Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable
It’s their own fault. They didn’t have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn’t have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.
They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.
I’m really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants
There’s this toxic idea in the business world, that in order to be successful you can’t just make money and be profitable, but your profits have to keep increasing year after year. This kind of runaway, cancerous growth is poison to the country and the world.
The founders want to be billionaires, as if being a multimillionaire would not be enough.
This is like if a Grocery chain said that they need to stop selling Lemons to little girls because the lemonade stands were profitable and they aren’t. The scale of the two businesses is not the same… none of these apps have millions of dollars in VC funds or thousands of employees.
But Reddit doesn’t need these thousands of employees, they’re already getting the brunt of the workforce for free (the mods). Like the other guy said, one hundred engineers to manage the platform, 100 customer service to help the mods/do admin and off you go, you just need a few unobtrusive ads to finance that. But that’s way too open and won’t turn you into a billion dollar business nor get you any love from advertisers or VCs, let alone going IPO, so we are where we are.
Agreed. What are all their employees doing? Is reddit basically an adult daycare?
As someone who’s 4 weeks into new job with very unclear duties, there’s definitely a point where a company loses a lot of efficiency because there’s too many people who don’t seem to do much for the company, even those who want to do more for the company.
On the upside its a very low stress job with very good pay and benefits, plus I’m getting to do things like leading trainings that I might not otherwise get to do at this stage of my career
and im willing to pay for API access. If Reddit started charging me a buck or two i would be ok with that. I recognize that servers are not free, and their profit has to come from somewhere.
But charging app devs $20,000,000 a year is NOT the solution.
I would have accepted it… Not anymore. They burned this bridge.
And the Apollo dev said there were things they could have done, but the combination of 30 days notice, and the number of subscribers Apollo had who had prepaid for a year, (at a much lower price) the was no way to make that work. Plus Reddit had promised them no API changes just a few months ago.
They also could have saved money by remaining a link aggregator/discussion board instead of deciding to host media as well. Any surge in costs is their own fault.
They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them.
THIS!
Here’s your API passkey. If we catch your app not displaying ads, your passkey be invalidated.
Bobs your uncle, all the browser apps are now delivering your ads.
If they were worried about money, then they should have remained a link aggregation/discussion board site instead of hosting media themselves.
I’ve seen people saying “Lemmy can never replace reddit because the instances won’t be able to afford to host video!” …My dudes, I have never once asked my forum / social media site to host videos.
This is the big issue with growth investment or whatever the hell its called. Instead of being happy with a steady revenue, big companies have to always grow until they become completely unsustainable.
It blows my mind that Reddit can look at 90% of its communities going dark in some way and think, “yeah, this is fine.”
EDIT (AGAIN): Thank you all for the comments on total subs. It’s still clearly not 90%, but it still appears to be a significant portion of the active Reddit community. For the interested, check out the comments below for stats. :)
It might be as Louis Rossmann said, it was a mistake to say "we’re going black for two days. They should’ve just says “were going black until you cange the rules again”.
Abstaining for two days is enough to break a habbit.
Reddit’s traffic might not recover for a while.
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Of course it’s up to the user to take action and abstain but if I open Reddit I see posts and can mostly scroll through my feed like it’s any other day. If I wouldn’t have known subreddits went private (and they didn’t sticky a message) I might have not even noticed since I’ll just see posts from subreddits who don’t participate instead. The power that makes Reddit so good is working against the community effort right now.
The first thing I did this morning was open BaconReader from my homescreen before realizing what day it was. I replaced BaconReader with Jerboa to try and break the habit. It’s not easy and I think Reddit knows it.
Is this for real? I wonder if different people’s r/all look different. Mine is a ghost land. I would know something is up instantly. There’s like 20 posts on my front page with 0 up votes from random ass subreddits I’ve never heard of. The content of the posts on the front page is wildly different than normal too.
I never use r/all. But I just checked and most of the top posts I saw yesterday seemed to be there still, so maybe there’s indeed not much going on.
What is Jerboa, if you’ll excuse my ignorance?
It’s the Android app for Lemmy
Lots are just going dark indefinitely so hopefully it hurts them. I went to look on there this morning and their server response is worse than Lemmy atm so I dunno what’s going on.
Loading full web pages takes more server processing power than API access.
This is browser and RIF just seems weird because blackout should mean less user load.
A lot of subs did that , im sure reddit worked do make it finite .
There are, apparently, 2.8 million subreddits. About 8,000 are dark, meaning that’s just over one quarter of one percent of subreddits. Even with some of the largest subs participating, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is no massive dip in traffic. There are enough subs still open with enough mass appeal that most people will just look at some other subs for a few days. And I’ll be honest, even though I’ve made an account both here and on kbin, I know I’ll still use old.reddit (with RES and an adblocker at least) most of the time, simply because I doubt any of the subs I actively look at will do any meaningful migration that would lead to a similar level of discussion.
Hmm, 2.8 million subreddits, but how many are ghost towns? I wonder if anyone has a measurement in terms of monthly active users or something along those lines.
Of all the subs I was subscribed to, there were I want to say only about 10 that didn’t take part in the blackout. I unsubscribed to all of them. I am now subscribed to only subs that either took part in the blackout, or in one case one that opted to remain public (due to the nature of its contents) but is blocking all submissions for the next couple days.
For me, once RIF stops working, reddit will be dead to me. I will never install their official app, and 99% of the time I’m on reddit is on mobile. I have no doubt that old reddits days are numbered as well and that was the remaining 1%.
Not for long you won’t. RES and old.reddit are on the chopping block too.
IDK, he said in the AMA that old reddit isn’t going anywhere, and even if he’s lying I don’t think he would immediately do a 180 and kill it. The way I see it, it will probably be around for the foreseeable future.
He was just bullshitting about API changes in April, he’s absolutely lying about old.
Well if that ends up being the case, then I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
Reading comment above yours i dont think the 2.8million is correct and it also states that there are only 100,000 subreddits with over 125 subscribers and only 34,000 with more tham 1000 subs. Of the roughly 8000 subreddits that went dark there are someof the biggests subscriber counts woth some having millions of subscribers. I think based on that that its actually quite a hefty number.
It’s also worth noting that many of those massive subs, especially the default subs, have lots of overlap in subscribers. r/funny with 50 million and r/aww with 30 million does not necessarily equal 80 million people because there are millions, probably even tens of millions, of people who are subbed to both.
Wait WHAT.
Yeah, it’s kinda crazy. I support the blackout but deep down I know nothing of substance will come of it. Their dip in traffic is probably not much worse than when a major city loses power.
I wouldn’t say nothing. I found this site.
There are absolutely not 2.8 million active subreddits. I just spent like an hour trying to find data on this. Nobody cites their sources. I used a dump of subreddit statistics from 2018, when there were just over a million subreddits. (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/comments/8gzmmv/i_created_a_better_csv_textspreadsheet_list_of/)
There were ~34,000 subreddits with more than a 1000 subscribers. And 100,000 subreddits with more than 125 subscribers.
Looking at https://subredditstats.com/ the top 5000 subreddits make up about 30% (based on an estimated 840,000 posts a day by some reddit user on a subreddit that’s currently dark so I can’t give a good link) of the daily posts and surely far more than 30% of the daily traffic.
This makes sense to me. I was wondering how many were active, engaged communities and how many were shells or ghost towns.
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Why would anyone even want the job as a moderator on a dying site that’s going to be filled with trolls and spam? Heck, you’d be better-off just getting a job at McDonalds. At least that pays.
Indeed - I think they’ll manage to find mods but the quality is certainly going to leave something to be desired.
I agree that coming on as a mod would be undesirable in this climate, but I do think a lot of us as part of the protest have a bit of a blind spot. Reddit may be hurt from this, and they may slowly start losing users, especially if Lemmy or another good alternative start taking off, but let’s be a little realistic here. Lemmy has a total user base of around 112,000 people as of yesterday, though I’m sure a fair few of these accounts are the same person (I have 3 Lemmy accounts on three instances). Reddit has over 50 million daily users. (Lemmy’s active monthly user count is around 15,000 right now). Reddit’s monthly user count is 1.6 BILLION. If Reddit is ‘dying’, Lemmy has been dead and buried. (Yes, I know one is growing and one is shrinking this week, but it’s a little naive to think that will definitely stay that way.)
Could Reddit eventually die and an alternative rise in its place? Certainly, but it’s going to be a couple years off.
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That’s what Huffman was saying BEFORE the blackout. Now that 8476/8838 subreddits are currently dark, I wonder what he would say now? I don’t really see how Reddit recovers from this. It’s sad because I loved it and there’s nothing else like it (yet), but there would need to be some major changes taking place before a lot of people consider venturing back.
Guess I’m sticking with Lemmy, then.
This is the way
This is the way
It’s not that you’re charging for API access; it’s that you’re charging US pharmaceutical industry pricing levels ($12,000 for something that should realistically be $200) and then only giving devs such a short time to implement changes. This was designed to kill 3PApps outright and everyone can see it. What an ass.
That part. No one is saying don’t charge but literally no one can afford to fork over that kind of money. Christian crunched the number to run Apollo for a year and it came out to approximately $20M. Twenty million freaking dollars. How is this reasonable?
I’m so tired of unchecked greed. It ruins everything. US Pharma is a great comparison.
Main reason why I’m gonna try and stick it out with Lemmy.
Hard to corporate greed a decentralised system :D
This! I’m happy to pay more for my Apollo Ultra Subscribtion, but their prices aren’t based in reality, they have the only purpose of driving 3rd Party Apps out of business. And then they also wanna limit NSFW content to the official App and nothing else, that’s affecting a lot of Subs I’m in (a ton more if I count my throwaway porn account) It’s just ridiculous.
Pissing on 3PAs and saying “it’s raining only on reddit”
Cool beans. Thanks spez, for introducing me to lemmy.
Well Steve, it’s not profitable for me to be a moderator for free either. Feel free to let me know how profitable you think you’ll be after hiring enough staff to replace all the mods that’ll be leaving.
Since I don’t see a link to it in the discussion, here’s an internal email from yesterday that has made its way to the Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman
RIP Reddit! This was all I needed to see to delete my reddit shortcuts from my phone and computer. let’s gooooo lemmy!
Same. Dude is acting like a spoiled brat digging his heels in when everyone is telling him he’s making a huge mistake. It would be like the captain of the Titanic seeing the iceberg and thinking “It’ll move”.
I think for me it was just the one last thing that pushed me over the edge. The content was starting to get meh and the bots were 👎
Like I said a few other places, even if Lemmy only grows to be 1% of the size, I honestly like the small community vibe of it more than Reddit. More direct interactions.
I’m hesitant to remove my Reddit bookmark. Too many good memories.
Might just burry it deep in my bookmarks
same here, the only reason I haven’t completely deleted my reddit account is because I still wanna sell some stuff there. Other than that, I’m not planning on using it anymore
There is literally no new information in this article and the title implies that it is in response to the acutal blackout, and not the threat of one. Bad article.
Thanks for saving my time
Yeah, this is just clickbait.
They really should have just found out what the 3rd party apps -COULD PAY-. If it covered the cost of their usage and there was some profit on the top, it would at least bring in some money. Based on what I read by the Apollo dev, there was back and forth communication about pricing for a while until he broke the news.
It astounds me that they chose to cut them off entirely by offering impossible pricing. Isn’t some money better than no money?
It’s because the planned IPO. Allowing third party apps, that are better designed, show no ads and don’t collect the same amount of telemetry data (seriously the official app spies constantly for user data), doesn’t look good in the eyes of potential investors.
Also, the API feed doesn’t push ads, so 3rd party ads don’t have anything to show. Reddit should have redesigned their API so ads could get pushed out.
The idea was to kill 3rd party apps, duh.
Idk I use relay and he thinks he can do it for 3 dollars a month, but that’s still giving into reddit. I’d rather then switch and start making Lemmy apps, or adapt their app over, might be unreasonable but just a thought
3 dollars a month for a lesser experience, mind. What with reddit stopping access to NSFW/explicit stuff via non-official apps.
But honestly, even if my app of choice - Sync - could do it, I’m not about to pay a corporation for content generated for free by us. The whole thing stinks of the slow slide of social media into the gutter. Happened with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit is no different.
Federated social media might take a little while to take off, but it will be so much less toxic and much more enjoyable without the ever expanding need of a corporation to deliver more and more profit at the expense of the user.
I’m not about to pay a corporation for content generated for free by us
That’s actually a good point. I don’t mind paying for access to an app, since it costs money to maintain, but our posts draw people into the site to read advice, news, and funny stuff. If Reddit is going full-monetization, there should at least be some payment for… upvotes? Views?
Not really a good point. Servers, bandwidth and employees cost money. Even if content is generated for free, those things cost money. A reasonable price is totally fair for an ad-free experience.
This. For those that understand that standing up the infrastructure costs money, I don’t think paying a reasonable price would be out of the realm. Even the Apollo dev was stating that API should not be free, but reasonable.
I feel like there’s a weird disconnect in the way that a lot of people perceive physical and digital infrastructure.
For something like a road, it’s natural to assume that maintaining it costs money - after all, you can see the wear and tear on it, you can see the guys patching it, etc. Because of this, things like paying tolls are an annoyance, but most everybody accepts it as the cost of keeping things running.
For a website, though, almost everything is hidden from the end user. You don’t know how the server is doing beyond “is it up or down,” you don’t know how big the dev team was or how many people maintain it, or what costs they incur… And so, people seem to be more prone to assuming that “it just works,” without considering the costs behind it.
Right, but the content is also what draws people in. Not just the infrastructure. So if some of that money made its way back to mods and top posters then they would be feeding the community instead of charging them for the content that brings in more viewers.
Others have speculated that the API pricing model is built around customers who want to use the data for AI training, not customers who want to build apps for public use. The $20M price tag is what they’re hoping a mega corp will pay for data access and don’t care about anyone who can’t afford that much. Some money is better than no money, but for a lot of people the “chance” at BIG money is better than some money lol
If this is the case, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just separate into tiers, where mass data usage to feed into a language model is priced differently than people legitimately using and contributing content to the site.
they still have a lot to gain by killing the 3rd party apps and forcing the remaining users to the platform that will benefit their valuation the most. the pricing is to court the big whales to sell data to and the forcing people to use the native app is to improve the quality of the data they want to sell.
Precisely. Investors like apps because users cannot change their user experience, disable telemetry, block ads easily, and so on. They receive push notifications which drive engagement and allow easier tracking across accounts.
I think it’s simply that they want to funnel all of their users to official channels. All of this “discussion” is a poorly veiled attempt at public justification. 30 days notice at the quoted price tag was very intentional. My hope is that Reddit seriously miscalculated the amount of damage this would cause. My suspicion is that /u/spez doesn’t care and is willing to nuke the site for a one-time payout at maximum valuation.
This is what happens when a bunch of MBAs are detached from the product they’re working on.
Hubris by the new execs they hired.
The alt-right is having a great time right now on Reddit. Tons of their posts from r/conservative on the front page.
“We are not profitable”
Says the one who wants the money of 3rd party developers.
Also not a great thing for the CEO to say right before their IPO.
Not at all. Most tech startups (if not all) are unprofitable at IPO. Plus they have to make their finances public, so it’s not something that was a secret before.
I just want to point out that the article is dated 9 June, so before the actual blackout. Maybe they have changed their mind seeing the actual data
I really can’t wait to see what’s the fallout of Reddit going dark. Does the community really wield the power? Or does Reddit have another ace up its sleeve?
