* The website to be free
* The API to be cheap
* The ability to use a 3rd party app that does not track, advertise, or monetize you in any way
* VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI
Good luck kids
If you do ask for a few dollars a month you have to provide a ton of perceived value. That's despite the fact that they would spend it on snacks without hesitation.
> VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI
None of this needs to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Partly it's because Reddit has squandered its users' goodwill. I'd be willing to pay for Reddit if it was clear Reddit was going to work in my favor. Since right now it's doing its best to run off the mobile app I'm using, why on earth would I do that?
The average "Reddit" business is pretty odd; they want:
* Paying subscribers _and_ advertising revenue
* Free content: posts & comments
* Free moderation: voting & ToS enforcement
* The ability to monopolize said content
* Contributors to continue to pour millions of man-hours to make content for the site and never ask for anything like ad-free viewing, an enjoyable user-experience, tooling, etc.
Social platforms present a difficult balance between the users, contributors, moderators, and business - all within a very hostile internet (in terms of security, spam, etc).
For payment to happen, users do demand significant value to be parted from their $. In Reddit's case, the 3rd party apps are strongly desired because the 1st party app does not meet their needs (users _pay_ for these apps!). Reddit doesn't want to compete on UX, as they're demonstrably bad at it; partially due to lack of skill and due to mismatched incentives.
It seems like they incorrectly assume that they own the community, rather than the other way around. Reddit's primary value is in the content they are _given_ in exchange for hosting & tools - both of which are have significant downward cost pressure (which _should_ trend towards free, given a large enough community).
Reddit is trying to switch their customers from users to advertisers in order to make a profit, which is difficult after years of _generally_ serving users. It is bait and switch at it's finest and most egregious.
If a lone dev would have made an app like Apollo for FB, they would be under 10,000 pages of litigation the next day
People don't use the FB app because its great. They would love a non-tracking version of the same service. It's just not allowed
I disagree on this point - I'm pretty sure all the big 3rd party apps at least have ads. The problem is fundamentally just that the 3rd party apps are a lot better than the official app, and have been for some time. If Reddit had made the official app better (which they've had _years_ to do) then significantly less people would care about any of this.
They also could have gone the Spotify route, which I think would have gone over significantly better - Keep the API as-is, but require a paid premium account login to use it. Functionally it's not even really a difference, but it means Reddit deals with all the details rather than the 3rd party apps. However, functionally the goal was to simply price the 3rd party apps out of existence, so that's probably why they didn't do this.
It's also pretty clear from the response that they never thought this through, which is hard to believe. They had to have it pointed out to them that tons of stuff currently uses the API which has no replacement, you'd think they'd have reviewed what currently uses the API before drastically changing it. Reddit has gotten significant value for free by having people write code against their API, that's code they didn't need to write themselves.
As patience of creators and curators begin to run more thin, today's information society will split into tiers of those who pay and get good information vs those who demand free and will splash around in the filth of the free information sewers. The filth being ads, spyware, malware, low quality content, spiritually harmful content, government propaganda and worse.
... the product that exists.
> VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI
VCs are free to ask for an ROI.
They are not owed an ROI.
Only the kids think they are. Especially childish people who think people are owed money for a crap product just because they put money into a business before where the goal was growth, not necessarily profitability.
I use(d) Relay for Redit, paid a small ($5?, maybe) one time fee for the "Premium" version a few years ago and have never see an ad. You are correct in the sense that if you use the free version of Relay (and possibly others), you would have ads from the app, not Reddit, but if you're willing to pay a small amount, you can get rid of them.
Where have you seen somebody say that they wouldn’t post without venture funding for a given platform?
I'm not sure it would work, there are just so many challenges, over and beyond the initial bootstrapping.
But at the end of the day the I am sure that for a large portion of people complaining they spent the majority of their video watching time watching YouTube. If it's not worth it to you to pay the equivalent of a big mac meal month to get rid of ads that's fine but don't act all morally superior to those that do.
Does reddit really need, hr, middle managers, sales, marketing, design teams. It wouldn't if it had a focused goal. Now it has all sorts of crap and extra features to try be profitable.
(And, when Reddit was launched it was the era of the single core Pentium 4; storage and compute and bandwidth were expensive. Now they aren't. Store Reddit comments in a compressed file, they fit on a $50 SSD).
Do they? I sure don't. In fact VC involvement is just about the last thing I want out of anything I consider critical infrastructure...
You already did open up your content, but personally I'd lead with that. Make lurking free and any interaction part of the subscription. This would include posting content, as it does remove the most blatant spam and gaming of the system.
Having said that, while I do think it is commendable that you want to reward the people that provide content, I am not sure if you should do so based on votes. Because that will just make it so people will try to game the system with clickbait and fluff content.
As we are on HN anyway:
"The Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it."
Source: Article by Paul Graham (the guy that started HN and funded reddit way back in the day) http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html.
What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:
1. An article - takes a few minutes to judge. 2. An image - takes a few seconds to judge.
So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E en F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them so they gather votes faster.
Some things out the top of my head you can do to mitigate this are:
- Don't tie it to voting, make it a different action people have to explicitly give. Basically reddit gold, but then still with the monetary reward tied to it. - In addition to that, don't make it an infinite resource people but a monthly budget people can spend (this might already be the case? I didn't check too closely) - Technically a bit more challenging, but if you could tie it to engagement time in addition to votes it would mitigate the fluff content issue somewhat. Some metrics you might be able to use are time spend in comments, time between clicking on an outbound link and voting (don't count votes with no outbound interaction either), etc.
As a seperate thought, I am not sure if there are liability issues when you reward posted content with money. Not all posted content will be owned by the person posting it, but they are effectively being paid for it. So that might make you as a platform more liable for copyright claims and such. Not a lawyer though, just something I thought of.