos taken by a person, listen to songs performed by a person, and listen to a podcast by real people?

Lots of positive feedback here, but after a quick listen, I'm not a fan. To summarize my thoughts...

1. The experience just feels too sluggish. For example, I opened the HN homepage, skimmed all of the headlines, read the comments on the top post, and it probably took about 30 seconds. I was done, feeling like I got all the information from HN that I needed, with the intention of checking for new posts later in the day. This tool took an entire minute to brief me about a single post.

2. It's not very practical. Usually 1 or 2 posts catch my attention on the HN homepage each day. This tool is most likely going to give me information about the wrong posts. You could improve this with some type of algorithm that learns what information I listen to and what I skip, but it's not ideal. Or, perhaps I could click the headlines I'm interested in, and a custom audio summary is generated.

3. Lastly, I think it removes the human experience of HN. I like to read exactly what people are posting. Everyone is unique, and it's interesting to see how people interact, along with their choice of words and tone. Erasing all of that and listening to a robotic summary just sucks the soul straight out of the community. It reduces the connection to the people here, which I think is the best aspect of the site.

Thanks for sharing though, it's interesting to see this idea brought to fruition.

I have no problem with anyone plugging their business. I assume the entire purpose of a small project like this one is to generate leads. I just find it disappointing that it's one of the most unnecessarily bloated websites I've seen in my life, and you plug so many people involved in the project that should know better. If you're trying to make "The fastest way to quickly grab a lorem ipsum", then you need to consider the performance and the time it takes for the site to load, not just the UX. You should be able to get this down to 100ms load times, and closer to 50ms once cached. It shouldn't be seconds.

Why does a one page static site that is a few paragraphs of text use 9.3MB of resources (4MB compressed)? Why is the tiny logo in the corner 1MB? It's absurd, especially when you say your pain point with competitors is them being slow and clunky. This could be a 5KB website with internal analytics.

It's not a great look, especially when you're plugging the design studio, collab partner, and founder for such a basic project. If it takes this much resources to make a box of text with a copy button, I would hate to see the efficiency of your larger projects.

Aside from that, congrats on making something. It's simple, looks relatively polished, and works decent. I think you could maintain the simplicity and add a few features to allow generating alternate text, and a variable number of paragraphs that can be copied at once.

When it's a crescent shape, it's also more crisp in one direction. So if you hold up a square and make a shadow on the ground, two sides are sharp, two sides are blurry. Or if you look at your own shadow, it's a mix of sharp and blurry edges, which looks unusual.

When a service is being redesigned, I hope improvements to the functionality is what's leading those changes. Causing confusion without any benefits beyond a "more modern look" isn't the best reasoning for a redesign.

If any visual adaptation results in substantial user confusion, then why roll out this update which they say is "strictly a change in visual appearance"? If they're going to cause confusion, at least incorporate some additional functionality at the same time.

> Be excited! The tens of thousands of people working in entertainment building other people's visions can now be their own writers, actors, and directors. And they'll find their own fans.

It's terrible news for the people being replaced. Their training and decades of experience is their competitive advantage and livelihood. When that experience becomes irrelevant because anyone can create similar quality work at the push of a button, they're suddenly left with nothing of value in a world flooded with competition.

I understand growing rapidly, especially for a social network, where you need to quickly reach a certain amount of user content per day to provide value. If you can't get to that point fast enough, then you'll crash and burn.

I think the bigger issue is equating success with active user count. Social networks love to brag about their number of active users. It's all they care about. It doesn't matter if they're making the world a worse place, ruining lives, making people depressed, turning everyone into swiping zombies, taking information that was previously accessible and moving it inside a walled garden. That doesn't matter. If they have more active users, they're more successful.

However, look at HN as a counter example. It's a decent community and I think the reason for that is not setting growth as the metric of success. HN has enough content to keep people interested. What's the purpose of more users after that point? Yes, they'll create additional revenue, but if they can't provide equally engaging content or comments, they're just going to drag the quality of the community down (a trade that most businesses gladly accept).

This is the world we live in though. Everyone is focused on numbers. All people care about is followers, likes, or subscribers, and they'll happily sell their soul if they can grow those numbers. Companies don't care, they'll promote whatever garbage gets the most clicks and keeps those active users up. Advertisers don't care, they'll sponsor whoever has the highest number of views. It's a sad state of affairs.

Changing the zoom level will typically show these missing results. For example, I just checked my neighborhood. There are 5 restaurants within a few hundred feet of each other rated 4.5+ stars. With my filters set to 4.5+ stars, when I zoom out a bit, 4 of the 5 restaurants disappear, and I instead see a handful of 4.1 and 4.3 star restaurants. One of the 4.3 star restaurants is literally next door to a 5 star and 4.5 star restaurant, which are hidden at that zoom level.

I thought maybe it's some kind of weighted rating, because it's showing me the 4.3 star restaurant with 1,100 reviews, instead of the 4.5 star restaurant with 600 reviews. So, perhaps Google thinks the additional number of reviews make up for the lower rating, and they rank it higher, even though I'm specifically asking to not see those results. However, it also shows a 4.4 star restaurant with 40 reviews, while hiding a 4.5 star restaurant with 90 reviews.

This is par for the course when it comes to modern recommendations though. Do you want to see Netflix movies released in the past 3 years? Or what about a simple list of top rated movies? Too bad, you can watch what we tell you to watch. It's a complete lack of respect for the user.

In a different universe, I think the idea could be a valid attempt at dethroning Google. However, after seeing the changes to Reddit the past decade in our current universe, I wouldn't trust those same people to handle search for the world.

Reddit should have leveraged their content to compete with Google.

1. Improve old.reddit.com instead of creating this terrible Reddit v2 that encourages replacing real content with memes.

2. Build a dedicated Reddit search engine on a short trendy domain.

3. Remove all Reddit content from Google.

4. Carefully curate other quality sites into the search engine.

5. Leave Google to rot with SEO and Amazon referral spam.

Google Maps is terrible for hiding results. I'll use the filter to show restaurants with a 4.5+ star rating, and it hides dozens of places 4.5+ stars while instead showing results 4.0 - 4.4 stars and even some that have no reviews at all. I find the arrogance insulting. You want to see 4.5+ star Japanese food restaurants? Well, I don't think that's best for you, and I'm going to replace some of those results with 4.1 star Caribbean food restaurants that you'll like instead.

I think this causes further problems as well. These big companies know they can easily be listed at the top of Google, and therefore they pump out low quality articles for every popular key phrase. They can write a "Top 10 X of 2023" list and bring in lots of traffic and referral sales, while a smaller site has no chance of doing the same. Then, the big site takes all that income, and pumps out more low quality articles. It's a rich get richer scenario.

If I search, "The top 10 movies on Netflix", I get sent to this page...

https://decider.com/list/top-10-movies-on-netflix-most-popul...

The top 5 movies above are...

1. The Boss Baby (2017)

2. The Angry Birds Movie (2016)

3. We're the Millers (2013)

4. Zookeeper (2011)

5. Mean Girls (2004)

Is this really the best the world has to offer for my search query? I could spend a week putting together a far better page for that query, but what's the point? It's not going to rank anywhere notable in the Google results. There's no incentive for me to produce that quality content.

You might want to check community centres. They typically have all sorts of short term classes and activities taking place. They involve lots of new people in the neighborhood, incorporate a wide range of ages, and it's a casual environment where people are mostly trying to get out of the house to socialize or stay active.

Another option is board game groups and cafes. You can easily drop in or sign up to take part, they encourage conversation as you play games or discuss rules, and the players will change all the time so there are always new people to meet.

It's easy to progress from the above environments to going out for drinks or having people over for dinner if you find connections and good conversation.

> The question is how many of those users will move to Reddit's official app after June 30, and how many will look for alternative platforms that aren't so manipulative and abusive. I for one have deleted my Reddit account and won't be going back.

I think you're in the minority. If there was a well known Reddit alternative at the moment, I could see Reddit having their Digg moment and losing a large part of the community. Subreddits could blackout and threaten to leave to the other website. That is something that would be taken seriously. Dozens of subreddits with 1-50 million users potentially jumping ship at once. If you had the right platform, with the right attributes and reputation, the stars would be perfectly aligned to take in a mass number of Reddit users. But, no one is in the right position to catch the ball at the moment (I don't claim it's an easy position to be in). It's actually unfortunate, because these moments don't come too often and I believe it allows Reddit to make these changes with little repercussions. Fans of old.reddit.com better watch out, I bet it's on the chopping block within the next year.

> His whole point is that the app isn’t actually worth $20 million a year, which is what they want him to pay. It’s not even worth $10 million. Not to him or Reddit or anyone else.

Right now there seems to be two options on the table.

1. The Apollo dev pays $20 million per year for API access.

2. Apollo shuts down and the users return to the official Reddit website/app for advertising.

If Reddit is refusing to lower their API pricing, doesn't this mean the users are worth $20 million? If the users were worth $1 million, then why wouldn't Reddit charge $2 million for the API and double their income on those users?

That being said, something else must be at play here. The users are not worth $20 million and Reddit refuses to take anything less than $20 million. If I had to guess, they want to boost metrics before going public and are willing to take a hit to their reputation to do so.

I remember I stumbled on a StackOverflow question about my API. I wrote a comment to tell the user a part of the API they were using was being depreciated, and they should change one line to avoid their code failing in the following weeks. I received a couple of ugly replies saying that my post wasn't relevant to the original question and it should be removed. I mean, I agree it wasn't the original question, but I wrote the API and I was trying to help that user and any future users coming to the page. Not the kind of place where I want to spend my time.

> First off, it's abundantly clear that the Apollo dev wasn't actually demanding money. It was a pointed statement that revealed the CEO wasn't being honest about the costs.

I disagree, I think the Apollo dev would have happily taken the $10 million.

> Then Reddit would be able to recoup the cost in half a year and gain an additional $20 million yearly. What a great deal, right? Except they both knew that the $20 million price tag was complete bogus.

The $20 million price is irrelevant here. Reddit doesn't need to pay to acquire these users. They are Reddit users (they're registered there, and Reddit knows everything about them). They can close down Apollo and they'll get almost all the users back for free.

If Apollo had a standalone community, then it's easy to calculate the value of a user, and a fair price for acquisition. But, that's not the case here.

Don't take this the wrong way, I'm not siding with Reddit and I think both sides are losing here due to their poor management.

It's not a deal though. Reddit says the users are worth $20 million in lost advertising. So either Apollo pays the money, the users move to another app that pays, or the users return to the official site and app. Either way, Reddit gets their $20 million.

Apollo has no leverage here unless there is strong evidence most of the Apollo users will leave Reddit if the app shuts down. I don't believe they will. The other potential leverage is the upcoming subreddit blackouts, or hinting at taking the Apollo users to start a competitor. The developer said they are not going to build a competitor (that was a mistake, they shouldn't have revealed that card), so I think the blackouts are the only chance of lowering API costs.

It's certainly a strange call. Hey, you want to charge me $20 million per year, so why don't we make it easy and you just pay me $10 million to go quiet?

It's really confusing. He wants Reddit to pay $10 million so he isn't "loud" with API usage? He wants them to buy and takeover the app? He's wants a payment to shutdown? Is he even serious about any of this? I get the impression he lacks the confidence to ask for a $10 million acquisition, so instead he approaches the subject casually as a joke, and the entire conversation spirals into confusion due to the lack of clarity.

Either way, that's not a great deal for Reddit. They might as well charge the $20 million, and if he can't find a way to pay it then Apollo shuts down and the majority of users return to the official Reddit site/app for free. There's no benefit to paying $10 million.

The call was a failure between the two parties and likely destroyed any future negotiations. I think the best suggestion was from another user here. Only allow Reddit official subscribers to use third party apps. Reddit can charge users whatever they want, and app developers can monetize their apps however they choose.

It's related to user activity, along the lines of products a user views. The other large tables in the billions of rows are about analyzing how products are performing on other websites over time, helping to determine past and current trends for businesses.

Agreed. I have a handful of tables with over 2 billion rows and have experienced no issues. One database is 2.5TB in size. I feel like 20 million rows is a relatively small MySQL table.

Waveshare has some HDMI displays. They still look overpriced and small though, so I don't consider them great solutions.

https://www.waveshare.com/eink-disp.htm

You really underestimate scammers. If you create a popular social network and there is money to be made, they'll find a way. They'll visit a developing country and pay people $5 to hold a fake ID card for a photo or video. Paying $5,000 for 1,000 fake accounts isn't a problem for them, because they'll quickly make that money back selling likes, followers, or pushing advertisements.

This quickly changes the premise of your service from a verified social network with content written by real humans, to a social network with mostly real paying users, some fake paying users, and any content you see may or may not be written by a bot. Is it really that different from other social networks at that point?