Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.
this looks more malicious than ignorance or inefficiency. they want to mimic twitter by building off of community then claiming "costs".
fuck reddit. No redditor wanted them to selfhost photos and videos, yet they replaced imgur with their own. Why?
Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.
There is some good content on reddit still, if you look hard to find it, but one thing that makes it hard is that reddit blends ads into the content and I think also blends in non-sequitur content that further confuses the reader into looking at and clicking on the ads.
They just can't let reddit clients provide a good, never mind better, experience.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda... and
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...
The official reddit app is an absolute nightmare and essentially unusable. Their "new" website also completely sucks and is even worse on mobile than it is on desktop. If this actually gets implemented as is, I'll definitely have a very productive rest of my year. I have no data to back this up, but I feel like with reddit, even more users only rely on third party clients than it was on twitter.
$0.24 for 1000 full page loads wouldn't actually sound insane (if you compare to typical CPMs of sites with ads), but it seems hard to believe that the average user is doing that 350 times / day.
I've never worked on a web platform like Reddit, nor with any per-request priced APIs. Reddit's charge of $0.00024 per request still looks like it is _significantly_ above what their own costs are.
Wasn't Reddit's pay-for-API-access announcement originally phrased as a desire to claw back some of the value that LLMs have found in Reddit data? I don't understand how per-request API pricing actually accomplishes that. (I was vaguely anticipating Reddit's API pricing to have some sort of expensive "firehose" endpoint for OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc to pull from.)
It looks like they're instead going to squeeze out all third-party apps instead. I don't think this bodes well for Reddit's future.
This is why I am sticking with the web-based Old Reddit.
Any further strangulation and it's "hasta la vista, Reddit".
I just don't understand why developers underprice their apps so much. You're talking about an app that people are constantly raving about, and that people use for multiple hours per day. Charge $5/month, that's half the price of Netflix or Disney+.
Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all.
Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.
Honestly, this was probably one of the more reasonable features they've added. Having to upload images on an external site added a lot of friction for users, and put Imgur in an awkward spot as well when problematic content was removed from Reddit, but not from Imgur.
Their video player still sucks, though. I'm not sure how they managed to make it so bad.
Edit: just to put my money with my mouth is, Reddit Premium sub cancelled.
I really don't know why it has to be API use based anyway. We all log in to our individual accounts through the API. For clients they should be able to determine requests/account or let users pay for their own usage or something. They're in full batshit MBA mode.
Reddit has failed to adequately monetize their userbase, they've run into the same "politics and porn" issue that every social media platform has, and they've raised way, way too much money.
The worst part? I couldn't tell you the last legitimate ad that I saw on reddit. Facebook shows semi-relevant ads, sometimes location based. Reddit ads are visual flotsam.
Reddit really buried "no nsfw outside official reddit apps" (from the end of your first link). Didn't Tumblr do something similar and lose a significant fraction of its userbase and revenues?
If value in a platform comes from third parties choosing to use the service, and those third parties are free to use alternatives, then platforms should be very careful about how greedy they get in exploiting their users.
Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use.
Between this and trying to crowd out third party clients, one has to wonder if they're trying to position themselves to become the next Digg.
It seems like Reddit is pushing these changes because that's exactly what they want to happen. They want all users to be using the free first-party Reddit app.
Reddit is already nearly entirely astroturfed advertisements, and you pay for the site by reading the shill posts that fill its pages. The fact that anyone pays Apollo or Reddit for a subscription is already just sad. Like paying for cable.
It's obvious or an open secret that Alphabet/Google and Microsoft will use their web copy for teaching their AI.
Same with Twitter. So many businesses were built upon basically free API access and are now shocked the company responsible for their app's customer appeal wants some of that action.
It's not Reddit's responsibility to float OP's business and make it profitable. OP's billions of monthly requests have a real cost for Reddit - and now that Reddit's API is so coveted, they can charge whatever they want for it's access.
No Twitter - no Twitter App.
No Reddit - no Reddit App.
It's really simple...
I assume they hope to attract more advertising money this way.
Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy, but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant?
Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.
The other explanation is these charges are intended to kill third party uses of the API. I'm pretty sure that's what is mostly motivating Twitter (down to the weed joke price).
Are they gonna try to bill google chrome, too?
Like I said before in [0]
"Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase a high price for it."
Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them.
If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features.
Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party clients, but to appease advertisers Reddit has to make guarantees around visibility. It's not enough to check if third parties are calling the correct API, they will actually need to regularly audit all third party clients.
It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.
$5 is not an insignificant amount to a lot of people all over the world, including Europe and maybe the US. Especially when every single app and service wants you to subscribe to them now, I've heard plenty of people saying they're going to cancel their Netflix subscription when password sharing stops working.
344 requests per day is not worth $5 per month for the average user.
Where are you guys moving on next?
Same reason why Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. don't have alternative clients.
Nothing unusual.
Reddit is proceeding along the well-trodden path to monetization optimization.
For the average HN user? Lol, no it’s not.
I would wager the majority of HN users can point to several dumb >=$5 expenses in any given month. If you don’t value Apollo enough to pay for it, fine. Just don’t pretend that $60 a year is a morally outrageous amount for software.
Apple takes at least 15% of that, or 30% depending on the developer's revenue, leaving $2.55 or $2.10.
OpenAI should start a clone, make it nice, and train their LLMs off of it. If discussion boards have immense future value from hosting humans interacting, clearly the cost of hosting them is worth it.
Reddit, Twitter et all don't owe you anything. They do not make money via read-access API calls - they lose money. It's super simple...
Only a fool would build a business around a free service with no escape plan.
I tried to appeal but when you're permabanned you are limited to only using a small appeal form with 250 characters maximum. I tried to bypass this by linking to a google doc. Nobody visited my google doc and yet reddit said they "reviewed my appeal" and "will not be lifting the permaban".
I'm not a troll, I never harassed anyone, used slurs, called for violence, etc. My only offense was arguing with a powercrazed mod (hated by most of his own subreddit), and my Reddit accounts are all wiped. When I try to create a new account, they get permabanned too after a day or so, so I gotta give reddit's "platform integrity" team some credit, merely using a VPN isn't sufficient. I just wish they'd treat customers who've given them hundreds of dollars the courtesy of a phone call or a human review. I really hate how some big tech companies feel they're totally above providing any level of customer support. Reddit isn't alone here. I can't even get refunded by my CC company because the coins were purchased over 6 months ago.
At least I still have HN.
Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse and TikTok have decided to ban third-party apps. Twitter and Reddit decided to charge for it.
In this case with the developer of the third party Reddit client, unless he is making enough to cover the API costs, then it make no sense to build on someone else's API with little to no revenue. That is the risk.
It is no different to TapBots (creators of TweetBot) doing the same mistake.
Then the third party app can choose between adding their own ads, or charging a subscription.
You might have better odds in court with a precedent but you'll still be out legal fees.
Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM clients.
Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be developing its own first-party language model, and any other model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay these much higher rates.
Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are losing.
Complaining you don't get free stuff anymore is really unbecoming of an entrepreneur.
> If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id
> If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute
So... doesn't this mean that each logged in Apollo/3rd party client user can make 100 requests per minute for free?
The Apollo developer says his average user makes less than 400 requests per day and it's somehow going to average $2.50 per user per month. I must be missing something.
In the case of Twitter, power users who posted the best content almost exclusively use third-party apps for the extra features and usability they provide, and the ban on those amplified Twitter's quality issues.
You have many people in this very submission saying they will quit Reddit if Apollo becomes defunct.
I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy, and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting a 3 day ban.
I'm out.
Netflix has introduced ad-supported tiers where you pay less. That’s the same here, those users can use the website or first-party app.
If Christian added a cache layer on his own server he could easily make the finances work.
But... Thats in nobodies interest - Users end up with stale content, Reddit looses users due to stale content and loses revenue due to Christian extending caching times to save money. Also, Christian will make uncachable requests, like for example voting, hard to do, which again hurts reddit as a platform.
What a lovely model.
Twitter eliminated 3rd party clients, and now Twitter is estimated to be worth 1/3 of its acquisition price.
There was a few months where it was required, but it isn't anymore.
I'm pretty sure FB thinks I'm a republican country hunter with a big beard who loves driving his huge truck to crossfit. Because of where I live possibly?
Why can't a third party app use each user's individual API queries for that user's app usage? Like you have the user OAuth with the app, and then the app uses that user's own user API access to query the API. 100 queries a minutes seems like it should be enough for most people.
Lastly - Twitter's market price has nothing to do with it's profitability. That seems obvious, but apparently needs to be said here.
Realistically, it was only a matter of time. Also predicted here: [0]
They are just truly shitty at make a working app. It's really not a business or what, just the official one truly don't work.
Popup ad to notification is already bad, pretend it to be user message? How the fxxk do they think it is going to encourage the engagement?
It would be a better question to ask "Why did Mark Zuckerberg buy successful VR game companies and shut their games down?" (if you were having fun you wouldn't visit Horizon Worlds) or "Why did Zuckerberg damage a successful brand by renaming it?"
It's not about money, it's about power. The primary currency of power is deference and if one powerful person demonstrates they can take an action and get deference that action is appealing to other powerful people who want to prove they can to do the same.
Reddit even gives each user 100 API queries per minutes for free.
Why can't apps use that to access the data for each user?
When I go use an app that talks to OpenAI for example, it asks me to put in my API key. So why not just do that for third party reddit apps?
I think the app can just ask the user to OAuth with it and then it should be able to use that user's API access up to the free rate limits.
If the same thing happens with Reddit I'll be ecstatic.
It's not profitable. That's why they're cutting to the bone and not even paying a lot of their bills.
They had to make an advertising exec the nominal CEO, because a lot of advertisers have fled the platform.
Ofc the major issue is how to avoid enshittification. Having a good monetization strategy from the start is key. Hardest part besides attracting large user count is to attack some of Reddit’s failings: terrible arbitrary moderation. That’s the tricky part.
I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered my email.
I truly believe they just don't care.
He wasn't complaining about that. He was led to believe that the price would be reasonable, and he was willing to pay a reasonable price, as he already pays Imgur.
It seems the OP has a very distorted impression of what "reasonable" means to another for-profit company.
According to Apollo's developer 80% of the users make less than 500 requests per day, so I'm guessing the proportion of power users making a lot of requests are in the single digits. I doubt enough of them want's to pay enough to subsidize the others.
There's also the point that using Reddit is a two way street. Reddit is made up of user created (or user stolen) content, and moderators are working for free. Reddit's whole value is made up of user interactions, allowing users to make those interactions is not just a cost.
Why should the app developer pay anything at all? The users are also Reddit's users, they authenticate and can use Reddit's resources in a number of ways, why not charge them directly? Will Reddit be sending a bill to Mozilla for my page loads?
Twitter and Reddit both allowed a thriving third party ecosystem to develop before they made apps. (And in both cases they just bought the most popular apps.) Hell, the word tweet was invented by Twitterific, a third party twitter app.
While it certainly is completely up to the platform to allow whatever they want, it's shitty to make a change that big and alienate many of your original most dedicated users.
There's legal precedent already in Europe that this is fine by GDPR rules, as long as the price of the subscription is "reasonable".
That way they get to preserve (or even improve) their ad targeting business, on the assumption that most users will just choose selling their data over a subscription. And if they go for a subscription, even better. In a sense, let the market decide the value of privacy.
The first step in this would obviously be killing any third party alternatives that would be the first place of refuge when they make that move.
In any case, a pet theory, but there's been a strange convergence by these big companies and the way they're changing their business models.
Because Reddit makes money off the ads. They can't guarantee third parties will always show the ads in the way they've designed.
So now they are charging third parties the cost of losing ad views.
Except that's not what Reddit is doing here. They're charging 3rd party clients ~21X what they lose in ad views, pricing them completely out of the market.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/27/tech/elon-musk-twitter-si...
Not all apps are worth $5/month, but this particular one that people apparently love enough to spend hours per day on certainly seems like it should be. A slightly nicer calculator app that you use twice a month? $0.99 is fine. A professional productivity app that saves a high-value worker hours of time? Way more than $5/month.
It's ok if not everyone can afford an app.
> Why should the app developer pay anything at all?
The app developer is just a proxy for the users, who are using Reddit without seeing any of Reddit's ads.
Only Reddit knows how much money it loses per user who doesn't see ads.
Or they'd do some kind of peer-to-peer caching between clients.
Prices are a two-way street. You can name any price you like, but if buyers can't afford it, then you make $0.
This is why the developer himself can't just raise his own prices by any arbitrary amount. Buyers have some say in the price.
And then Reddit would have to audit third party apps to ensure paying users are getting what they pay for. Sounds more onerous than just making third parties pay up.
Indeed, but this is the risk in selling a middleware product. The Apollo developer doesn't own the platform, and was lucky he hadn't yet been asked to pay for the share of maintenance costs his app created.
Hopefully one more nudge towards decentralized services and open standards.
I was a huge reddit user over the years, but now I only go there for a handful of very specific subreddits. That's really it's only use anymore. It's great for that, but they are probably seeing massive decline in usage.
And the moment they basically kill 3rd party reddit apps is the day I barely touch it again.
And they do. Over time they have become less and less distinguishable from post of humans.
I wonder what's going to happen with Apollo.
And what about my script to randomize my posts after a while? Yea, it doesn't do a lot, but still...
Users shouldn’t be forced so aggressively into using an ‘app’ - whether the official one or a 3rd-party app - when mobile web browsers are so very capable.
I’ve been in tests where the entire site is gated, demanding I download the app. I’ve been in tests where SFW content is marked as NSFW, demanding I log in. Etc.
I wonder if there is a "fediverse" for something like forums? I can never get into mastodon because it's not like forums and conversations between people are quite hard if you don't follow them.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
I really want to be the fly in the room looking at their grafana for monthly active users and see what happens to it in the coming months.
I’m someone with ADHD and obsessive behavior is kinda one of the main symptoms of it. I think with this change, it’s not going to be hard for someone like me to drop it.
I suspect that because of these changes, Reddit is also going to make it harder for search engines to index them - which is going to further reduce how useful Reddit is for information discovery.
This is going to hurt reddit, and I personally don’t think the growth is going to be as strong as it has been once they take these actions. Social media sites depend on their users, and arguably only a small portion of their users create content. And a smaller portion that than create useful content. Once you’ve pissed off and pushed away that small %, you’re not recovering.
I’m guessing this is some decisions made by MBAs who have learned some theoretical stuff, but don’t realize their courses haven’t really covered businesses like Reddit, Twitter, StackOverflow etc. They’re in for a rude awakening.
Remember that Tumblr effectively died once they made some decisions.
Otherwise I will ignore this claim because we simply don't know what ad revenue per user is, and we don't know what Reddit's projected future revenue per user is, which I would also expect to be covered by this pricing.
Not sure why couldn't subscription cover the API use for the user.
That's no longer the case. Google's "For You" gets me my niche subject-specific content, Google News/Memeorandum (and its sibling sites)/Apple News gives me the mainstream media perspectives, HN (and maybe Bluesky occasionally) my urge to discuss and engage with others, and YouTube Shorts (I refuse to install TikTok) helps me understand Internet culture.
I don't think any one company came for Reddit on their own, but what they've left Reddit with as a differentiator are the communities. Unfortunately, those end up existing as little fiefdoms for the moderators who run them, and if that's all you're going to offer, you're not going to be able to justify that $10-$15bn (probably lower now) valuation to investors.
To look to the Twitter example, even when I used a third party Twitter client before Elon came onboard, old Twitter were regularly playing silly games with issuing auth tokens to third party clients, for all of the same reasons.
At this stage I view third party clients as nice to have for major free web service APIs, with the expectation one day it will probably stop working. Reddit doesn't owe anyone a public API, as much as I will miss third party clients (big Narwhal user here).
What evidence do you have that a majority of these users are not already using the first party app?
I love reddit but recently they are starting to make it harder to use their services. Eventually its going to turn in to a cesspool just like facebook. Something new is gonna come open to all we promise its always free and then repeat.
But having worked on platforms like this, this solution opens up yet another support vector. A cost that works for the most potential buyers may not be high enough to actually pay for support requests.
I'm not using Reddit on its own app nor the browser.
The app is huge and clunky.
The browser is turtle slow.
Neither gives me the granularity that Apollo gives me. The swipe controls are slick and so are the filters.
If I can't consume it with Apollo then it ain't worth it to me. And I already paid for the app. I refuse to pay more for something that is not a necessity.
Apollo would have to become a subscription to be sustainable and in a time where everybody wants to make a subscription out of everything I, on the other hand, am in a shut down everything that is not essential mode.
This is not essential. Neither is Netflix. Neither is Disney Plus. I'm looking for more to cut. And while, i can currently afford all this, that might not always be the case and I'm sick of subscriptions that just are just leeching out of our $$$ our bank accounts month to month and that eventually add up.
Also, I've been considering cutting back on toxic social media and maybe this is just the right push I need.
Oh well. Had a good run.
*shrugs*
Yeah, I pretty much only use reddit for a few game communities, unfortunately with this change I suspect more and more people will move to discord. It's pretty annoying, but I suspect I'll have to eventually cave and join them when they finally kill old.reddit.com.
Users->Discovery Mechanism->Topics->Threads with all of the trimmings.
I hope they can come to some sort of agreement or find a way to acquihire the Apollo developer (though that might kill the app with crappy features as well).
It comes off as extremely entitled to think that reddit should supply you with the data created by their platform to do what you want with it.
Every few months I kick a couple bucks to my homeserver (which is currently running a pretty large surplus or I'd do more) and that's the end of it.
I guess if they go through with it we’ll see what impact it has.
Does anyone have a ballpark?
Or a plugin of improvements for a general-purpose Web browser?
(It could even preserve ads.)
The reason for such an app would be that a lot of people like parts of Reddit community content, but much fewer people like many of the UI attempts that Reddit has made of the years (for desktop, mobile Web, and apps).
Depends on who you think an average HN user is.
And maybe they will soon learn that they are not owed an audience.
Maybe that will be reddit's Digg exodus moment.
I read a thread on reddit about the api fees where commenters called out HN as the next site to move to. Hopefully not.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
https://github.com/xavdid/reddit-user-to-sqlite/
It can pull your recent activity from the API, but also has support for pulling data from a GDPR archive (a feature I'm very proud of).
So I'm quite happy if they destroy themselves. I spend too much time on it anyway
I wish the “my” portals would come back.
Seems like reddit's old reputation of being capricious and spiteful is still apt. Charming.
The sooner it's gone, the better.
It sounded like an OAuth'd user gets an individual allocation of free rate limited API queries (100 per minute).
And I'm honestly not very fond of how the communities on reddit work. Sure, there is some overlap between the peoples on different subreddits, but there is little 'community' across subreddits and it feels very different to the 'good old' discussion boards that cover a very general topic and then have many more specific subsections. I'm especially missing the more off-topic aspects, which just doesn't fit well with the separation in subreddits.
You're likely not using TikTok effectively. I personally use it, and all my engagements with it are 100% relevant to my interests.
The only iOS app for Lemmy is Remmel which is dead and no longer available on the App Store.
Reddit exists _despite_ Reddit's incompetent management and tech teams, not thanks to them.
And it IMO, is anti-competitive - they are intentionally killing all existing competitors, vs. improving their own offering.
So, if you already have a sophisticated ad tech and sales team, you'd be able to pull 50%+ profit margin without having to worry about running the infrastructure for content.
That being said, there's maybe only a handful of companies with a more competent ad tech/sales team than Reddit, and Reddit's is pretty damn bad. So while the numbers make sense, the strategy does not given the competencies available in the market they're trying to sell in.
The lesson I learned is not to report anything because trying to be helpful is not worth the risk of blowback
For checking out completely random things, or funny things, or just to brwose around... that's where tiktok destroys them now.
>Tiktok is 99% garbage content
That's... a statement.
Using it as just a news source seems really valid.
And it feels different from other social media platforms because of the focus on full discussions. But surely this still counts as social media?
Genuinely asking because I see you made your account just to post this comment - why did you do that? It's not a bad thing (I'm here too), I'm just curious why you felt it was important to do?
they're passion hobby projects that'll disappear rather than turn into a job
But they have someone once or twice a week look at a list of 200 appeals at a time, dismiss all 200 after glancing at the subject line of all of them together for 15 seconds, and then move on to the next page.
There is nothing they want from a 13 year old account. You're a liability. You still use old.reddit.com, they want to get rid of that without backlash. You want 2007's reddit back where you could have amazingly intelligent discussions on just about anything with dozens of other people who are essentially anonymous to you. They want to be Facebook, with ijits clicking on tiktok videos.
It's quite possibly they're just banning old accounts so they can re-invent themselves as a spammy Facebook/Instagram/whatever clone. You're in the way.
It'd be a mistake to assume that they're pro-bitcoin-scammer, when mostly they're just generically evil and want what you liked about Reddit to be long dead.
Think about it - who would go out of their way to download a un-official app?
I feel like it's incredibly short sighted for these companies to limit their APIs.
Reddit wants IPO. Badly. They want to show potential investors that they're solvent. To this end, as Google did nearly two decades ago, they will monetize every inch of their user base and application -- that includes access to their data.
But Reddit is on thin ice -- as MySpace, Digg, del.icio.us all found out and as Twitter is finding out.
Why? Reddit doesn't have any asset of intrinsic value. Reddit don't have sought after intellectual property. Reddit doesn't produce any goods. Reddit's value is the community and the data they bring. When they antagonize the community, they are antagonizing what is keeping the lights on for them.
Usenet. But it fell out of fashion around the turn of the millenium.
Combine that with the obviously hostile user interface. It’s a terrible terrible website and nowadays I don’t really miss it that much.
Edit: and certainly nowhere near enough to offset that kind of price increase.
IRC itself doesn't provide a shared history, threading etc.
You could get there with alternative clients and bots (at least if all participants use the same), but calling that IRC is a stretch
To put the pricing post into the same context, we're talking $7.50 per Apollo user/quarter, which is closer to what Facebook makes per user than Pinterest.
That said, presumably 3rd party client users are especially active and would skew higher ARPU than the average Redditor, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were more likely to live in developed countries.
I dunno. I started running the numbers expecting to be outraged, but the cost doesn't seem crazy far from what Reddit could conceivably hope to earn off these users. I doubt Reddit is monetizing anywhere near that well right now, but if they're pricing the API in a forward-looking way, rather than planning to ratchet it up every quarter inline with monetization efforts, it could make sense.
0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/995251/pinterest-quarter...
It is currently maintained by one excellent developer, is featured by the Apple App Store for design... what's the downside?
Literally a name reddit generated for me and I paid no mind to it.
Fun fact, reddit uses browser fingerprinting to ban all your accounts afterwards. Also fun fact, there is a way to get innocent users banned as a result too.
Worse, they use browser fingerprinting AND IP.
Not sure if it's caused by power-hungry mods, the upvote/downvote dynamics or political polarisation, but you can often quickly make out specific "opinions" that are somehow magically shared by everyone posting in a particular subreddit.
The UX also actively supports this by de-emphasizing individual users and emphasizing subreddits as the primary "personalities" of the platform. This goes so far that on r/all, the names of the individual users who posted the threads aren't even shown anymore. All you see is subreddits.
That together with some "supermods" moderating large fractions of the popular subreddits and a recent post on HN of another redditor who experienced shadowbanning makes me seriously wonder how authentic the discussions you see on r/all really are.
Example RSS feed: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/top/.rss?sort=top&t=week
Credible citation needed
EDIT: Okay I see the 20x figure in the article
Yes, the obstructive popup when you visit reddit on a mobile browser to force you into installing the app. Other than that only if you want to do more than read.
Yes please. Random videos should move to TikTok.
But it doesn’t matter what is, it matters what they think and they’ve got AI cash fomo.
No, users who want a usable Reddit are making API calls.
They've worked really hard on making sure their official app is an actual piece of garbage. I am truly impressed at the amount of work it takes to make something that is that bad. People being paid for the existence of that app make me feel good in that no matter how bad I can get, no matter how senile and incompetent I'll become, there'll be a job for me somewhere. Paid absurdly well, too.
People keep bringing this up and I feel like there's a fundamental misunderstanding going on. The internet of 2010 is not the internet of today, not even close.
The average reddit user of today isn't going to stop using reddit due to problems like this because they just don't care, at all. They don't care about the new web design being a massive downgrade over the old one because they're used to every website looking like that, they have no complaints, many of them probably don't even know the old design still exists. They don't care that the app sucks and is full of ads because, again, most official apps for most websites are like that, it's the new normal. They just want to scroll through funny meme videos on their phone for a while and don't think about it beyond that, the age of the average user having standards is long, long gone.
Oh boy, I can't wait to have to join a specific game discord for every game I want to play or else be locked out of any community information!
Discords are easily killing a lot of hobbies by sequestering away information. And even when you're told "Oh that answer is on XYZ discord" you have to go in and find the conversation using Discords ever-shittier search function
These firms hirebuy (like acquihire but more money) a single dev with an amazing tool, and not long after the tool is terrible and the dev is out of there.
Closest thing I can think of is the .win communities which are very reddit-like in interface, but unfortunately mostly uh.... radical.
Reddit itself was open-source until 2018. I wonder if someone could easily spin up a docker container that allows one to self-host a local instance (e.g. one subreddit)
Not the greatest of experience, both for devs and users.
Even smaller subreddits can be pretty terrible with bad mods.
A lot of smaller hobby subreddits are basically treated as facebook groups, with people treating it as a group for people with an interest and not a focused discussion about that interest,
Other apps are around that ballpark, and that's every before considering that Apollo users tend to be heavily power users. Over 7000 moderators of 20k+ users subs for starters, means a lot of requests.
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
Oddly enough I can't find it actually on his blog.
This is just the natural lifecycle of all things involving humans. Why people want the same stuff to remain dominant forever is baffling to me. I can imagine nothing worse. Reddit dying off to leave space for something new and fresh is a good thing.
Social media sites do seem to go through the cycle even faster though--probably because they're essentially digital nightclubs. We all know of that one hip club that everybody waited in line for in our 20s, and then suddenly the drinks get too expensive and the crowd gets older and uncool...and then suddenly there's no line out front anymore. And there's a new spot in town where the young people cluster.
Before Reddit there was Digg. After Reddit, I'm confident there will be something else.
But, without a social graph, I wouldn't call it a social network, so it does not suffer a lot of the problems social networks have (e.g. echo chambers, ostracizing members, showing off, influencers, and many others).
Social media has problems, social networks have problems, and social media which leverages a social graph has a whole different class of problems. Ironically, the relative primitiveness of HN protects it from at least some of the worst elements of the internet.
Instead they jerked around the developer, ditched all the code, and shut down the app in 2016.
The people making up reddit might have been replaced with completely different people - with different motivations, behaviors, and expectations.
I'm not a reddit admin. Please try to engage in good faith on this website. I'd suggest reading the "In Comments" section of the hacker news guidelines if you're unsure.
Without old Reddit (and third-party apps on mobile) I'd stop using Reddit completely, I have zero doubts about that.
Reddits main function as a porn facilitator will really hamper its desire to make lots of money as a publicly-traded business.
Are you using old reddit? [1] Do you find that slow as well??
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/o67vzg/how_tro_get_ba...
I have here, Masto, and a few other places that at least have mostly sane policies. All I know is that reddit is definitely on the decline. And this whole API debacle is going to be their own Digg V4 moment.
Reddit subscription is $60 a year. That removes ads.
Proceeded to shut it down and basically fire the developer. They don't want anything but their reddit mobile app they have had top minds figuring out how to data mine you harder and show you ads. That's it. That's their goal.
Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly, but with the recent resurgence of server-side rendering we may soon be able to get rendered HTML with one HTTP request. And then the only hurdles will be legal.
A slow spiral into irrelevance because of lots of small bad decisions. At one point, Reddit felt like a lone champion of free speech and conversation in a sea of buzzfeeds.
I think they've moderated the website into ruin. They've put a lot of energy into silencing certain kinds of voices/opinions while promoting others. What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of the seemingly worst ideas from the left are stated as fact and voicing a dissenting opinion can quite literally get you banned.
r/antiwork and r/latestagecapitalism are the most egregious examples of this that I can think of. But the attitudes held there have leaked into 99% of the other subreddits to some degree.
For the record, I lean left. But it really sucks to no longer have a town hall where both sides of the aisle can discuss things as adults.
If there's one takeaway, I think it's some flavor of: Don't overmoderate/show favoritism. You can't have yin without yang, or salt without pepper.
What made Reddit awesome was the discourse. Maybe they never realized that this was the secret sauce. That is, the clashing of ideas. And so they didn't cultivate that. Today, outside of a handful of niche/hobby subreddits, it no longer has anything close to educated discussions.
Users should understand and I would gladly pay for Apollo per month.
It looks ridiculous on my 49" monitor because it's middle aligned and horribly padded horizontally.
Also it doesn't seem to be doing it right now, or maybe it only does it on mobile but that thing where they only show you a couple of comments then have a DIFFERENT post/comment section right under it drives me crazy.
Maybe I'm just a luddite unwilling to learn new things.
Love the features, but feels shady to me still. The API pricing thing does suck, but at this point I’m not willing to throw any money at them.
Seems to me this is more them trying to push ads on people; apps like Apollo do not serve ads (or, as a long time user of Apollo, I've never seen them). I think this has been a long time in the works, before all of the LLM buzz.
Especially with modern tech, very few pieces of technology act as a single purpose; my phone can be just a phone, just a camera, just a chat application, or any combination of the above. Whether it's a toy or a work tool or a social media device changes depending on how its being used.
HackerNews is the same, in that you can just use it as a link aggregator, maybe you like it as a "classic" forum, maybe you use it for advertising. (HN-ready articles that are basically advertisements are quite common and popular even)
I think before anyone can really answer if something is social media or not, it needs to be better defined what it actually encompasses now as oppose to when the term was coined. Like, is a Glade AirFreshner a social media device just because you can tweet from it?
0 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8064945/pdf/cyb... I guess this says it originated in 1990? But it doesn't seem well defined.
I think the key problem with all the theorycrafting in this thread about how Reddit could approach this in a better way is that these better strategies are fundamentally incompatible with whatever is broken in Reddit's management.
Reddit's product is authenticity. Monetization is the antithesis of authenticity. The two cannot coexist, as they're about to find out.
This also entails getting rid of the free tier and imposing usage limits on the remaining subscribers since a few people could easily blow out the average and drive up costs.
There are definitely people willing to pay those costs (I count myself as one of them, as well), but the lack of apps like Apollo being successful at that price point probably means that it is not a sustainable business.
Imagine where Meta would be now if it hadn't just bought up all competition from WhatsApp to Instagram.
One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg. So far, reddit has been very careful raising the temperature so as to not scare the frog before it's dead.
I got banned for false reporting.
Clicking the link through to the reported comment showed ... a deleted comment from a deleted account.
Lesson learned!
I do not like telegram or discord communities due to history issues. Same with Facebook. Reddit posts popping up on Google searches is really great.
I really wish we could go back to forums. The thing Reddit gave us was a central place to find communities as well as a unified login and feed. I feel like an aggregator of forums could help with finding communities. Forums that support oauth and rss would help bridge the gap of unified login and a central feed. The nice thing about forums is that their infra costs only need to scale with their community.
I wouldn't call that Apollo app's author a fool. My understanding is they were turning a profit from the app up to now. So, apparently, it was a nice business. It's just that their business model is about to stop working.
Well, that happens to other business too sometimes. They'll have to adapt somehow or come up with another business. Life as usual.
If you're building your business to be completely reliant on another unsustainable, unprofitable business, don't be too surprised when they ask you to help row or get off the boat before it sinks.
For API restrictions, Reddit has been in a doomed if they do, doomed if they don't situation for a while now. I think there's about a thousand other better decisions they could've made before being forced to make this one about API usage, but I also don't see their numbers and their time simply might've already run out.
If the API is solely for your own consumption, this can be simpler, and of course third party clients are harder to monetize as the kinds of ads you can serve are going to be restricted to what you can force a third party client to receive and render.
If the number of users on third party clients is really low, all of the above can carry more weight in internal business case style discussions too.
Third-party client apps can keep doing what they do, knowing that attempting to use the data to train an AI would destroy their business forever. Companies that want to train an AI can use the other license and pay big stacks of money.
I've got articles about the debt limit, AI, immigration, the new Titleist irons, etc.
Nowadays with the brain damage that has been inflicted by adtech social media over decades it is hard to imaging mass adoption of such a publicly funded outlet. People have become literally social media junkies. Unless you do a tiktok like race to the bottom you can't disrupt the incumbents.
But establishing the principle is important even if its a small audience. 2% of billions is still a large population. Just like public TV being typically of higher quality (where it exists) such platforms could be really interesting, worthwhile places.
If the experiment succeeds one can start thinking of introducing user fees and other funding mechanisms and eventually maybe restoring sanity and delegating the targeted adtech industry in the darkest corner of hell where it belongs.
“… and cap the number of request per user so it remains profitable.”
My fellow mods and all prominent users I interacted with (the vast majority of them not from tech as it was not a tech focused community) were all well aware of 3rd party clients, and many used them.
This is very anecdotal, but amongst Reddit more "intense" user base, I would be surprised if 3rd party client usage was low.
Reddit gets paid either through ad revenue displayed to non-paying visitors to the website, or through API calls for access to their dataset. Apps that enable user access via the API will need to pass along this charge to their users.
Apollo must become a paid-subscriptions-only app, as Reddit now charges for usage. This is fine. Apollo needs to constantly be updated to keep up with Reddit API changes over time anyways, so neither 'free' nor 'one-time purchase' are acceptable ways to provide a continuous living wage for keeping up with reddit API (and mobile OS) updates.
There's a third (paid) option, which is that Apollo sells the app to Brave or Firefox, where it's integrated into a paid "Reader Mode" subscription — because a team of developers will need recurring revenue for living wages in order to maintain the website rendering overlay and overcome Reddit's attempts to block or break it, and will need a team of lawyers to defend against the eventual lawsuit Reddit will bring against them (even if they'll lose due to the LinkedIn precedent from a few months ago — but, I am not their lawyer, this is not legal advice).
There are no good free outcomes that are not advertising-supported, and the API is incompatible with advertising, which is why so many people use it. I'm glad to see that Reddit has realized this, and I'm glad they are still offering the free ad-supported website rather than a paywall. I hope that Apollo is willing to charge me for their app, and isn't demoralized by their users complaining about this. We'll see.
That way you don't give the data freely, you could make each API keys provided to the user with limits that won't impact normal navigation but would cripple automated data capture, and you'd solve the issue where third-party apps aren't fed ads by sustaining the platform through subscription.
If the ToS allow this, the cache layer could even be shared across apps from different developers (developers supporting both iOS and Android might have an advantage here), making the costs even lower.
They're not charging for cost; they're charging ad revenue replacement for users using apps. It's pretty clear in the way the Apollo costs would be about $2.50 per month, which isn't that far from the $7/mo for reddit premium.
Yep, and with more intrusive monetization comes stricter content controls. Once Reddit bans NSFW content -- which is "when" not "if" at this point -- it's going to lose its relevance as a platform.
Good riddance to Reddit. The only sad part is there is no clear successor ready to take its place for the minority of subreddits that host real communities and serve as a useful distribution point for information.
Personally I think the developers of the top Reddit apps should get together and develop their own backend that clones the Reddit API endpoints but hosts the content on federated instances. Just cut out Reddit corporate - what value are they providing when the bulk of content creators are using third party apps to browse and create content?
old.reddit is showing the same issues that i.reddit had, such as redirecting you to "regular" reddit if you click on a title instead of the comments. I think old.reddit will keep accumulating small papercuts like these until enough users give up, at which point it will be shut down without recourse. Reddit can't do this right now because some moderation features don't work well outside of old.reddit, but the fact that everything outside the "official" website is being degraded or shut down should give you pause.
They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for everyone involved.
Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling absolutely dead.
Reddit for the past few years have been changing the UX to benefit their revenue streams. Visit any reddit thread on a mobile browser, and get a nag to download the official app. Their app is less likely to be blocked by ad blockers, has advertising SDKs, and can link advertising parameters.
I believe certain threads need you to login. It is also in their best interest to find opportunities for you to login to again link browse behavior. Forgot to mention, the app also allows a logged in state to persist easier than browser.
TL;DR All of Reddit's UX decisions have been to grow their revenue stream.
Do they have the right to do so? Of course. Does it suck for this audience in particular, probably. In my opinion, they will lose their early adopters and perhaps some power users. Is that a risk they are taking? Clearly.
On the one hand, this is fine: Reddit is supposed to be a collection of independently moderated sub-communities with their own rules and administration. On the other hand, you have a unified identity and content history across those communities, so it's a lot easier for one community to take action based on your history in another, which is a strange dynamic.
I actually think Facebook Groups are onto something with the way post history and profiles work: each Facebook Group a user posts in creates a separate sub-profile for that user which is specific to the Group. Users in that Group can see a user's post history in that Group, and that user's "main" profile depending on their privacy settings, but a user can't walk "across" to see a user's post history in other Groups unless they search from that other Group.
I feel like per-subreddit post histories along with a global user profile would help move Reddit more towards the "sub-community" vision if that's the direction they want to go.
The issues Reddit have are:
* Cross-stalking, as discussed above.
* Content discovery. This is the same problem every user-generated content platform has. What sub-communities get surfaced on the logged-out front page? Cross-pollinated to existing users? Every type of content will be objectionable to someone, so deciding what to show is always going to be a lightning-rod issue with advertiser dollars at stake.
* Global moderation. What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? What happens when that user is completely banned (do all of their old posts disappear?) Should large-scale content moderation like spam be handled at a platform or a community level?
Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?
My first though was that maybe 1% of users buy something in a given year, but that's $24k to acquire a customer and is so far from reality that my perspective must be way off.
I too am sick of subscriptions, and may find myself in the same seas I found myself at 14.
tl;dr: I quit Reddit because I didn't want to make yet another account, and my life is better for it.
Edit: Also, I've been trying not to come into HN political and pop-culture threads too much, but am failing at that. Maybe today is the day I start just hitting the technical threads!
Dude, you run an interface to another company’s core business. You cannot make any guarantees about what they may or may not do.
It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser fingerprint info, search terms, information from their partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit, what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes and so on.
Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots, people harassing you, completely unrelated comments, report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much data.
A “lifetime” purchase for any app is always a bad idea and is a Ponzi scheme. Mobile apps always require maintenance and updates.
Now of course I understand that he could have never predicted such a price increase.
but those users don't see ads on 3rd party apps. they already know what all they can implement to improve user experience. they just wont, willingly
Worst case scenario is just web scraping Reddit and serving up to 3rd party clients as read only.
I think a critical part of the Digg exodus was that most people already saw Reddit as a clear #2 in the space. When Digg fucked up, there was an obvious place for everyone to migrate to. I don't see that right now. Facebook isn't cool anymore, Twitter has a large number of people who won't use it because of Elon, Mastodon isn't mature enough to gain casual users.
Bascially, the problem I see is that if people leave reddit, there isn't an obvious place for them to go? TikTok maybe? I just don't see an Pepsi to Reddit's Coke.
An interesting and notable thing in this context is how for any given interest represented on reddit there is actually an entire ecosystem of subs. There's the main one, the decade-old mod schism one, the "circlejerk" parody one, the "True" one that takes itself more seriously, the more recent schism that allows slurs, the one for memes about the interest, a few to many for various subdivisions or specializations within the interest, various vestigial zombie schisms and misspellings that may or may not just redirect to one of the others.
Each of these will have elements of its own culture and history and jargon and in-jokes, but drawn from the same pool of subject matter and all in some way referencing or revolving around the biggest one, even if only in opposition to it. All will share some mods with at least some others and most users will frequent more than one of them.
What you end up coming up against is identity. Each sub needs a reason for itself to exist and so members create that meaning by enforcing the norms, referencing the jokes, and socializing new members into the history and protocol. HN works exactly like this too btw; it is culturally a subreddit, even if hosted elsewhere with slightly different game mechanics.
I'm of the exact same opinion as you. Too many services trying to leech too much $$$ from the consumer right now. With inflation and other essential living expenses as high as they are, cutting these other "nice-to-have" services is a no-brainer.
To each their own of course, but I hope more people (even folks with the financial means) will choose to vote with their wallets, because some of these policies are quite frankly getting out of hand.
The reddit api is also essential because reddit offers so little functionality. I have used my own bots before to search my own comments and delete my own content en masse.
Most technical users are still happy to use a GUI over writing their own scraper / visualizer
The Apollo developer does however address this in his post and he claims that Reddit's ARPU is only $0.36/quarter. Reddit has likely been doubling down their efforts on Ad Targeting, etc and perhaps forecasts much higher.
Christian's reddit post only addresses ads though, but Reddit has been trying to diversify and create multiple products and revenue streams. They have gold for purchase and if I recall they were trying to launch some Clubhouse-esque product. Point is, it's hard to push any of these things if so many users are on 3rd party clients that don't support such features.
Once the new app is being used by power users paying for their own usage, Apollo builds a Reddit alternative. It will fit into the feeder app just like the rest.
Also, online advertising can lead to in store sales. When you look at those dollars people spend a couple orders of magnitude more than $240 on stuff every year.
To stay inside the free tier, you get 1000 requests spread over 10 minutes (their current spike-smoothing behaviour) across your entire user base.
Anyone reading this can make their own Reddit-esque forum on a VPS and serve a few thousand people for a few bucks a month. And if Reddit ever kicks out all the polished app users/old.reddit users, you'll see that start happening a hell of a lot more
> Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?
1. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of businesses lose money on their Facebook ads, but either don't realize it or Facebook has enough churn that it doesn't matter if the quit (e.g. a revolving door of unsophisticated local businesses spending money on Facebook because it's the biggest game in town).
2. A lot of advertising is broad "brand awareness," and I imagine it's actually very hard to determine if it's actually working in many cases.
If I have a backyard and let you host a couple concerts in it free of charge and then next year I decide "hmm, I think I should be paid for those concerts you're hosting in my backyard" is that anti-competitive?
Absolutely not.
Old reddit has been working exactly the same for quite a few years now and I can't remember it ever redirecting me to the new version. Perhaps this happens if you're logged in and have the new version set as default or something?
I mean the only thing the founders/investors want is to cash out, nothing more. they don't care about what reddit becomes after they IPO.
> Reddit's product is authenticity.
It has not been authentic since Trump's election. It has become a PAC, tangentially something else, but mainly a way to push partisan politics on every single subreddits including the subs that have nothing to do with partisanship.
Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze" where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half the customer base.
Twitter was one of the first to give access to cheap mass data, and now they're one of the first to charge through the nose for that. The move is going to be that if you're not enterprise level you're not getting this data anymore, and I doubt it stops with reddit.
(By bulking and cutting I mean eating a calorie surplus to gain muscle and fat followed by a calorie deficit to reduce fat while hanging on to as much muscle as possible.)
Reddit, Netflix, YouTube... they bulked their user base by subsidizing products. Now they're in the cutting phase and raising prices, restricting features, and/or increasing ads. They know they're going to end up with a significantly smaller user base, but if the cutting manages to maintain a large enough number of profitable users (muscle) while shedding unprofitable users (fat) then the business will end up in better shape.
Alternately one can keep calories stable and slowly increase muscle without gaining fat, but that's much slower and harder than a bulk/cut cycle, and most people and public companies don't have that kind of patience.
They may suspect they're larger than Digg ever was, and can simply weather that storm.
They may be right, to be honest.
Aren't they closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out? Literally all their data from 2005 to March 2023 is still available via torrent.
I think this site will get a flood of new users from Reddit once the axe drops. I think this will cause the quality of discussions to go down.
It was recently killed, just like old.reddit.com will be.
I'm curious why you'd think that. If anything, an API access agreement allows Reddit to compel Apollo to meet advertising requirements.
In consumer finance, CACs are even higher. For standard credit cards it’s around $200 but can be over $1000 for premium cards.
[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/01/23/netflixs-83-millio... [2]https://www.unifimoney.com/blog/changing-the-vicious-cycle-o...
All other truth is locked down in unindexed chats, and all other search results are SEO'd AI written articles shilling referral links.
You can also detect accounts that are displaying scraping behavior and block them.
To be fair, paying for Apollo unfortunately doesn’t support the future of Reddit. They need some way to keep the business afloat.
I've reported threats of violence similar to what you describes over at https://www.reddit.com/report and they removed it after a day or two, even comments that were highly upvoted.
Redditors are now perking their ears for the next person to yell "next party at my house!"
I suppose time will tell.
Hah. Reddit "truth" is sold and bought at every level for anything popular enough. It's just the illusion of truth. Your site:reddit.com strategy stopped making sense 2-3 years ago.
I will not be sad when reddit essentially dies in a few years from now. Good riddance.
1. SPA that you can run on your phone or desktop
2. Centralized User Management, need some way to block known bad actors
3. Signing posts / comments
4. Distribution of posts and comments over DHT?
5. Hosting images, videos and lengthy text posts on torrents
6. A whack ton of content moderation software to somehow make decentralized moderation work.
7. Image recognition for gore / CP that inevitably will get spammed
This would enable people to help host the subreddits they are subscribed to, but murder battery life on mobile unfortunately.
That's only one side of it though. According to the same post, Reddit's ad revenue is closer to $0.12/user/month. So, they are apparently willing to sell traffic to advertisers for a much much lower price than API users.
That's pretty much the definition of enshittification.
It works the other way: with today's SPAs the API (that powers the frontend) is exposed for us to use directly, without going through the HTML - just use your browser's devtools to inspect the network/fetch/XHR requests and build your own client.
-----
On an related-but-unrelated note: I don't know why so many website companies aren't allowing users to pay to use their own client: it's win-win-win: the service operator gets new revenue to make-up for the lack of ads in third-party clients, it doesn't cost the operator anything (because their web-services and APIs are already going to be well-documented, right?), and makes the user/consumer-base happy because they can use a specialized client.
Where would Twitter be today if we could continue to use Tweetbot and other clients with our own single-user API-key or so?
This is only a temporary reprieve for Reddit, Twitter, et.al. The LLMs are going to start simulating user agents and work around this. Well-intentioned alternative user agents like Apollo are collateral damage.
The root fix is a solution to online human verification. All these web products are just trying to hang a "Humans Only" sign on the door.
Is client_id something you have to register with reddit?
So you can't, for example have a client_id per user?
What if you as the app maker forced all your users who want to use your app to go register for their free personal client_id for their own personal API use, and then you have them give that client_id to the app along with their OAuth with they log in?
I am just trying to understand why a third party app can't just be a "software shell" that individual users can use to access reddit through their own personal free API limits as if they were just some individual accessing reddit through the API.
I only use Reddit on desktop and the SPA React app they made is still garbage.
This is a tool to purge your reddit comments. It first edits them to something else, then deletes them. Reddit admins have claimed that this is a true delete, as opposed to setting a delete flag.
I realise that it's ripe for mis-use as clients could always just not display ads, and analytics would be hard as even if the client isn't actively malicious, it may fail to display an ad that it records as visible which is effectively ad-fraud.
Nevertheless I feel like there are unexplored options here, including SDKs rather than web APIs, select partnerships, and maybe more. I would imagine if it could be done it would work well for Twitter, Reddit, and potentially even Facebook and Instagram.
I guess it probably comes down to it being a hard problem with little perceived benefit over owning the customer interface, but the backlash to these things always feels significant (in my bubble at least), and I'd be surprised if these companies didn't feel it was an unqualified positive change.
As the URL suggests, at this pricing RIF will simply die.
Looking at one of the subs I run though - old.reddit.com accounts for 5% of total traffic. Whilst 5% is not nothing, it's also not really all that much. I doubt they'd notice much impact even if half of the old.reddit.com users left.
I dont know if anything will overtake Reddit for a very long time because of network effects. But discord is probably the best guess. Although I actually think people do want centralization. They want 1 login to 1 website that has everything.
I agree. And I think people should also keep in mind that OSes also have APIs as well, and should be wary of systems that try to prevent user freedom.
Then again, I've been running Linux for ages now. And I don't have to worry about anti-user garbageware on a forced update coming my way, or updates that de-feature my system.
And I swipe next as soon as I realize it's this kind of content.
I imagine that with the userbase these apps have they could succeed and perhaps do some less greedy/intrusive monetization.
This is 20x higher than what each user currently brings Reddit in revenue, but I'm betting that Reddit is going to be cranking up the monetization hard in the next few months.
Reddit Premium is currently $5.99/mo, so the bean counters probably see $2.50/mo for API access for a competing app as long overdue rent. I'd be very surprised if we didn't also see a big push to drive up the ad revenue on free accounts (more pushes to get on the app, ad-blocker-blockers, etc.)
Don't get me wrong, the old UI was awful, but it was much more information-dense, so I prefer it. I think it's unlikely that anyone that's not already a turbo-nerd would come as a completely new Reddit user, compare the two, and pick the old UI.
I would rather invest in reddit with NSFW content allowed than in reddit with NSFW content banned.
About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market.
Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and stealing ad revenue.
Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs launched its own forum reusing the client's name. It exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular message board among the youth.
The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to it.
I hope to see Apollo go down this route.
Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard as reddit going to paid awards and memberships.
One more thought: Keep the Apollo UI or whatever thing the users are most familiar with. Most of them do not care if it is fediverse or open source or backed by web-scale k8s, they only want it to just work (tm) good enough to post things on it. Eat the lunch you prepared yourself.
Source: a friend working in marketing, so it’s not really reliable data point.
There is still a ton of value in the more niche Reddit communities. I don’t spend much time in the default subs, but the smaller interest-based subs are great and most of them are too small for the karma farmers to really care about.
Might as well get off the entire internet because all of the popular sites are sold and bought at every level.
a) there is no political aspect to it
and
b) there is no commercial aspect to it
Make Apollo a paid-only app. Change the price for Apollo to $10 per month. That’s still a drop in the bucket for anyone that cares enough to really want Apollo in the first place.
So like OAuth? IIRC Twitter used that with all the 3rd party clients. I think the problem is that 3rd party clients filters out ad posts one way or the other. Your other point still stands though, just charge the user API access.
I still routinely run into it on my phone where I cannot view the site at all unless I download the reddit app, especially if its a NSFW subreddit
The purpose of an API is the agreement, more than the access. You can always reverse engineer something, but your users won't be too happy when things randomly stop working, whenever reddit chooses.
I wonder how many power users, heavy users, or content generating users use unofficial apps. The passive lurkers are great for ad revenue, but the people who comment make the site worth browsing.
I HAVE to assume there is quite a bit of overlap in Apollo’s mentioned 7 billion Reddit api requests last month…
Obviously Discord is chat focused so not a one-to-one replacement but I am not sure that the younger generations will care.
Plus there is the possibility of discord adding a Reddit/forum like feature, since they already have the mindshare.
The Apollo app has a huge install base anyway. Problem is only, how long will this all take?
I've undergone audits for "Sign in with Facebook" usage in the past on a small app (~50k FB auth'd users), and it was enough of a spot-check that they probably catch egregious mis-use with not a lot of effort.
That's maybe true as a first-order effect.
But, for the ads that everyone else sees to be worth anything, the site has to be worth visiting at all. If your most dedicated/prolific users mainly post/comment using third party apps, then making their experience worse will reduce the quality of the site overall (even if you start getting revenue on behalf of those dedicated users).
It strikes me as a very shortsighted move.
there's plenty of areas you can improve upon functionally for a modern forum
And even if you build it, it will start out empty.
Google and social media platforms have shaped the web to be entirely advertisement driven. If they were capable of showing you things you wanted to buy, without the creators paying to be seen, they'd never make any money.
Almost anything you ever want to do, someone else has already done well, but despite that, it's hard to find snippets of code you can include in your projects. It's easier to just write it all yourself. If the usefulness of ChatGPT is an indicator of anything, it should be an indicator of how much is out there that you never get to see. The sad part is realizing that that's intentional.
An app that uses reddit is not a competitor to reddit, it's a client of reddit. No definition of "anti-competitive" applies here.
Reddit is about discovering content. How would you discover anything on Discord? Is there a trending list to see the top messages? Is there a way to list Discord communities so you can discover ones matching your interest?
I'm at a lost to how the two are similar in any way except for the "young generations" use them both.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
On the user side you need to:
- pay the service a recurring fee
- pay the client probably a recurring fee (x2 or x3 if you use multiple clients on different platform)
- mix and match the above and manage when it falls out of sync
It's totally possible, but how many users are willing to go that route ? Weather apps could be an example of that with the pluggable data sources, but that's to me a crazy small niche.
We will need to pay for servers and dev time so maybe we can allow our users to donate to upkeep. Maybe call it new service platinum. Unfortunately, most people don't pay so maybe we can have a limited number of non-intrusive ads on the site. Well now people with equity want some money back so we need to figure out how to make some more money. These third party apps aren't showing our ads, so lots of our power users use these third party apps and lots of companies are leveraging our service to make lots of money. The obvious answer is to get some money back from the api users. I shall call this site reddit.
Twitter still maintains a critical mass of users and corporate accounts, but all the most talented creators (at least the ones I followed) have reduced their Twitter usage substantially or moved on completely.
Eventually new readers will stop showing up because there is no worthwhile content.
Be it cars, bikes, coffee, firearms, you name it.
For hobbies I've found Tiktok is riddled with low quality content.
I suppose it really depends what you're looking for.
Bottom line is it depends what kind of content you're looking for. For niche interests/hobbies, Reddit is very hard to beat.
We already know that the "verification" it provides is functionally worthless.
These days it seems like anyone with a blue checkmark is just asking to get made fun of.
You can see how the end game of this is HTML no longer being free, right?
I'm curious what percentage of Reddit Premium subscribers are also users of third-party apps - seems to me that if you're a power user you're more likely to be in both camps. Also moderators - apparently lots of mods do so through the apps instead of the website, so there may be plenty of subs that have issues as well.
- It's a very niche thing to charge for, and merely charging for something means having to support it, so you can be underwater on support costs alone
- Users on third-party clients are resistant to enshittification
The business model of any Internet platform is to reintermediate: find a transaction that is being done direct-to-consumer, create a platform for that transaction, and get everyone on both ends of the transaction to use your platform yourself. You get people hooked to your platform by shifting your surpluses around, until everyone's hooked and you can skim 30% for yourself. But you can't really do this if a good chunk of your users have third-party clients.
This is usually phrased as "third-party clients don't show ads", but it extends way broader than that. If it was just ads, you could just charge $x.99/mo and make it profitable. But there's plenty of other ways to make money off users that isn't ads. For example, you might want to open a new vertical on your site to attract new creators. Think like Facebook's "pivot to video", how every social network added Stories, or YouTube Shorts. Those sorts of strategic moves are very unlikely to be properly supported by third-party clients, because nobody actually wants Twitter to become Snapchat. So your most valuable power users would be paying you money in order to... become less valuable users!
If social media businesses worked how they said they worked, then yes, this would actually be a good idea. But it isn't. Platform capitalism is entirely a game of butting yourself in to every transaction and extracting a few pennies off the top of everything.
Thats really easy for Reddit to measure. Why are you assuming they haven't?
It strikes me as a very shortsighted move.
If you stop assuming that Reddit is run by idiots, and you consider the likely probability that they've modelled this stuff in some depth, it's easy to believe that your initial assumption is wrong, and that the users are on 1st party apps (or will be if others shut down), and that many will stay and continue to post rather than leave or stop posting.
Your premise is based wholly on the belief that you know more about Reddit users than Reddit does. That seems dubious to me.
And though it’s easier to price a subscription, those also tend to be more user-hostile and occasionally not that great for the developer either (just look at the recent Twitter client debacle, where for-profit enterprises were begging their users not to ask for a refund for prepaid services that could not be rendered). I can’t imagine anyone came away from that with a good taste in their mouth.
I don’t begrudge anyone the right to earn a living, but in my mind the vast majority of subscription models on the market don’t imo represent a very compelling value proposition.
If you do that, I'm going to make a client that uses a rotating set of accounts and masquerades as a different client. I am then going to make content available through my client for free, and I'm going to put ads on it so that I can make money. With some small number of accounts, I will serve perhaps x1000 users and you can't do anything about it.
In time, perhaps I will lock the users into my platform. They will talk about how the community on Reddit doesn't understand Reneit and how all the memes come from Reneit. If I win, I'll be Reddit over Digg. If I lose I'll be Imgur.
So go ahead. You'll be Invision to Tapatalk and you will die.
Facebook's ARPU is $58.77 in the US/Canada so $5/month. According to them, Apollo's Pro clients would earn reddit $2.50/month. Is the right number $1? I imagine that would still kill Apollo.
It seems like the problem more generally is that third-party clients cannot extract the same value from users that first-party clients can.
Has anyone tried to solve this differently? What if Reddit gave you a libAds to add in your application where you build and control the other 90% of the interface and do a profit sharing system with them.
This isn't true if they're charging for API access. At best it's a question of whether the lost ad revenue is being compensated for by API revenue.
If you want to attribute an ulterior motive here I'm guessing it's more about control. They want their users to use Reddit as they want them to use Reddit, or at least they'd like to reserve the right to that power.
Considering that I've seen ChatGPT-type comments in various subreddits, I expect paid social media like Twitter Blue, Reddit Premium and Discord Nitro being pushed even more in the future.
Only issue I’m having with it is discoverability of new communities.
Elon wanted to turn it completely off and was probably convinced to ban the accounts of all the third-party clients and to try and harass the world's many weather services to pay 42,000$ a month.
Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo. He's always been fairly transparent about his money flow, so it's exceedingly easy for Reddit to price him out and put the fear of god into any developer interested in a Reddit client.
I still read it most days (through Apollo) but when/if this kicks in, that’s the end of it for me.
- "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users are more than enough, especially considering most of them are power users. I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit.
- "Making a social network is hard." Yes, but it's not too hard. Scaling is hard, but we're not scaling to Reddit's size (100+ million); and Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks). HN runs on 2 servers and uses a LISP dialect (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); even though HN is text-only and Apollo would have images or videos, I'm 100% certain there are enough dedicated Reddit users who can make this a reality.
- Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)
There's absolutely going to be an exodus if Reddit does anything non-negligible, the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care.
The value of reddit's content to non-reddit entities is rapidly increasing as its monetizable use shifts from a set of signals on which to build first-party ad targeting (which they never really figured out) to generally useful llm training data.
I thought Tapatalk is more like a generic mobile client addon to forum wares than being a forum itself. I remember that nagging banner when I was on XDA years ago...
Quora used to be more centrist. And it had a major boarder appeal globally. But it too has been turning towards a Reddit style moderation within the past few years.
I've seen an influx of political redditors making their way here to fight e.g. nuclear power (because why not) over the past few years. I can't imagine the professionals working on protecting/pushing brands are very far behind.
Ever since new reddit it's all be user hostile steaming garbage. But they have the user base and their content so the value and network effects are there even with shit UX.
Because they aren't having to pay for hosting.
The only way to replace reddit is with a distributed system like aether: https://getaether.net/
Or if you absolutely want a centralized system, something community run like ao3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own
But given the absolute hostility and hate _users_ of reddit give those two sites for not banning everything they find offensive a site like reddit is just not possible any more.
Quora was good for more centrist and international comments, but it too has been destroyed by poor development combined with politically motivated moderation.
Now everything is highly politicized with a hard split across two camps where before I barely could detect the very concept of a camp at all.
There's no detectable reasonable right-wing online, it always escalates into 4chan. Hence, the "civil" people clean the place, and you'll have centrists and moderate-left remaining. Give it time and far-left will dominate as moderates silence themselves out of fear.
Now, whether this constitutes “anti competitive” in the legal sense is probably not going to fly in court: it’s unlikely Reddit can be compelled to offer an API at any particular price. It’s their service, they can do what they want with it. Rather, it’s a lesson that third parties should not be developing clients for other company’s services, as it is building a foundation on quicksand.
Discord is good but it's a chat app first and foremost and it's a pain to search for esoteric information, especially since you have to be in the server in question to even search.
It's not working. https://imgur.com/a/6blpTqF
[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/05/31/reddit-apollo-a...
Do you mean at least one? Because there are many "credible" ones, unless I misunderstand what you mean by credible.
It's more about the business side than the human side, the social need will always be there but the business aspect taints it. At least the modern corpo "let's IPO and become billionaires, fuck the people, and chase endless growth" taint it more so.
Nothing online is forever unless you attact the data hoarders.
This can't just be laid on the feet of faceless bean counters or old men in the executive suite.
It's so weird to me that they've let the mods go absolutely bonkers. I've gotten banned from so many subreddits simply for having a different opinion.
I know that their UI and native application are absolutely bullshit.
This is already happening across the board.
For me, I don’t think that will be the case. I almost exclusively use Reddit on mobile though Apollo and Reddit’s own app is absolutely garbage (unpleasant to use and heating up my phone burning through the battery).
I used to pay for Reddit premium, but I stopped after realising that Reddit wasn’t providing me a better experience for it.
Though I would also argue that one of the biggest negatives about Reddit is that you can't come back to a thread later that day or another day, if you want to get your reply head then you need to respond immediately and attain a lot of upvotes. With a forum you could respond whenever you wanted and get a discussion going. And similarly forums would allow you to avoid the echochamber effect by avoiding upvotes/downvotes as everything was chronologically ordered, so it was a much more civil affair.
But I agree that the chain-of-quotes is a positive about Reddit, which I think might be possible to implement/merge into a new forum design.
The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.
Amazon made this explicit with their Geospatial API pricing ( https://aws.amazon.com/location/pricing/ - "Places" tab) - where the pricing for being able to store a result is 8x higher.
Reddit has subreddits on the right and left that will ban you for disagreeing, or even for having made a comment in a subreddit they don't like. That was theoretically always possible, but at some point people decided such a policy was a good idea.
I personally think a misstep of reddit's has been relying so much on volunteer moderators. Why are people willing to put in so many unpaid hours of labor? Apparently, the answer is sometimes because they have a political cause they want to promote.
Now, if you paraded around telling people you trust Apple and that they would never hurt you in any way, and that you had conversations with their management and they want you to succeed, now we have a problem.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...
This is so stupid.
Ultimately if you want good discussion you need the same layout that Reddit and HN have, with indented comments and easily branching chains. Otherwise it's just a chat masquerading as a forum thread which is useless.
2. It's the OP's assertions and estimations as an outsider, it's not based on any insights.
I think moderation on Reddit had the effect of cleaning out centrists as well, since it was a comment that got you banned from reddit and not your political position (e.g. a post which was positive towards a trump policy would get you caught up in the post-2016 moderation sweep).
You can see the effect on Indians. Quora was popular with Indians because it was intellectual and centrist in the western political spectrum, from a culture that has the right-wing as being Hindu-leaning and the left-wing as being Muslim-leaning. Indians are absent from Reddit comparatively.
This could lead to some initially profitable users into leaving the site and as a result make it less useful for the remaining users. This could lead to a negative spiral until Reddit is left with a fraction of its' user base.
This isn't the problem, if you're willing to just shed 95+% of you userbase, then sure, make everyone pay and have a first seat view of your app slowly dying.
It's a low brow dismissal, I know, but between the posts and the comments, Reddit has gone to total shit. Also to note that the average age has remained the same, so it's really hard to talk about anything serious when the majority are 18 yo US middle class white males.
And the only rebuttal I hear is "oh, I'm on /r/askhistorians and it's good here." The exception that proves the rule.
May it all come crashing down so we can build something anew. They're just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic at this point.
The sooner it's gone, the better.
No, they're just flailing.
The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subreddit would go a long way provided whoever buys that power must go out of their way to plausibly deny that.
And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money- Twitter was fairly valued in the tens of billions for a very good reason- but much like Twitter, that sort of thing sells "at a loss" because having the kind of content which enforcement of ideological conformity upon is meaningful necessarily means major companies won't want to put their products next to that content. Reddit is not a product that can generate a concrete return on investment, which is partially why it can survive operating at a net loss for a long, long time; capital directly funds political power.
Cheap capital drying up means money is tighter- so financiers are getting harder to come by- and if you're in straits that dire and don't want to downsize you have to look for other sources of revenue. In Reddit's case, this will completely kill their main product, but they have a mental block that prevents them from dealing with that honestly so they might be screwed.
>Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks)
Mastodon has the same kind problem that Reddit does but massively amplified- server operators have power over user networks (the same thing happens on Reddit with bots) which is a no-go for honest communication.
The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted.
Only if they have a solution for that can try going their own way.
Outside the US the subreddits seem to be much older as well, not sure about the situation in the US itself.
My attempts at commenting on Tiktok with anything informative have failed as the super short comment limit makes explaining anything very frustrating. Tiktok just doesn't have a commenting culture and most people stick to emojis and a few word comments which aren't conductive to interesting discussions.
For me, Reddit and Twitter are simply not worth visiting using mobile web or first party apps because the ratio of crap I don’t want to see (ads and promoted content) is too high vs the content I came to see.
YouTube is going the same way, I use multiple adblock rules to hide “shorts”, “people also searched for”, and “people also watched”. I pay for YouTube premium but feel like a mug for paying for a service which tries to force feed me content I don’t want. I’m on the brink of cancelling the subscription.
If you're in a situation where all of your income comes from a company, but you don't have an employer/employee contract with that company. It seems like such a precarious position to me.
So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users.
The API side could moderate their own content and restrict access to UIs that play nice and the UIs could refuse to surface content from API sides that suck.
The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.
and yes, I've used content moderation AIs in the past (like Google's Perspective API) and they're not really usable. OpenAI moderation endpoint, embeddings classification, or even just gpt3.5-turbo would work marvelously.
Just because you pay for Apollo (I pay for it as well) isn’t evidence that most of the Apollo user base is ready to open their wallets to the point of starting Reddit 2.0.
Investors want to get paid for the last 15 years of waiting… and they want as big of a paycheck as possible and nothing matters but that. All the free labor mods did? I’m sure the board and investors all agreed that moderator labor can’t legally demand anything, meaning they don’t matter.
So, I expect Reddit, one of the best forums on the internet, will deteriorate after all the trust gets squeezed out via increasingly intrusive ads shutting down of the (old.) subdomain, an increase in user profiling and user acquisition.
Sad but it was good while it lasted
> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society.
You can see Reddit as a landlord, owning the land (or website) that the value grows on. They don't contribute value themselves, instead they make money by charging rent to everyone who wishes to grow value on their land.
Reddit has been privately owned since 2006: https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/condenast-acquires-re...
And it's been a shitshow since they pulled their free speech bait & switch in 2015, so good riddance.
This feels like exaggeration. Unless there's something I missed?
"My thoughts: I think if done well and done reasonably, this could be a positive change (but that's a big if). If Reddit provides a means for third party apps to have a stable, consistent, and future-looking relationship with Reddit that certainly has its advantages, and does not sound unreasonable, provided the pricing is reasonable." https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
> you had conversations with their management and they want you to succeed, now we have a problem.
If this did happen, but later management double-crossed me, would you then rip on me?
I will not be using the Reddit app unless they do something about annoying / intrusive ads on their app.
I'm fine with ads, just stop showing the ones to me I don't want to keep seeing.
After that, the activist investors which will certainly look for more margins will demand reddit reduce services and increase revenue irrespective of what that does to the services, so long as the relative cost/benefit is beneficial to quarterly returns.
Chat is ephemeral and it there's a certain amount of participation expected, where as Reddit content strikes a nice balance of changing frequently, but not instantaneous and, for most users, it's a passive activity. To put it another way, most people aren't doom-scrolling on a discord server.
The major subreddits of Reddit are being destroyed by the moderation and are basically echo chambers.
The remaining users are barricading themselves into a handful of subreddit which offers no real advantage over forums (except for how the branching layout of Reddit threads mimics pre-forum chat rooms).
Reddit has something like this, but definitely not as intentional,
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.json
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.rss
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.xml
>The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.
Old reddit had stylesheets and they could be very interesting. I still prefer that over the current thing they built.
That goes beyond rent-seeking into feudalism.
Rent seeking is running an application as a service that could just be a tool you pay once for, and instead have to pay for monthly. Charging people rent for access to a commons in which they provide all of the value is digital serfdom.
I would happily pay for Apollo on its own backend, and more than happily see ads.
All I am asking for is the Apollo apps front end, this app is the only thing that makes Reddit or a site like Reddit usable for me.
Try searching for something when you don’t recall where you said it (dc server or DM)
It's a well know historical fact that companies always do the smart move only based on hard facts.
So they are just alienating younger users.
For your question, though: I don't think it's "your fault" that anything bad happens to you. It's obvious that the problem lies with the company you're working with–it's just that this kind of bad behavior is unlikely to change, so you unfortunately need to take it into account when dealing with them. If you had asked me earlier I probably would have said something like "be wary: the management of today might not be the management of tomorrow, or they may shift priorities, or they might just straight up being lying to you". If all goes well, that's awesome, but I still think it's important to consider these things.
By way of example, one of the apps I work on has effectively gotten approval from senior management–essentially, what it does is "legitimate" and "within the rules". What this means we have reduced our investments in thinking about scenarios where it gets removed from sale, but continue to maintain our ability to deploy elsewhere even if it is little-used right now.
Even $1 per month is enough to keep a lot of the outrage junkies out and you can use the revenue to pay for moderation of the smaller group of power users that remain.
Fundamentally you're advocating for a web that doesn't rely on ad money. I'm totally with you, but the discussion should probably expand beyond the web and to why our society generate so much ad money in the first place.
What should we do to free our societies from ad money ?
However, of all of the Reddit alternatives that have popped up and failed, this one seems promising because there is a broad base of users that are all angry at once. In the past, it has always been fringe groups that have been banned and sought another site. Because of that, the subject matter of the new site always had challenges getting site hosts and advertisers on board. This is different. Having power users hurts on ad revenue but potentially helps on site quality. I don't know what will happen but this is a uniquely promising opportunity. We'll see how it goes.
This is not a useful comparison. A failure of an ad blocker means you don't see an ad while using the service. Big deal. A failure of a reverse engineered glorified web scraper is that the app stops working, completely, for all users of the client, at once, until someone fixes it.
Yes, it could be democratized, but most users wouldn't understand any of this, and say "ugh, this app never works". It would be a user experience that reddit could make as terrible as they wanted.
We need to figure out sustainable online communities.
The removal of r/waterniggas (a sub about staying hydrated) seems absurd ideologically, even with that name.
I think most people going out their way to pay for an alternative Reddit client have a beef with Reddit in the first place, and it's the client that keeps them on the platform.
Would they be happy with Reddit alternatives ? who knows. But they'd probably give a fair shake at it to see if it fits their needs, and not just dismiss it at first glance. Also would such a service be profitable ? depends if service such a minuscule group is done efficiently enough to keep the running costs low.
IMO Apollo users probably aren't on Reddit for the mainstream stuff, Mastodon or Bluesky could probably take that role. Niche communities could probably move on to smaller services and their users would follow.
PS: Voat was positively horrible, but I'd argue the circumstances that led to its conception where wildly different. This time we hopefully wouldn't have some "free speach" narrative baked into it, except for the NSFW bits perhaps.
I'm sorry, but in the case of ads this is a two way street. Ad companies have made it impossible to revoke consent for them to collect my data so ad blocking is the last refuge I have left. What entitles marketers to ignore the DNT flag and continue collecting info about me?
The requests would be all made from a client, so how would they even know it's not their client? Is it illegal? Because I can make any reddit request with a curl, no?
Please educate me.
What I'm talking about already exists by the way. Stuff like nitter, teddit, youtube downloaders. I once wrote one for my school's shitty website.
Honestly I don't really care about "most users". To me they're only relevant as entries in the anonymity set. As long as we have access to such powerful software, I'm happy. I'm not out to save everyone.
A server with nothing on it is like a field of weeds. It's just taking up space.
Your employer can dump you at any time. If you hadn't noticed, there have been mass layoffs in many tech companies this year.
Imagine holding a companies website hostage you work for free on unless they run their company how you want them to.
Moves like this are what caused the huge Digg -> Reddit exodus that significantly boosted Reddit's popularity. People need other places to go when their favorite platform takes this seemingly inevitable path.
I can only imagine the man hours that went into Google's Adsense bot, and it only had to verify websites rather than mobile apps.
According to which court or government?
I'm not familiar with every country, but I don't think a single G20 country or the UN has spelled out anything like that.
Imagine one has 10 request for thread {X} every second (probably a massive under estimation of the actual traffic). If you cache that single thread with a lifetime of a second you have instantly cut out 90% of your API usage for that thread.
Obviously the final benefit depends on what the actual distribution of {users} per {threads} per {time} -- but if your goal is to shave redundant API requests than it definitely makes sense, especially if the alternative is untenable in terms of cost.
I chuckle sometimes to recall the popularity of the “forwardsfromgrandma” subreddit many years back, because the top of /r/all often looks almost exactly like it now.
those poor bastards, all chained to their computers, joylessly creating content for their overlords.
Eg consumer put up with the increased price for a while, but will switch away over time.
(You'd make the billion small requests, if you are doing this on the sly.)
Pick me, I'll build and scale your social media site. I already did it once too hah
Also, it seems to me that Reddit could gain some goodwill here by supporting the flagship competing client apps with a lower rate while still charging a higher price for those trying to leverage its data for ML, similar to how Google provides much of the funding for Mozilla despite being a competing browser.
The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all submissions and comments that conflict with the narrative being pushed by the establishment.
Hacker News is great because many of the comments are substantive, thought-provoking and don't read like State Department press releases or obvious corporate astroturfing.
How is this relevant to the present issue regarding reddit?
I'm probably just showing my age, but one reason I could never get into Reddit is it always felt to me like teenagers rehashing the same old debates I had as a teenager on usenet/IRC/whatever. It was never the platform, or anything wrong with the users themselves. It's just that I aged out of the "spend all day arguing with random people on the internet about things" demographic. (Instead, I spend all day arguing with old friends on the internet about things).
Ooof. I mean, if you're only an iOS user, maybe?
My hunch is that the Apollo founder would be unwilling to participate in the same schemes.
HN has about 5M unique monthly users depending on how you count them.
Perhaps the mod has taken too many to the ol'noggin.
If I could just pay for the service without Google's malicious intents, then I would have no problem paying for YouTube Premium.
Same goes for Reddit and all the other bad actors.
If a server with nothing on it is just taking up space, then the users will have no problem spinning their own up and replacing Reddit or whatever.
Aggressive control of the meetingpoint (which it is able to do), is rent-seeking because reddit controls _access_ to the value, but does not create the value. You were making a point that reddit doesn't provide literally nothing. That's true, but it's a red herring. Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.
edit: I'm sorry, you were not making that point. I was responding to that point.
How did it come to control a cultural meeting point? Was it because they owned a server farm and employed people to create a website people wanted to use at the right time and the right place?
> Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.
This will be easily proven by people moving from Reddit to an alternative. Or disproven by not moving to an alternative.
Why? I would think it's the much simpler "having a ton of users is worth a lot of money".
Then notice how many posts in /rAskReddit are recycled from 6-12 months ago.
It’s gross, but honestly I kind of respect it. Reddit has recreated modern day TV for mobile phones. And it works because people can’t be bothered to retain what they’re consuming, so waiting 6 weeks for the news cycle to restart makes it all feel like a whole new thing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_de...
It's the only reason I use reddit and I will definitely not use the site anymore if this app goes away.
Probably a good thing...
I only see a couple thousand people actively comment or vote.
Tell me you only use iOS without telling me you only use iOS...
Is there a chance it’s getting better?
Most web development is downloading. Social networks have massive uploading and frequent changes.
Twitter literally invented microservices because of this.
The hard thing early on might be getting getting started with good training data. But chatgpt might already be good enough to make reasonable choices today with a good system prompt.
This ignores the nature of network effects. The value of the thing is precisely that other people are using it. That's not a value that's created by reddit, it's a value that's _exploited_ by reddit.
"Just go somewhere else" requires either a phenomenal degree of coordination, OR to just bite the bullet that not everyone will move to the same place at the same time, which fragments the community (which was, again, the bulk of the value in the first place).
The difficulty of network effects is that, as the group gets larger, the value goes up faster than linear AND the cost of coordinating a migration ALSO goes up faster than linear. A gathering that's 1/10th the size, isn't worth 1/10th as much. It's _significantly_ weaker. And migrating en-mass is an n^2 coordination problem. It's closer to a hostage situation than it is to a value-add.
> How did it come to control a cultural meeting point? Was it because they owned a server farm and employed people to create a website people wanted to use at the right time and the right place?
Kinda don't care? Maybe they worked hard for it, even. Does that justify indefinite control of an important resource? Legally probably, but you can tell I think it shouldn't.
Rather unfortunately, the position that "my opinion is unpopular, therefore contrarian and correct" is something that is easily manipulated. The demographic that falls for conspiracy theories loves to amplify the idea that they have some secret / esoteric knowledge. Again, a great way to manipulate people, encourage violence etc.
It might have changed since then but from what I remember of reading through the lead devs reasoning behind the "feature" I want no part of that ecosystem.
Embrace the users.
Extend the functions to get them locked in.
Exploit them for everything you can get!
Now the only way to access site Y is by a) routing all your data through some third party server, or b) installing a native application which has way more access to your machine than the web app would.
Some days you gotta wonder if anyone on the web committees has any interest in end-users.
I remember when Digg.com launched v4 and everyone hated it so much that they planned a "quit Digg day" and then collectively moved to Reddit. Maybe some day reddit users will do the same thing and move to something else.
This not expensive or a hard problem. You grab a bunch of servers, you set them up properly, and then you write your app properly.
No resume-driven bullshit; no hype-driven bullshit; no “we need to be galaxy scale now” bullshit. No email notifications, besides basic “thanks for registering, here is your login” and “here’s a password reset link.” No cloud-based bullshit. Don’t use fucking python. Use a real systems language to eek out as much performance as you can from the hardware. Actually understand databases and how your specific databases work. Use Postgres unless you have a very good reason not to.
Just a few thousand dollars a month, and a brief reprieve from short-term mania to actually think, and you too can literally serve 1 billion pages a day.
Why does everyone run into problems with this? Because they have personal hang-ups and delude themselves (or simply don’t care). This path has been tread numerous times before. The mistakes have been made thousands of times. The people who made those mistakes are available to help you out (for the right price, or if you’re good enough company).
I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material.
Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem.
Or installing a browser extension that allows rewriting CORS headers.
> Some days you gotta wonder if anyone on the web committees has any interest in end-users.
Oh, they do. The defaults are much safer for end-users than they used to be. Who they mostly leave out is a narrow slice of power users with use cases where bypassing make sense, and the extension facilities available address some of that.
Especially for an app like Reddit with millions of subreddits. There is no monolithic "reddit"; the experience is tailored to each user based on the subs they've joined. So your % of requests that will be asking for a cached resource is lower than other high-volume websites. I think your 99-to-1 estimate is _way_ off.
But I do agree that CORS is being hijacked/abused for this purpose. But at the same time it's an important security feature. It prevents the scenario where you visit some website and some malicious javascript starts making calls to some-internal-site/api/... and exfiltrating data.
The app has been regularly nagging existing paid users, who paid to remove ads in the app, about “amazing” deals to “upgrade” to a monthly subscription to the app to get some virtual stickers and other silly things of dubious value over and over. People complain about it every time they come up on the Apollo subreddit, directly mention the app’s author, who has yet to ever respond on this matter.
I think Reddit is being greedy, but I’m only sad if Apollo goes away because the Reddit client is so shitty; not because I love Apollo.
Service-oriented architecture: Am I just a joke to you?
Any stats you can share on registered user engagement?
I'd love to see a breakdown or writeup on this subject in general.
Presumably that's why they haven't booted old.* users yet. They realize that a really substantial amount of their network effects and their moat stem from quality posts by people using computers.
Reddit is about to fuck around and find out, and unfortunately I think they're going to find out that people will just dump everything into even more annoyingly gated-off Discord communities
That's an ancient (in internet terms) problem, framing Reddit as some sort of intentional ideology-spreading-loss-leader-for-powerful-capitalists doesn't correspond with their actions - after all, Reddit has been deeply involved in the spreading of all sorts of ideas on all ends of political spectrums.
They're just running into the same issues all these "give something cool away then hope you can make it profitable later" business do of trying to turn the revenue knobs slowly enough to not drive everyone off.
Reddit’s product is ad-supported message boards. It has a high valuation because it gets an incredible number of eyeballs every day and investors want to monetise them. Reddit is flailing because those users aren’t as monetisable as investors hoped. I don’t think it’s a whole lot more complicated than that, not everything has to be a political conspiracy theory.
I think especially in a forum where people tend to be semi anon. This isn't staking out a facebook name and keeping up with highschool friends. I know a few user names by sight on reddit but I really don't care if I hear from them again and I don't expect they care about me.
Makes leaving to anywhere that can put together a decent UGC interface pretty simple. It just feels like other than content, which reddit doesn't actually post, there's not much in the way of network affect.
Everything else is secondary and most product managers don't view a/b tests as anything other than experiments on ways to increase those stats.
The slice is only narrow because it’s practically impossible. If there were an option presented to end users “let X.com read data from Y.com?” there would be a rich ecosystem of alternative UI’s for any website you could think of.
These alt-UI’s would be likely to have better security practices than the original, or at the very least introduce competition to drive privacy/security/accessibility standards up for everyone. Whereas currently if the Origin has the data, they have full ability to impose whatever draconian practices they want on people who desire to access that data.
Content and advertising cannot be separated by IP and the site content is basically an application that is difficult to parse.
First, I parsed the posts for the most common phrases at varying lengths, hand identifying 3,730 individual strings that I felt indicated spam within the post title, post body, reddit username, reddit user description or comment bodies.
These strings are then checked against new or updated records and things are flagged as spam as needed.
It's been weeks since I've had to manually intervene and identify more spam strings - that's not to say I won't need to eventually as trends and techniques change (or, as it happens - reddit's api changes), but this was a fantastically successful means for identifying and analyzing obvious spam.
Beyond the above, I used what was a relatively simple approach to identify similar post titles to those that were determined to be spam for a "if you thought that was spam then you'll probably think this is too..." type feature that was very effective.
If reddit's api changes weren't happening I'd have already started training an ML model/NN or whatever chatGPT told me was the best one to use in order to classify these objects from the existing data.
Ironically, all of this was in order to offer moderation bots to subreddits to help handle the spam problem.
I started with scraping the API to play with meilisearch as a search engine but was just awestruck at the amount of _obvious_ spam that was getting through automod/reddit's own spam filtering (if there is any?) before being published/available via the API. I just didn't want to store all the metadata I was generating for all the spam posts and couldn't depend on reddit to police the issues on their end.
Now they're still unable to get a handle on spam - but also cutting off the developers trying to help them.
I get nags to upgrade to something I couldn't care less about, in an app I paid to avoid these ads and nags, every time I open the app (i.e. multiple times per day) on "promo" days (i.e. any US holiday)
These nags have also been disingenuous, because the price will usually go up on "promo" days so that Apollo advertises a "special deal" that is basically the price it's always been before. It's advertised with a full-screen popup upon opening the app (or while using the app)
If it was no big deal and nobody minded, there wouldn't be a slew of posts complaining about it every time, and the app's author wouldn't consistently ignore these posts and comments as he has done every time while always answering praise and positive comments in the same threads and subreddits.
Selling me something to remove all ads and then showing me your own ads anyway is dishonest. Either mention this at the time of payment, or make it opt-in like virtually every other company I deal with (aka "do you want our marketing material?")
substack is where all the online right wingers who aren't unhinged reside imo
why are you trying to communicate something informative in a comment? just make a reply video.
also you have to be REALLY strict about the stuff you watch - if something comes up that you don't like the look of you can instantly swipe away. that trains the algo more accurately than saying you don't like something using built in tools but you can do that too if you really object to something.
for me it usually takes less than a week to train a new account to specific content, less than a day if it isn't niche("gaming" is easier to train than "gym exercises focused on strength over hypertrophy")
If a third-party webapp wanted to access Reddit, an auth flow that gets API tokens from it and then stories those for usage gets this working (in the universe in which Reddit wants this to happen of course). You still get CORS protection from the general drive-by issues, and you'll need an explicit auth step on a third party site (but that's why OAuth sends you to the data provider's website to then be redirected)
Create post -> share url -> instant chatroom based around the topic -> live chat with anyone on the net in seconds (hopefully have fun). Open to feedback :)
https://r.nf/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_re...
Something that so many founders get wrong is the belief that something needs to be good to be valuable. It doesn't. It just needs to be better than not having it. That is often a tremendously low bar.
> Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem.
Exactly, tech is full of this weird hubris that everything has to be super complicated and over-engineered.
Heck, while you exclaim disdain for Python, I've seen large web services run on Django and a few servers behind load balancers with very few problems.
The web is in the process of rapidly filling up with AI regurgitated garbage, eventually there's going to be a handful of sites with real usable content on them left, reddit being one of the biggest.
I greatly appreciate the rules here that we should read and interpret in good faith - and the fact that it's enforced.
This current cruel control over all user data is amoral. It has no effect on bad people, & only hurts those trying to do right & to improve situations.
If sites want to make money, it should be for doing more than being the site of record for user content. SXG is a viable path forward to let the internet be authentically better connected.
Make it work with https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy would be one idea. I have absolutely no clue how hard this would be though.
Unlike Reddit, you'll have the benefit of the hindsight of 2023 instead of managing 20 years of tech debt.
In any event, this is clearly absurd pricing. Its tough to tell if this is deliberate to simply kill appollo and cater to a usecase that makes them some money at the same time, or simply a dumb idea.
Finally, I really don't want to sound like a shill for big companies like OpenAI/Google etc, but where do companies like Quora and Reddit get off selling their APIs at big numbers? Like screen scraping is legal and this data was contributed directly by users. In reddits case, literally the entire idea, community, subreddit and moderation are all handled by unpaid users. I get that capitalism exists, but its kind of fucking bullshit they think they can sell this. Like everything, if the price is out of whack, I hope people spin up scrapers and build their own API
That's a nice dream but the reality is that HTML would be a really bad API, even worse than SOAP.
I mean I could never get my head around how they could circumvent liabilities by simply saying oh this is user generated content but still copyright it and now sell it? Seems like the greatest scam social networks have been able to pull off.
Also if this data is public, what stops people from scraping it?
You’re describing Reddit ten years ago. There’s not really a “typical Reddit user” at this point it’s so big. All kinds of people are on it and most of them are not techies with a particular ideological bent.
This is their real motivation. You can’t fight that honestly. Greed is good for these folks.
They did resort to all kinds of tricks. But your overal point still stands. The performance of python is lacking memory and it's embarrassingly slow. I hope python4 will have scripted for developing and compiled for production, like Dart. And a great compiler like Rust.
[0]https://instagram-engineering.com/static-analysis-at-scale-a...
Now with Reddit trying to shutdown Apollo and other 3rd party clients with this pricing move I can see myself never using Reddit, their official client sucks a lot (it's unfortunate they bought Alien Blue just to kill it, which gave Apollo the chance to rise from those ashes), if Apollo dies... I will simply not use Reddit as much, the only other way I can use Reddit right now is through old.reddit.com, that sucks on mobile browsers without RES.
It seems I will soon experience a repeat of Digg with Reddit, slowly use it less and less because the experience is broken until the moment I forget it exists.
Perhaps that's a longer topic not really relevant here.
So you could've just lead with the fact that you don't care about private property and have an anti-social outlook on life. It was spelled out to you why there's value in Reddit. You say the commons are the important thing.
If I go to your living room with 3 friends and we start talking about life and philosophy, you'll ask me to leave or pay rent. But I will tell you no, you just host the place where cultural discussion is happening, I don't care if you worked hard to get your home, I'll just be there and it's not up to you to control that home forever. I could've gone into any home, the value is in my discussion, so you should be happy I'm having it there and allow me to have it for free, since there's no value in your home and you shouldn't even own it for the future.
Is it so unreasonable to charge 20m/year to a super popular iOS app? I don't know.
Does apollo make money from this? Do they take advertisement income? But I imagine, if you are the most popular app, on the most popular mobile platform, of a very popular site like Reddit, there has to be a lot of money floating around no? They definitely have income, and definitely have expenses (development isn't free). Curious to actually see the balance of these.
But if reddit want people to use their own app, I don't see why they would support Apollo for free. I also don't know that the actual cost towards reddit would be. A reasonable price is probably somehwere between 0 and 12k.
The keyword here of course is "at scale". At what scale? Any commenter that believes what was written upthread should create a system and demonstrate that it can scale to Reddit levels.
You need highly accurate data about user behaviour around the ads, and highly optimised display and linking.
I've built a similar system, albeit not for ads, for recommendations, based on viewing items in a feed. With a simple model, across web and app, all developed in-house, it was still hard and required a lot of care to get good ML signals and signals that people really understood.
Doing this across third party clients may be prohibitively difficult. I'd like to see attempts, but so far I've not seen any.
The deal with WWW is as follows:
You provide a website on the server. The client downloads it and decides how to render it. An API is going to be more efficient than HTML plus all the bells and whistles. But if you don't provide a reasonable API we go back to the stone age of HTML clients which parse and scrape. It is going to be more nuisance for client and server. Load is more intense and it requires more bandwidth at the cost of user engagement. And you'll get barely more advertising income.
The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates.
To be honest, I'll be happy to cut Reddit out of my digital habits. There's a few things I'll miss but HN, Slashdot and e-books will easily replace that gap.
I'm not sure what they expect...we've all seen it happen with social-media, it starts out all open and free, and then investors get involved and soon enough people have already moved on to the next open and free alternative. 4chan is the only exception to this rule. But if 4chan somehow got transformed into a for-profit service, then things have already gotten very bad.
You picked the server you joined but the benefit of this over something like Lemmy is that you don't get the split community/discoverability issues that impact the average user as everyone was reading and posting to the same newsgroups but from their chosen NNTP server.
Let's have something like NNTP implemented in ActivityPub (is this possible? I'm not familiar enough...) where the news servers are decentralised and users pick whatever one they want but the newsgroups themselves are the same across all the servers.
Twitter used to have a vibrant ecosystem of clients, most of them working better than the official app both on web and mobile. Twitter was able to kill their third party app ecosystem with their paid API changes and lived to thrive as a company till recently.
The reality is, you need a good cohort of content and users to move who can sustain the content, moderation and discussion. Just moving Apollo users doesn't ensure that. There are other good third party clients like Relay etc as well
Even then, why not just turn the banners off on NSFW posts?
In general, all for-profit social media or similar operations will have the same fate. The term for this is "enshittification". While HN is owned by a company, it isn't being used as a profit generating service, even though it technically has some job ads, so it is (so far) immune from this.
We must find a solution to sustain non-profit user-generated content operations to continue enjoying the benefits of an open online community. Forums went of fashion as they required too much technical expertise to operate and to a lesser extent to use, so they got displaced by reddits and discords, both of these are distinctly worse from a data sovereignty and user freedom perspective. In the age of smartphones, density of information (esp. text) seems to be frowned upon.
I'm not sure what's the solution is. "Making your own platform" doesn't work because people's time is limited, and they inevitably gravitate toward the biggest platforms, taking all the attention and mindshare with them. Is federation the answer? Perhaps, as it seems to bring down the operation costs to a reasonable level, but it seems to pose other problems with content curation, which is a hard problem.
Most forum have gone into demise, unless they focus on some very small niche (so they're small already). People prefer apps, otherwise they forget about things unless they're enormous.
I’m talking about the case when the User wants origin A to render data origin B has, but origin B doesn’t want that. You’d expect the User Agent to act on the User’s behalf and hand B’s data to A after confirming with the User that is their intention.
But instead the User Agent totally disregards the User and exclusively listens to origin B. This prevents the User from rendering the data in the more accessible/secure/privacy-preserving/intuitive way that origin A would have provided.
Strange to see all the comments arguing that in fact the browser ought to be an Origin Agent.
I guess it is a combo of additive fake grassroots and bans.
It feels like, at some point, a point of view becomes law and all dissent disappears.
I mean three close friends in some anarchist 100-voters-in-total party don't agree as much as reddit users seems to do.
I said large, not huge :P
I'm afraid I don't want to dox myself so I can't post publicly stuff from my employer. And I don't really have time to do what ask and write it up in my free time.
I doubt something the size of reddit would run properly on Python, but I think both mine and the commenter I replied to had the point that most sites on the internet WOULD run fine without all the bloatware and overengineering complexity. Very very few sites have the traffic that reddit does. Most websites belong to the long tail, and for those almost any tech stack would work - so why choose a needlessly complex one?
No wonder, seeing what the political news are there at the last 3 years.
> Private property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy, with socialist perspectives making a hard distinction between the two. As a legal concept, private property is defined and enforced by a country's political system.
> The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy
That is a political statement, whereas what I described is a practical situation of life. Do you support the viewpoint that I replied to that it doesn't matter if someone owns something, even if they worked hard for it, that you should be able to come in and takeover because of discourse that happens there? If so we can disagree on that, there's no need to make it a wider political statement.
But that still makes the original commenters argument moot:
> Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, [...]
That speculation is not how things have been or were.
The others are just a-dime-a-dozen Reddit clients.
Twitter is similiar in that you’re self selecting who to follow, and who to engage with. Things you engage with have hashtags, have observable topics and categories that they generally post about, etc. If you’ve ever looked at the categories that you’re in after doing a Twitter data dump, you can see they know a _ton_ about you. What I don’t remember seeing in there is “confidence,” but it might just be that those numbers aren’t surfaced to users, or that it’s encoded in the ordering (and I don’t remember it).
The point is, Twitter and Reddit have largely the same types of signal that Facebook does, but certainly way less than Google. Facebook’s user engagement might be higher, but I’m willing to bet that the number of people using Facebook to follow their friends, and not random businesses and other accounts is greater, thus limiting confidence in understanding about someone’s preferences. What I mean is that my friends might never post about politics, and I might not follow political figures, or other talking heads, that suggest my affiliation…
In Google’s case, they drop a “pixel,” for tracking purposes, on 75% of the web (inflated estimate for effect), and analyze every accessible page on the internet with the goal of understanding what it says. As a result, they have far greater reach in what they can and do know about you…
A friend of mine is moving to Canada, another to Germany, both went to Reddit to ask for help, and what they got back was anti-immigration tropes of all kind (from "go away you cheap labour, you are stealing our jobs" to "go away you rich tech worker, you are gentrifying my town").
While social media are generally cesspools of psychological deragement, racism and xenophobia, I keep hearing people complaining about some undefined left wing bias because the occasional weirdo with pink hair complains about capitalism or fascism in r/weirdoswithpinkhair or r/randosthatcomplainaboutcapitalism.
I'm sure not even HN "does only that" and even that it does with a lot of help from caching, etc
Funny
One universe I could see is the browser allowing a user to grant cross origin cookies when wanted. Though even then a site B that really doesn’t want this can stick CSRF tokens in the right spots and that just falls apart immediately
I imagine you understand the security questions at play here right? Since a user going to origin A might not know what other origins that origin A wants to reach out to.
CSRF mitigations mean that origins could still block things off even without CORS, but it’s an interesting thought experiment
Any new user would just use the official client, but the fact that so many alternative ones exist and so many people use them is telling of the unusable state of their app.
I use reddit every day, only because I don't use the official app, because of that it's become my go-to site to look for things, even on a computer.
If I lose access to my 3P client, which is tens of times faster, not clunky, customized to my liking, has all the shit sub filtering set-up and is generally a joy to use ( mind you, it has ads too) I will simply not bother anymore.
So, people that use 3P apps usually engage more because otherwise they wouldn't bother, this change is going to royally piss off every single one of them. In the short term maybe some users are going to switch, but in the long run I think the platform is going to lose lots of people that actually engage in the community.
This feels the most fair to me honestly. Using RiF subverts reddit income by not showing ads. So just let me the user pay a bit to use third party apps. Considering how much time I spend on it a couple bucks should be reasonable.
It's pretty funny how these two quotes express similar sentiment (NIMBYism, in-group protectionism, deep-seated fear of disruption) yet are often placed on opposite ends of the spectrum (anti-gentrification vs. anti-immigration).
Also, it's federated. You don't have to get even close to a server with the kind of propaganda you dislike the most and just keep to your favourite propaganda bubble.
You can also just run your own server and forbid the "wrong" kind of propaganda, whilst allowing the "right" kind.
Lemmygrad is a server for Marxists. They say so on the topmost post when you open the website (https://lemmygrad.ml/post/668436).
Of course Lemmygrad is for marxists. That's my point.
The community and the eyeballs are what is valuable, and Reddit holds them captive not due to any incremental value they provide, but due to network effects. Lots of people or companies would immediately replace Reddit if the quality of the server or UX or UI was what mattered -- but cannot because the audience is captive.
Killing the apps represents a unique "digg moment" of pissing off users enough to bother migrating.
I'd be willing to shell out the bucks for Reddit Premium if that would let me keep using Apollo.
But my HN client cache the frontpage when you go through the articles so you have to manually press a button to refresh it once you want to see something new. Does the latest scoring from this minute actually matter? Similarly, there's little need to automatically refresh the comments if you go away from a thread and click back within one minute. Maybe you can implement another method for dealing with upvotes/downvotes so they don't require API requests.
It just seems crazy that the average person uses multiple hundreds of API requests per day.
Copying the Google+ model, nice. We all saw how very well that went.
And those NSFW posts are far from just porn. It's frequently news (especially related to war), the "vice" subreddits (cigars, guns), mental health subreddits, ect.
Also, 4x of Apollo Ultra is probably not enough. After the Appstore takes its cut and the dev pays himself, you're not left with enough money to pay for the API access of the power users you're now inevitably left with. Powerusers, who, again, can't access 40% of posts on your app.
I have to heavily disagree with this. Reddit content is way better in both quality and quantity. The only thing worse is maybe the Signal to noise ratio, and even that is questionable. For example, askHistorians is a gem. Many subreddits are very useful. Moreover, for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. Not once have I needed it to find useful content on hacker news.
Ask about anything remotely controversial, and you'll see how quickly it's an echo chamber.
4chan was horrible and excellent at the same time. A sea of garbage that was also full of gold.
Probably the only online community I ever enjoyed to be a part of. All else was shit.
Now, I'm not surprised to see _Twitter_ doing this, because it's just one of a laundry-list of ideas that Naughty Old Mr Car has to make Twitter worse; it really barely registers. But _Reddit_, I would have thought, would be a lot more conservative in the "massive dangerous change" department, particularly after what happened to Digg (and more generally the history of internet forums). I'd expect that there's a huge danger for them here that the big third party apps will simply endorse a Reddit clone.
My hatred for Reddit the platform only grew as time passed, to a point where I mostly dropped the site from my browsing habits a couple of years ago. I hope the recent changes bring an end to Reddit, the world will be better without it.
But my hatred for Reddit does not extend to RiF, much to the opposite. I hope whatever Reddit replacement spawns in the future has a RiF for it.
But I'm also much older now. I wondered if the community changed, or if I was the one that changed and can't appreciate it for what it is anymore. Maybe both I and the community changed in different directions.
I probably will never have an answer. But I still remember the old times there fondly.
In a sense, 4chan in the mid-2000's was probably my final experience with the old web, in a time before walled gardens, before social media trying to lock everyone in and tracking the shit out of everything to shove ads down the collective throat. A place still not neutered by contemporary political correctness and value systems. Full of extremely smart people and extremely dumb people in equal measure. It was maybe the ultimate form of the prior iteration of internet forums and irc chat rooms.
Nothing lasts forever, entropy dictates that on a long enough timeline all things become shit. Oh well.
Reddit, like Twitter, does not seem to understand what Facebook and Instagram already know: For many people, the APP -IS- the platform.
Pushshift has been shutdown by reddit earlier this year, so probably they are getting hammered by LLM folks trying to get the data now since they killed pushshift without understanding how it fit into the universe.
Reddit is completely stupid if they think people are going to pay for "enterprise API" access... pushshift existed because the API was trash and the only real option is to dump the entire dataset into something usable. The reason reddit's data was used so much is because there was an SQL API via pushshift and you could also download archives of the entire dataset at one go.
I took another look at RIF just in case my memory of it was out of date and the difference in quality between it and Apollo is massive. I’m doubling down on my original comment: Apollo is a truly special app and RIF (and likely others) are very generic clients.
I don't see any of the moves Reddit is making as unsustainable, they just have a lock on their niche. Sure Apollo could clone Reddit, but why continue to use their app that that point when it would be better to switch to the official app which will see maybe 100x+ more usage?
if you need relational modeling have people run it themselves on something like supabase
And I don't think a lot of that value has much to do with the direction Reddit has been going with its redesign. If they viewed their core product as creating high quality rich textual content for input into LLM, they would do many, many things differently and probably spend more time improving the moderator tools to improve curation.
They have an outsized influence as content sharers/creators rather than consumer, so annoying them is worse for reddit than it might appear.
The numbers they posted suggest they could still easily be in profit with these charges, they just wouldn’t be making 20m profit.
I think it's fair for the authors of these tools to do well. I encourage creators to monetize when they can. Just get the check up front so you can go create the next thing, because no matter what the acquirer says, you are unlikely to remain aligned.
Worth noting this model would introduces no new holes - everything I ask for is already possible when running a native application.
There are political undertones in nearly every subreddit. But depending on which sub you are visiting, you can be downvoted or even banned for not having the "accepted" viewpoint. There's no place to have balanced discussion anymore, and that's one of the things that used to make reddit enjoyable.
Creating more siloed echo chambers isn't a fix, it's the problem.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...
I’ve been on Reddit since the early days, and I think the thing that keeps me going back is habit more than enjoyment these days.
Comment threads for any even moderately larger sub have turned into cesspools of sniping ad hominem attacks and every form of fallacious argument under the sun.
And that same mindset is slowly creeping into the smaller niches that are the primary reasons I go there. This growing ooze invariably puts me in a worse state of mind, and I tried deleting the Apollo app just a few days ago to see how it impacts my mental health.
This API nonsense will easily make this a permanent experiment at this point.
It’s sad, but seemingly inevitable.
The subscription currently costs $0.99/month or $10/year. With the new API pricing, he’d have to pay around $2.50-$5 per month per user. This means not only would the subscription have to become non-optional, but that he’d probably have to bump its price to $5/mo to just have API and server costs covered. Factor in super heavy users, the App Store cut, and a bit of margin to live off of and you’re looking at $7-$10/mo.
A few users will pay this much but I’d bet that most will not. It’s as much as a streaming service costs for a free service. The user falloff would be immense, and this is exactly Reddit’s goal: they want to herd users into its official app and site where they can be subjected to ads, data harvesting, algorithmic feeds, and incessant A/B testing to juice “engagement”. Whether that happens by way of third party app devs throwing in the towel or from users being priced out of using them matters not.
I don’t want to sound dramatic, but the official Reddit app works just fine and is much more popular than any third party client in terms of usage.
Is $6 million a reasonable amount instead of $20 million?
And I recall in my case there is not a big exodus but people slowly moved over with die-hard fans on both sides.
As a comparison, with 20MM the devs can probably build the new thing, serve media over CDNs and out-SEO reddit with some to spare.
I think moot and hiroyuki did try to monetize 4chan but with mixed success. See the 4chan pass and splitting of the SFW boards into a separate domain.
It's a lot of work but for a small fraction of 20m a year you can hire a team who only work on that.
Didn't Digg primarily die from a redesign? Why has the web become so forgiving these days? People don't seem to give a shit anymore. "Oh OK, I'll use the official reddit app filled with ads, OK I will watch your 30 second pre-roll. OK I will give you may data for free". /s
For the longest time Reddit was predominantly the latter group of power users but in recent years Reddit has had a mass influx of the former casual group of users. I think the bet that Reddit is making is that the latter group is much smaller than the former and cutting off API access won't make a significant difference. But if they are wrong, this could well be the end of Reddit, going just like Digg went. It will likely still exist, but as a shell of it's former self.
Not everyone is going to pay, and that’s perfectly fine too. But the pricing is not as onerous as people are making it out to be.
> introduces no new holes - everything I ask for is already possible when running a native application.
A native application involves downloading a binary and installing it on your machine. Those involve a higher degree of trust than, say, clicking on a random URL. "I will read this person's blog" vs "I will download a binary to read this preson's blog" are acts with different trust requirements. At least for most people.
I suppose in a somewhat ironic way the iOS sandbox makes me feel more comfortable downloading random native apps but it probably really shouldn't! The OS is good about isolating cookie access for exactly the sort of things you're talking about (the prompt is like "this app wants to access your data for website.com)), but I should definitely be careful
> Selig estimates it would cost $20 million a year to keep Apollo running.
No, not a bill.
Arstechnica is getting worse every year with these type of titles.
Why not? If billions of people can be in a religion then surely millions can be in a subreddit with some religion-like properties.
I think there is probably not a clear and useful line between manipulation and moderation. There's no neutral moderation, all mod policies and actions are towards a certain goal & vision for how the community should be. I'm not sure what fake grassroots would be but I think the upvotes and awards account for that: people know what will be rewarded and the rewards turn posting into a performance.
Anyway I'm going to point this out again because it's useful and interesting: HN behaves in these same ways to about the same degree as any large sub does. The alignment on etiquette, culture, accepted belief and punishment for deviation from it is very strong here. This indicates to me that this is somehow an emergent characteristic of large self-selecting online communities.
>And that same mindset is slowly creeping into the smaller niches that are the primary reasons I go there. This growing ooze invariably puts me in a worse state of mind
These and other glaring flaws of Reddit, tracing the degradation of the site's user experience in recent years is the premise of the book "You Should Quit Reddit." It's a self-published book that's been discussed several times on Reddit's /r/NoSurf community. I found it intelligently written and sourced, as the author described his same experience of addiction to Reddit, going back to the site out of habit despite not enjoying it.
I was a daily Redditor since the early days and haven't been on the site in a month. I blocked all DNS requests to Reddit from resolving to break the habit of going on the site. Been lurking here instead and find this place more pleasant and reminiscent of Reddit's early days.
Oh is this why all the comment undelete websites broke?
I tried doing something like this for scraping corporate profiles. It's a lot harder than it seems. Most websites try to block bots that do this kind of scraping (unless you're Google/Facebook/etc...), so you end up having to setup a boatload of VPNs to make it seem like the bot is coming from multiple sources, but the VPNs end up being very unreliable and they too get banned as well.
For my own small scale it did manage to work but it was very challenging. I'd imagine doing it at the scale of Apollo would be all but impossible to get away with.
Reddit did not choose to compel ad display in their agreement update. I expect this is because it conflicts with getting paid by search engines and AI training corporations.
Discord blows for asynchronous conversations. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the replacement.
I joke that if this guy (pointing at myself) is doing your thing, it's probably jumped the shark. What does it mean when this guy has already grown tired of your platform?
What you have to do is have the app do it directly. This is more work if you have to do it in the app but it makes life for reddit a living hell as they can not just filter high requests nunbers as the traffic is coming from individuals.
I can’t imagine this killing reddit, not at all, but I think the power users and moderators are important to what makes reddit reddit and that without them the quality will decline quite a lot.
Apollo will be charged $2.50 per user per month to access the Reddit API, for a total of $1.7 million dollars the first month the bill is due; so, Apollo has 0.68 million users.
If we estimate that 30% of Apollo users will still be using the app after a period of time, then:
If users average one year of usage, Apollo must charge a fixed purchase price at least $2.50 * 12 = $30 plus overhead, in order to stay afloat without a subscription.
If users average three years of usage, Apollo must charge $90.
I have been using Apollo for five years, so I would expect to see Apollo charge $150 under your pricing model.
I consider Apollo to be worth $150, but only because I’ve been using it for five years. Their app would not be viable in the marketplace if it charged up front for two or more years of API usage.
Finally, I’ve been using Reddit for fourteen years, so if I continue using Apollo past my fifth year, the developer will lose $30/year on me. So, the developer will need to implement a shell game scheme, where new signups are charged an extra overhead on their $30/year flat fee to cover the usage costs of the users who are beyond their fifth year, which means that prices will be adjusted upwards each year for new users.
Flat app pricing is not a viable pricing model for Reddit’s usage-based API billing of Apollo users, resembles a pyramid scheme when modeled to include long-term existing users, and drives annual price increases leading to a collapse in user signups and the death of Apollo.
If your math shows otherwise, in some way that demonstrates how an Apollo flat fee model can pay for usage-based billing for as many years as the app continues operating, please share your work.
"We don’t allow apps that interfere with […] or access in an unauthorized manner […] other […] servers, networks, application programming interfaces (APIs), or services, including but not limited to other apps on the device, any Google service, or an authorized carrier’s network."
"Examples of common violations: […] Apps that access or use a service or API in a manner that violates its terms of service."
$2.50/user/month for Apollo usage is considerably less than the $6/user/month charged by Reddit to users directly for an ad-free website experience.
Is $2.50/month an unreasonable price for an ad-free Reddit experience? If that’s how much Reddit is being paid for advertising per Reddit user, then how many Reddit users will voluntarily pay that to use ad-free third-party apps?
This is more likely to kill Reddit Premium, than to kill paid third-party apps. Apollo is a better experience than Reddit Premium, and at a theoretical $2.50/month versus the known $6/month, would save me $42/year over Reddit premium. Sign me up.
People gravitate towards third party apps because they have less ads, and because since they don't mine for data as much as the official app the user experience is more like "classic" Reddit and less like an algorithmic content pipe alla TikTok.
Most of the things that make the official app shit are the things that make it profitable - it just needs to avoid being so shitty as to alienate too many users.
Personally I rarely use Reddit in a browser and if 3rd party apps were to go away that would be the end of Reddit for me.
I would also argue that accessing a website is not an API or an undocumented feature but a public entity. Who decides how a browser is supposed to display a website? It's up to the browser maker not some app store review process. That is why we have moz- CSS and apple meta tags.
Everyone references their Tweet from years ago of like "love is sharing passwords" and bitching about how Netflix has changed & become greedy.
But those people are thinking big enough; Netflix has changed this way because back then, they didn't really have any competition in the space. And now _everyone_ has to have their own fucking streaming platform, so of course Netflix is gonna change policy.
I'm not defending Netflix here, but what I am saying is that people are doing the shortsighted animal thing and bitching about Netflix. Really they should be bitching about all streaming companies and requesting that our democratic governments enact policies that force companies and corporations to be consumer friendly. All of them. Tax the rich. All of them.
Then rotate between accounts and put a random time between requests. Restrict certain accounts to browse within certain hours/timezones. Load pages as usual and just scrape data from the page rather than via api.
However, I believe in a company's right to charge whatever they want for their services. But I also believe in the right for people to choose not to use that service and for freer alternatives to spring up.
Just like Tumblr, Reddit seem intent on killing themselves, although these days I'm not so sure. When Elon took over Twitter everyone was saying that all the users would leave and it would die. This is not the case, human nature means that people seek familiarity and will cling on, hmm.
According to the Apollo dev, the average user would cost $2.50/month in API fees. I imagine power users would be substantially more costly, so $5/month would not cover the API + apple tax for just themselves, let alone supporting the regular users.
Reddit could replace half of the links with gruesome ISIS beheading videos and people would probably just keep scrolling. Only something like a third of all web users even have an ad blocker.
They would instead rather charge far more money for data access for things like AI training etc, Twitter have also made similar changes to their own API to prioritize high bills for AI training use cases, not third party clients. That's at least how I see this change. The high pricing for these customers also removes the need to worry about the ad tech situation as is the case in the third party clients - you can just offer them an ad free feed at these prices for the training requirements.
I suspect the internal at Reddit desire to have less third party clients may well predate the AI discussion too, given almost all companies in this position eventually want to wind down those clients as history has shown again and again, for all of the reasons discussed in this thread.
The difference is really that Reddit was relatively late in a concerted effort to monetize.
But it winds up at the same place regardless.
If their moderation/administration policies didn't create an exodus, killing off third-party reader apps will definitely not create an exodus.
Jesus christ. Actual tankies.
That would absolutely increase engagement.
>Only something like a third of all web users even have an ad blocker.
That's actually way higher than I thought...
But what no one thinks about is how much the productivity we lose from wasting time on Reddit is costing us. If I cut out my Reddit use (while just at work), and replaced that with actual work.... I could easily make $3,000 to $4,000 dollars more a year.
And I am not particularly well paid. I don't make 6 figures, so that amount of money is a pretty huge deal for me.
But still our brains think in terms more like.... well I'd pay $25 for this one time, but I won't pay $5 per month because that's just TOO MUCH.
What makes Apollo a "truly special app?" in your opinion?
I think it's true that Reddit leans more towards supporting internet privacy initiatives, net neutrality, etc. whereas facebook users often have no awareness of these issues in the first place.
But at the same time, no requirement to associate with a real-world identity means there are more sockpuppet accounts, more astroturfing, etc.
Twitter and Reddit tech neighborhoods have good reputations.
More specifically, just a few things: 1) lovely UI design with proper adherence to iOS human interface guidelines, 2) useful customization, 3) flawless performance throughout, 4) gesture support which translates into being able to sift through a lot of content and conversations, 5) complex native (performant!) in-app support for many media types hosted on all types of 3rd party sites, 6) and just all around thoughtful and thorough support for the entire Reddit platform and its features.
All of this executed extremely well by just one person. Frankly, an inspiration and should be championed here.
Unless you enjoy ads. I mean occasionally they are funny.
I have no idea what is out there as an alternative at this point, there just seems to be too much chaff everywhere.
I understand what you're saying, but I think this is the key to my point:
> It would be a user experience that reddit could make as terrible as they wanted.
It's an unfair cat and mouse game. Yes, effort could be made to fix it each time, but, if reddit chose, they could force everyone into the "most users" group, when the only app works for 5 minutes a day, and people get bored, because they decided to randomize page elements.
Personally I would have made the process more gradual but who knows, maybe they're running out of runway, or their research gives them confidence that a sufficient number of (profitable) users will stick around.
This is all just armchair conjecture but I suspect that either they'll be fine or that they're screwed regardless -- either way I doubt this decision will sink them.
/b/ = random /trv/ = travel /pol/ = politically incorrect /gif/ = .gif and .webm files /wsg/ = the work safe version of /gif/ (its toned down but still not actually safe for work)
I don't recall seeing that chart - if anyone can link me to it I'd be interested in taking a look.
This thread feels full of vague insinuations that some powerful political lobby is paying to use Reddit to manipulate opinions or something but no actual detail.
This is already the case. See the oceans of crap SEO optimized "food recipe sites". It's unbearable.
So sad that, BBC back in 199ps and 2000s, there were so many random sites to visit with interesting things. Search engines were of actual use.
Now, it's basically facebook, reddit, pinterest, instagram, stackoverflow , and a couple of counted others, depending on what you like. And EVERYTHING is monetized.
The WWW of today is terrible.
Now
Modding is about to get a lot harder.
115 ru
129 de
215 tr
380 nsfw
765 ja
932 freeculture
985 request
1487 joel
1784 lipstick.com
2022 features
4208 science
31266 programming
322776 reddit.com
> "One thing I've noticed is that the bulk of reddit's content is usually IT-related or at least culturally related, while digg is more generalized in its content (perhaps this is a product of time?). My point is that it seems to me that the fact that the "who" uses the site has a greater influence on usability than "how" the site is used." -
> "In the beginning, digg was pretty much all tech-related links, and whenever someone posted anything else you'd get a flurry of "this is a tech news site"-type comments. As the userbase grows and you get a more diverse demographic using the site, it becomes less "elite" and expands into other areas."
But holy hell, you must have spent exactly 0 time with Android clients, or just don't enjoy Android apps in general, cause I'd easily put Sync and Boost on equal footing as Apollo. Infinity is extremely solid as well.
If instead you'd been invited in - "come along, bring your club members, you don't need to pay for your own hall anymore, use my house, free signup, moderate your own room, use it without paying, bring your friends" and then when your old meeting place had shutdown and been abandoned and all your leaflets and documentation and inertia had settled on the new location, then stavrianos turned on you and said "now you're all used to coming here, I need to pay off my investors who have been funding this all along, that'll be $10Bn valuation please - and don't bring your friends unless they can pay a few million a month. Or you could just leave, after I've borrowed a lot of money and arranged things to make it so you can't easily do that".
A server with nothing on it is worse than taking up space, it's an investment of energy and CO2 release to make it and ship it around the world, and if it's powered on then it's taking electricity probably from fossil fuels and turning it into waste heat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_weed
[2] https://gardenerspath.com/plants/herbs/edible-medicinal-weed...
As to making fun of someone willing to pay to support a given system, I'm not sure that's at all productive. At that point, should probably not even be using said system in the first place. That doesn't mean I agree with every decision, or every direction, but do find it's a bit better than before overall.
"Take my word for it, I'm just superior" the comment, which would be as fitting on r/SneerClub today SlashDot 15 years ago or Usenet 30 years ago as a dismissive geek putdown-cum-status grab, could have been summarised as.
(I have also deleted Boost many times to control my usage.)
Because this isn't what they did, I suspect third-party apps are just collateral damage in a policy aimed at gating access to reddit content: from LLM developers, AI researchers, and anybody who can derive value from it.
I've literally never seen this, but I regularly see upperclass people misrepresent themselves as middleclass.
A) there is demand for functionality that depends on semi-real-time data, e.g. a prompt like “explain {recent_trending_topic} to me and describe its evolution” where the return could be useful in various contexts;
B) the degradation of search experience and the explosion of chat interfaces seem to indicate “the future of search is chat” and the number of Google searches prefixed or suffixed with “Reddit” make it obvious that LLM-powered chat models with search functionality will want to query Reddit extensively, and in the example prompt above, the tree of queries generated to fulfill a single prompt could be sizeable;
C) improvements to fine-tuning pipelines make it more and more feasible to use real-time data in the context of LLMs, such as a “trending summary” function that could cache many potentially related queries from Reddit, Twitter, etc and use them to fine-tune a model which would serve a response to my example prompt
Of course the money is all being spaffed for nothing. It doesn’t take a degree in applied ecosystem analysis from Aberyswyth Technical College to figure out that Coke spending 50m on a christmas campaign doesn’t sell anymore Coke.
I took a look at Boost and it's really nice! Looks extremely similar to Apollo to the point that I think they may have just duplicated the Apollo app on Android and this is not a bad thing at all. I was considering doing the same for HN.
Tildes is so profoundly unlike Google+ in so many levels I can only assume you never even opened their website.
Wouldn't network effects be the obvious null hypothesis, before we start speculating about human nature?
TBH, 4chan these days are nowhere near the days when it was known as the boogieman of the internet. Still stuck with language that wouldn't last 10 seconds on Twitter or even Reddit, but we're not talking about a doxxing/harassment hub anymore. Or at least, no more a hub for that than Twitter/Reddit.
I do it more out of necessity than because reddit is a good site. You get into a niche enough subject and your choice is either a small subreddit or delving into the artifacts of the early internet like GameFaqs, Deviant Art, or some new site forums (the ones that still exist). I Still need to take a grain of salt and check if the redditor isn't blowing hot air or isn't on some unhinged rant.
HN is great but focused on very specific, technical contetnt. Not gonna be much oppurtunity to talk about media or craft hobbies here.
Pretty much all alternatives I looked at lacked community. Not expecting reddit numbers, but even a threshold as simple as "more than 5 posts/20 comments a day" was a huge hurdle here. Social media is just so centralized now.
main difference ofc is that few pay for a private server, despite contributing to it. Parks are paid for by taxes, and sometimes voted upon by citizens to allocate budgets for. But a park with no visitors is similar to a forum with no visitors.
And for the longest time, many subs based their flairs around the NSFW tag combined with some CSS hacks, especially for subs based around TV shows wanting to add spoiler warnings. Some subs never bothered to update to the new system and still use this.