I'm not sure how Christian couldn't have seen this coming. Corporations want control over their brand, image, and experience. How Reddit is accessed and viewed is 1:1 to the experience.
It's unfortunate, but when you hitch your wagon to a corporation's API, you are taking the risk that one day they wake up and say ok we're ready to control our narrative and turn off the API (or set exorbitant prices to access)
Writing was on the wall when facebook/instagram did this years ago.
People have been using third-party clients to access Reddit for more than 13 years. When you have that kind of history, a change like this is difficult to seem like anything but a rug-pull.
The third-party apps predate the first-party even. Reddit had been a website only for years then bought the most popular iOS third-party client as a starting point so like you said it's very much a rug-pull.
The terms of service are the default contract. Presumably it has a we-can-screw-you-whenever clause, but sometimes the corporate lawyers screw up and you can actually get them for violating their own ToS.
Indeed, Courtland, and even on IndieHackers you see a lot of stories about platform risk, platforms which indie hackers often use to build a good product but always seem surprised that they got rugged, as if the previous X stories didn't show that it inevitably happens.
I remember SoundJam MP very well, I still have the box somewhere. The box that I bought from some store in a strip mall on Route 1, maybe CompUSA? Circuit City? The Wiz?
It came with a stereo RCA to 1/8th inch adapter cable, for digitizing audio files straight from your record player / cassette player.
I also remember being bummed that iTunes never properly supported aliases [0] when running under Mac OS 9. And I remember Audion [1]. Heady days indeed!
Mac users of a certain age will remember this happening several times and it almost always ended up being better when it was just built in. Reddit's app is garbo.
No, because it's still a for-profit corporation, and one that's taken lots of VC funding and has also been looking to IPO. Owners change, management changes, priorities change, that's what happens in the business world.
If you don't think you're taking a major risk, then you're just being naive.
(I'm not defending Reddit here, but I am saying anyone should have been planning for this highly probable outcome.)
It's weird how we see the business people making this same sort of mistake on community after community. It's like there's a blind spot surgically implanted in them during the MBA programme.
It's well known that most online communities are 1% super-contributors, 9% modest contributors, and 90% lurkers/occasional contributors.
"Third party app users" are far more likely to be 1% and 9% users. They're committed to the platform enough that they're willing to seek out or even make software to improve their experience on it. The lurkers will just download the official app if it's the top match in the App Store and deal with the inconveniences.
So if you take that away, you disproportionately punish your most valuable users. Note I say "valuable" not in terms of "they click a lot of ads", but rather "they bring the content that makes the other 90% of users stick around and click ads."
It feels like a bar cancelling "Free Drinks Ladies' Night" because they figure that the 10 female patrons will buy 20 bottles of beer, then acting surprised when the 50 men who would come in to hit on them (and buy four beers each) don't show.
Keep in mind that those MBAs making these decisions are not going to be there to go down with the ship when that happens. They will collect their bonuses they got for increasing the short term profits, sell their vested equity and move on, leaving the wreck for someone else to deal with.
It is a perfectly reasonable and rational thing to do. They are not thinking in the same terms and caring about the same priorities.
We can discuss how reprehensible or short sighted that is but business is ultimately about making as much money in as short time as possible. And that is exactly what they are doing (and what they have been trained for in those MBA courses).
> Third party app users are far more likely to be 1% and 9% users. They're committed to the platform enough that they're willing to seek out or even make software to improve their experience on it.
You’re speculating at this while the Reddit team just has all of the data and knows exactly where traffic comes from.
Also maybe the 3p app user, while being the most prolific poster, is simultaneously a high % of toxicity.
Reddit has a long track record of incompetence. The site has historically been very unstable and their attempts to replace the front-end UX for both the browser and mobile apps have been widely panned. Therefore, it's reasonable to suspect that they be making a mistake with this decision as well, despite having access to all of the relevant data.
Put another way, Reddit began enshitiffication no later than the "new" style and since it's intentional, it's only a mistake in the medium and long term, as has been noted they're trying to squeeze a few bucks out of its hulk before it dies.
MBA programs almost exclusively teach short term gains over long term stability.
The business world has been forever changed by the creation of the institutional investor, which was largely created by pensions, 401k's and other such funds where by the actual people putting in the money is several steps removed from the people investing that money.
So now the business world, for public companies, lives and dies on the quartely report.
It’s insane though. Just about any company can show higher quarterlies by doing shortsighted things that deeply undermine their long term value proposition.
Apple could license off a bunch of crap. Boeing could sell assets and designs. Toyota could just rebadge cheaper vehicles and sell all of their factories.. all of those could make record “profits”.
Are we doomed to everything just being a pump and dump scheme from here on out because why shouldn’t everything just be speculation?
Dont worry, BlackRock is trying their best to ensure profitability plays no role at all in investment choices. Not sure their plan is better, but it a change
Not every company runs like this. It's pretty common among tech companies that needed a lot of bootstrapping, but there are plenty of stodgy old producers who do not and who do plan more long term. Value investing is a long-standing philosophy and it has a dedicated "cult" but you don't hear a lot about those companies because they don't need a reality distortion field to make money, because they've basically already got a good concept.
Reddit is none of those things. It's a VC Frankenstein at this point and it's probably never going to make real money, so it makes sense that they're trying to change the recipe to at least get something back.
It’s because no-one who runs a social network site actually understands how or why it works.
I worked at one of the larger UK social networks and people there were terrified to make changes in case it suddenly stopped working.
From what I’ve heard the old Twitter management didn’t understand why it worked and were therefore very conservative with making changes. Mind you, the new management also doesn’t understand why it worked but are quick to make changes, and we’ve all seen how well that’s going.
He probably didn't see it coming because they told him to his face they wouldn't "ruin the API" as recently as January. That was in a call he had with folks at Reddit.
Fast forward only a few months and they are now:
1. Charging exorbitant prices for the API.
2. Removing the ability for apps to display ads to free users.
3. Removing NSFW subreddits and content from the API.
Said in another way, they are:
1. Decreasing app revenue (no ads).
2. Increasing app expenses (paid API).
3. Making third party apps worse (removing NSFW from the API).
That's...about as close to "ruining the API" as you can get.
To me, this is the biggest thing that makes the Facebook/Instagram comparison problematic. Reddit's history is built on the backs of 3rd party apps, and they've long been part of the core ethos of the community.
The same can't be said for the Meta properties, and so I'd argue we're seeing something different/worse here.
There’s a reason nobody has any sympathy for Charlie Brown. How many times does the football have to get pulled away for the lesson to sink in I wonder?
Edit: As many metaphors do, it works on multiple levels, but the fundamental message is don’t be a chump.
I've always felt incredibly sympathetic toward Charlie Brown and often pondered what message Charles Schultz was trying to convey with that trope.
What made Lucy like that?! I often think of the trope in the context of US politics, and specifically progressive capitulation to capital. I find it one of the darkest and yet prescient parts of Schultzes lore.. (Snoopy being an adult with a long, colorful history yet still treated as a dog, being another)
> Some form of “tough break kid welcome to the real world”
Yes.
> There’s a pervasive “if you can’t beat them join them“ attitude about these antisocial financial and social structures.
The argument would be sound, if and only if others weren't making a business off the free to one side of the equation.
> We need more people to say “Here’s an alternative to that model” instead of just throwing their hands up.
You have no alternative until you offer free compute, storage, hosting, for reddit, Twitter, Google, etc., as far as I can tell, you do none of these things, nor will you be able to fundamentally break physics to do so.
> Stop excusing it. Start pushing for alternative ways to organize.
Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the furthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness: a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say 'no.' But saying 'yes' begins things. Saying 'yes' is how things grow.
I think I've said yes in that comment once or twice. I don't know how well you think you are performing as you're trying to force this lame literary device you've invented, but I don't think insulting me is going to get you very far.
> I'm not sure how Christian couldn't have seen this coming
He did. Apollo has a freemium model, and if the API pricing was reasonable, he coult take the hit using the subscribers to subsidize the free users. The problem is the exhorbitant pricing, meaning all his users should be paying four times what the usual suscription costs, just to pay Reddit. It's bonkers.
Realistically, the price he would need to increase to isn't even that high. $5 a month. Paying $5 a month for an app you use daily, repeatedly to the point it makes 300 API requests - isn't asking that much. Would all his users pay? No. But they can use the free Reddit app with ads and what not or the website. But realistically, it's easy to think 5-10% would pay. And he would make a healthy profit and Reddit would get paid.
The problem, everyone seems to think Reddit doesn't provide enough value to be worth $5 a month to enjoy without ads and a nice UI.
Reddit wants about $0,00024 an API request. To think that isn't reasonable, seems odd. Sendgrid wants $0.0399 per email. ScrapingBee wants $0.098 an API request. Docraptor wants $0.4 an API request/pdf. I'm sure I could carry on and find more and more sites that cost more per API request, I didn't find one that was cheaper.
Reddit could just charge its users $5 a month, offer a $10 a month tier for some extra features and co-offers, and keep the API free.
It's a spectacularly stupid move, almost on a par with Musk >50% of Twitter's value and Waves trying to force their customers onto a subscription model by making old versions obsolete.
Reddit will lose a huge number of users, its brand will be trashed, and the app companies will be forced out of business.
This doesn't make sense. Make me, a user of their app and website who sees ads and other stuff pay money so that the API users can avoid them?
Reddit will lose a bunch of deadbeat users, who generate little to no income for the company but cost money to serve. In business, these are the sort of people you don't want.
Who do you think will spend hundreds of millions a year to replace Reddit so that deadbeat users can use it? There would be no money in serving those users and any attempt to serve them and monetize later will result in the same thing that is happening at Reddit. The days of VCs burning money for social networks seems to be over.
And some of the deadbeats are us moderators who invest our time voluntarily to keep the subs tidy, handle the mod queues and answer questions etc. I dive into queue management using the Boost app on my phone durimg breaks away from my corporate laptop, which I won't use for such personal stuff. The official Reddit app is not as good as Boost for moderation.
That's not correct. It's entirely possible they got their on accident. There are engineers in this thread who would know claiming they don't have a real good sense of why things work.
And every big decision they've made has made it worse, not better. Do you use new reddit?
Much more than $5, closer to $10. He still has to afford to live, as he currently does with Apollo's current subscriptions, plus pay reddit's API costs. This is according to his comments on reddit about this situation.
$10/month to use a free website on your phone is just not a very attractive deal at the end of the day.
$2.50 would be the API costs per user. So $5 would cover, take in some money and pay appstore feeds. And if you're looking at 10% of his userbase, that would be about 4 million a month income with 2 million being for Reddit. Based off his claims of 20 million a month with a $2.50 cost per user.
I'm sure he'll be able to survive off $1,000,000 a month profit.
Edit corrected the numbers:
$2.50 a user for API costs.
$5.00 a month subscription would cover that cost.
$1.50 going to AppleTax.
$1.00 a user to the indie hacker
If 5% of users that would cost $20MM sign up for $5 a month it would be $2,000,000 a month overall revenue.
Towards the end of the video (around the last 7min iirc), he explains the business problem in better detail.
He says that he can charge more and still make a living. However, the price change goes into effect July 1st of this year. That’s less than 30 days from now.
The issue is all the current premium users who have 2-12mo left on their subscription suddenly become a huge liability. He cannot suddenly ask for more (against apple rules), and he must not remove features they paid for (apple will issue a refund to them).
I don’t know about the specifics of the business to intelligently critique your calculation, but it couldn’t possibly be the case that somebody turned down an easy million dollars a month, right?
If I was to guess, the standard indie hacker thought is happening "I can't raise prices" and "lots of people don't want to pay". When they're seeing 90% of their user base say I'm not paying that, it's easy to forget the 10% that would. The 10% that would probably haven't even spoken up.
And there is also probably a part of him that doesn't want to be greedy. But is it greedy to sell your software for $5 a month? I don't think so.
Is the 10% based on anything (I figure this is Hackernews so it is non-zero chance that you or someone else knows something about conversation rates for these kind of apps). My gut thinks it is high but I have 0 experience.
10% is a low estimate based on conversion rates I’ve seen people post on conversion rates. Standard apps with freemium the rates are 1-10%, Reddit however is used a lot so a mobile app will be used daily (900,000 daily users out of 1.2 million overall) it already converts at 1.50 a month. It would be somewhat reasonable to think Spotify-conversion rates of 30% would convert.
Yeah all the way back when Reddit sent out takedown threats on most 3rd party apps for their names (I use Relay which used to be called Reddit Relay, can't recall the Apollo app name before) and launched their own apps it was pretty clear.
LinkedIn's entire business model is based on LinkedIn getting paid for searching and contacting. And the recruiters paying then are often the scummiest ones who look for quantity over quality.
Reddit's always been a bit of a weird site in this regard. Most sites closed off a long time ago and put so many ads everywhere. Old Reddit is still alive 5 years after the redesign and it's been so easy to avoid ads on Reddit in general. While most places have aggressively pursued monetization, Reddit has been a place where you could avoid most of that.
Even the way that Old Reddit showed ads was so quaint. If you look at Old Reddit without an ad blocker, you'll see an ad in the list of 25 items, but it has a different background color so you can easily visually differentiate it from the real content along with two high-contrast things noting that it's an ad. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have been minimizing your ability to differentiate ads from content by making them look nearly identical with a tiny, low-contrast marking that they're ads. Of course, New Reddit shows ads with the same tiny, low-contrast marking that other companies use. But unlike others, Reddit still allows you to choose the Old Reddit experience.
Yes, in some ways the writing has always been on the wall. In other ways, Reddit has been a bit different. They've largely ignored the kinds of things that other sites have gone after. Yes, when you've hitched your wagon to a company's site, you're at a certain amount of risk. That's also true of users who might find the site infested with ads or changing how they're allowed to do things. At the same time, Reddit has resisted that direction for so long that most people assumed it would continue. Why now? Why not 5 years ago?
It seems like the thing people are reacting to is the culture shock. Instagram was never open. They wouldn't even let companies schedule posts for a long time. Facebook was barely open, but never had the kind of ecosystem that Reddit had (and often fought against third party access). Reddit's policies felt really different and they aren't changing in a gradual fashion. It's not like Reddit told Apollo, "we're going to start charging 20 cents per month per user" and Apollo only works for those paying $1.50/mo for Apollo Ultra (and then a year later Reddit wants 50 cents and then a dollar and slowly Apollo Ultra goes up in price and more people move away from it). It's not like Reddit put in limits like "you only get 100 API calls per day per user" which would be 30% of an average Apollo users' usage. That would start bleeding users from Apollo over time, but not feel like slamming the door shut - and maybe Reddit charges $1/mo for unlimited API calls for the user and only those paying a subscription fee can get the unlimited calls. That would offer a way forward that users might grumble about, but could work with. Free users could still get a decent amount of usage and people who really cared could subscribe to a new Apollo Ultra at $2/mo. In fact, it could drive sales of Apollo Ultra - maybe 5-10x more people start paying for Apollo Ultra.
I think the big shock is that Reddit went from so open to so closed in one step while Reddit had historically accommodated the community's resistance to monetization. Old Reddit has stuck around for half a decade now. Despite being one of the most visited websites, a lot of monetization opportunities seemed to be ignored. Condé Nast/Advanced Publications seemed to mostly ignore the site. It was spun-out with Advanced Publications remaining owner and just kinda went along. Even after raising $200M in 2017, Advanced Publications was still the majority owner (and I think they're still today even after Reddit raised another billion dollars).
Lots of younger sites/networks have gone public with a lot less traffic and aggressively moved to monetize. I'm not saying this was the case, but it always seemed to users that Reddit's owners were a bit disinterested in its potential monetization and were mostly fine ignoring it - allowing users to easily block ads, keeping Old Reddit around, allowing free access for ad-less third-party apps, etc. In that environment, it does come as a shock. Reddit felt like this hidden place (that also everyone knew about). It just felt different.
You're not wrong that building on someone else's site is risky. At the same time, I can see the shock from such a sudden change to a site whose reputation was quite different.
He said it, because reddit was always friendly and now they're doing a 180 on them with very short notice; no time to phase customers out or spread some of the cost out, just BAM "you get 1 month to switch to the new scheme or adios losers". Public companies have to basically become fascist to do what wallstreet expects of them, which is to let beancounters rule all decisions rather than listening to engineers and other employees.
I'm surprised I haven't heard plans for these 3rd party developers to create a reddit clone, and instead of hitting api.reddit.com, hit api.apolloapp.io. Users of these 3rd party apps seem quite loyal, and would at least forgo uninstalling to test out a reddit alternative.
First, it's not trivial, and won't be production ready before Apollo runs out of money.
Second, it's been tried, multiple times. Saidit was one, I think. Ruqqus was another, and there have been more, all claiming to be censor free and all failing to achieve a solid following. Saidit was (and still appears to be) a cesspool of trolling, conspiracy theory and anti-everything-ism.
Third, it'll miss moderation, so it will probably follow in saidit's footsteps.
Something worth considering is potentially just jumping ship to a reddit alternative like Saidit, like you mentioned.
The trouble these alternatives have is their userbase have to be, in bulk, the users banned from the centralized social media apps. But if Apollo takes THEIR userbase, then those people arn't negatively selected. They're just people who have phones.
It's a better alternative to dying. Diversifying support for multiple backends could serve to protect you. Non trivial but it seems necessary at this point.
I am a backend engineer and would love to work on a project like this. What's muddying the waters right now is the "decentralization" federation kick (Mastodon, Lemmy etc.), which kills the user experience and ability to grow into a viable social network. Too many resources are getting wasted on this idea. And the people working on it just don't get it. Users don't care about who is hosting the servers and most people aren't in constant drama with unpaid moderators and the censorship boogeyman.
A direct centralized reddit clone without the god awful UI, dark patterns, and increasing poor leadership decisions would probably be an immediate success. Apollo for mobile plus old.reddit on the desktop would hit a million users in weeks.
I think most users don’t care, but people contributing to the ecosystem in code and content without ownership do care, for exactly the reason we are talking about these reddit changes.
When Reddit closed it's source code, that was the first warning. The second was the execution of its warrant canary, followed closely by a drunken Spez re-writing peoples comments.
Later Spez gave an interview where he proudly extorted how he had all his users darkest secrets, with a maniacal laugh for effect (now deleted). The blatant hazing and censoring of certain groups was the final act that killed Reddit.
Reddit is just so funny. People have gone through the pain of finding a third party client explicitly because they don't like the first party one. Do they think taking that away will suddenly make the first party app attractive? Delusional. Especially for heavy users which literally produce what Reddit is trying to sell.
By now we have seen many times how platforms have turned their back on developers. Twitter, even in the past gave good reason to not do build solely on that platform. At the end, it's their platform and they can choose how they want to run it and developers have no say in that decision.
I genuinely hope Reddit ends setting up their own demise with this. It's a good infrastructure (at least old.reddit is), but the sheer amount of power hungry mods who abuse their power is out of control. There needs to be a system where mods can be reported and held accountable.
Or, alternatively, have everything be decentralized lie the fediverse, although until that becomes more user friendly I don't see it taking off.
A lot of people were suggesting the apollo developer write his own backend and setup an alternative to reddit, and I sure hope he considered doing so.
This is a romantic view but completely false. Reddit admins over the years have always completely backed the view that subs belong to their moderators.
/r/newsButNotModeratedVeryMuch might as well be a different website.
The thing about Reddit is that it's "the front page of the internet", and the "front page" has been captured by special interests in collaboration with Reddit, Inc.
1. Niche refreshing or funny subreddit becomes popular. Power mods request to join the mod team, are rejected by the mods of the sub, who are just normal people like you and me.
2. It hits 100k users, becoming subject to more stringent rules from the admins
3. Incestuous relationship between powermods/astroturfers/reddit admins is used to get the original mod banned (at least accused of "allowing hateful content" or some other false flag)
4. Powermods take over the sub, keep some old mods, but ban anyone speaking up
5. The subreddit is now under the full control of powermods, and becomes an astroturfed echo chamber like the rest of the reddit front page. Sub's front page becomes a mix between the original content and the marketing page for ShareBlue-like organizations.
I wonder if part of the problem with this is due to how subreddits tend to be categorical in nature in that the moderators for a subreddit get to essentially own the discussion and narrative around that given thing. The issue with that is there is an expectation that there is no curating happening because nobody should have that much power to own and oversee over an entire topic.
I wonder if we will see a shift in engagement to smaller, more curated communities centred around the curators instead of discussion happening under broad sweeping discussion boards. Perhaps it's better for discussion to happen under categories within a community curated by somebody with intention. In this scenario, the expectation going in is that there would be a level of controlled oversight.
I've been working on a platform to help content creators offer their communities for this sort of thing where their communities can become a sort of privatized social network curated by them.
> A hierarchy that terminates at a single responsible party the stakeholders, the board, can control.
I think that's the organization structure that everyone complains is responsible for some of the most sociopathic behavior in the world. Or at least sociopathic behavior at the largest scale.
Human beings have no new ideas on how to organize things, and so they keep going back to the same old ideas that have been proven defective. In this case, defective in exactly the ways they claim to want to avoid. It's a little bizarre.
Who would apply those rules to the mods? Rules aren't magical, bolts of lightning don't shoot down from the heavens and obliterate the offending moderator. If only.
Who do you report mods to? Other mods?
There is no one to report them to.
The trouble is that people demand that the discourse remain pleasant and unobjectionable. That it drives on in a direction that they agree with. And good, human conversation can't ever do that. We have unpleasant things to discuss, and we have objections. The direction can and should be capable of changing at any time.
But because most people are cowards and children, you strive like little eusocial insects to deconstruct and destroy conversations like that. It bothers you. And the biggest and best tool for that is the moderator, some unintelligent busybody with grudges.
Until the one day of course that you yourself realize the there is something unpleasant to be said. Until the direction should be different. Until there are objections to be made. Then you get banhammered and you want to cry about the very juggernaut you helped to enable.
The confusing part is why you think that the solution could be an ever larger juggernaut? Why do you think that could ever help? How do you even propose creating it?
The admins like it the way things are. You won't get any relief from them.
If anything, expect things to be like now, but more so. They clearly intend to increase the intensity of the policies you dislike, they just haven't figured out how to do that yet.
I wonder if the API change was more about third-party clients than slowing LLM progress. That horse has already left the barn, and when you have important partners, you reach out before the public announcement about the API and give them a deal well below the rate card, if not free. Or maybe internal teams weren't aligned on this, and the partner/BD team was caught off-guard.
I'm guessing it's more about going public. Anyone who is using Apollo (or similar apps) isn't seeing ads and isn't giving Reddit lots of stuff they can track. For a long time, Reddit had allowed much more user-friendly access than most places. Their API offered great access for free and their ads were trivial to block with ad blockers. If you look at Instagram or Facebook, you'll be getting tons of ads even if you have an adblocker because they've spent a lot of time getting around those. YouTube has been working hard to get around ad blocking and Google is even trying to limit adblocking in future Chrome releases. This has left Reddit with less revenue than other popular sites.
If they're trying to go public, they're going to want to show revenue growth and show that they're able to get more money per user.
You've called Apollo an "important partner", but are they a partner for Reddit or a rival? In terms of Reddit's revenue, they seem to be a rival.
This is certainly terrible for users and I'm sure Reddit will face a decent amount of backlash over it. At the same time, I'm not really sure about categorizing Apollo as an important partner. Is Apollo kinda like YouTube Vanced? A better app for users that also means less revenue for the service? To an extent, who wants Reddit's ad-infested app when they could have Apollo?
If you're Reddit and looking to have a good IPO and grow your revenue, Apollo and other apps are standing in the way of that. They're offering a better, ad-free experience of Reddit. Over time, more and more people would want to use ad-free apps like Apollo instead of the official Reddit app as more people realize they exist so it's not like the problem would be shrinking for Reddit.
I think LLMs might be a convenient excuse, but I think the bigger issue is likely that they want to grow the revenue they're getting from their user base and they can't do that when people are using apps that get around their monetization. Reddit is following what most similar sites have done.
I agree with all of this, but one of reddit's main problems is that its own offerings are so inferior to the third party offerings. I mean, we're talking an order of magnitude worse. When you shut down the better offerings without giving people a comparable alternative, you're cooking your own goose.
It’s clearly inspired by Twitter. Which bothers me a lot. Who would follow ANYTHING that Twitter does at the moment? Twitter currently has the worst leadership in its history. Every decision made by twitter in the past months have lowered the value of the site, not the other way around. Twitter is currently worth about $15 billion down from $45b a few months ago. Why would any company try to copy Twitter?
In a world of Verblen goods, which includes $30,000 more-esoteric-than-Rolex watches, what does "worth" even mean? It's not like there's a vibrant market for Internet businesses that underpin online communication to discover a market optimal price. Musk wanted to buy Twitter, and wanted a discount. He threw whatever language he could at it to try and get the price lowered. It's not like you can go to the store and buy a Twitter or Discord. You have to haggle to come upon a price that both parties can agree on, which is a foreign concept in the western world.
Things are worth what you're willing to pay for them.
Who can even tell, Reddit is a joke of a company. Seriously, is this the third time someone there tried to play startup and "reinvent" it? All the while the actual website only gets worse?
It's also about future product plans, in my estimation.
Look at the recent job postings for mobile developers. See talk about adding multimedia interactive widgets to sub reddits. The current product is not sticky enough apparently.
This customizable widget tech is unlikely to be easily supported by third parties and will slow down the adoption and rebirth of Reddit as a sticky profit cow.
My take is that their goal is to destroy third party apps because they can’t control the advertising or get metrics on advertising back. Their in-house app is annoying, buggy, and geared towards maximizing advertising space. It’s not a user friendly app.
Reddit's official app is one of the most blatant examples of 'enshittification' to date in my opinion. I definitely would like to see Reddit be replaced with decentralised forums, I'd genuinely be happy with phpBB with threaded comments and an optional centralised login.
I’ve been surprised by the bugginess. I open up a thread and as I scroll, some of the comments are already collapsed, despite having 50 or more upvotes. I can only assume this is a cell reuse bug. If that’s true, that is seriously amateur hour.
Edit: and their video playback has been notorious for years now
Between the trainwreck that is "new" desktop reddit and the bad mobile apps, it's clear that quality is not a priority when hiring engineers or there's some organizational factor that's preventing their engineering teams from delivering quality. Wouldn't be surprised if it's a result of the marketing department and non-engineer C-suites running the show.
In the video, he literally says Reddit offered him a job shortly after the Apollo public release. He politely declined 6 years ago and said they have had an amicable relationship until now.
One thing I do wonder is that if the issue was the ads, why wouldn't they just say that Reddit Gold users would still have free access to the API and charge the rest? Then app developers could implement more restrictions/paid access to non-gold users while gold users wouldn't directly be impacted at least by Reddit itself.
PSA: Companies (especially public and even more so VC funded startup's) have no principles other than profit. And they routinely hire and fool otherwise, passionate idealistic but native young people who do not understand it.
I personally don’t understand the outrage. Reddit obviously has costs, and if it wants to make a profit it should not subsidise third party apps that cost double - both no revenue and no ad views.
The cost of 0,00024 per request seems reasonable, and according to Apollo’s creator the cost per app user would be just 2,5 a month. Keep in mind that currently this app probably has no incentive to go light on the requests, so with some tinkering the creator could probably get that down. Maybe some proxy caching or what not.
Of course free is going away, but paying users at say 5/mo or 50/yr should still work for Apollo.
That's assuming that Apollo brings in enough revenue to cover the costs and they want to run a business.
I'm not a user of that App so excuse me if I am mistaken, if Apollo is currently free and without ads then the developer had a lot less to worry about then than now.
Additionally the outrage, as far as I am aware, has less to do with Reddit needing to make money rather it's way of going about making money is killing the user experience which kills the point of the website.
No, that's not the thing, they are already a business. They sell three tiers of the app, one of which is a subscription. The current price of the subscription is $13/year.
> Additionally the outrage, as far as I am aware, has less to do with Reddit needing to make money rather it's way of going about making money is killing the user experience which kills the point of the website.
It's not killing the user experience, it's making the nice user experience "just" more expensive, which I covered in my first comment.
As an off topic side note: the most important thing I learned in my consultant years is you never say no. Instead, quote an outrageous price. What's the worst that can happen? They pay it.
Wouldn't Apollo be able to? According to Reddit admins, they use 3.5x more requests per average user than their competitors. Optimize and add a user limit or tier subscriptions.
The interview deals with this possibility and others like it.
The short answer is that he is left hanging due to the fact that many of his existing paying users have already paid for the year and thus, when the new API rate hits, will be costing him money long before he can recoup their costs through a subscription hike --- presuming 100% of them renew at the higher price, which would be an extraordinarily optimistic presumption.
Basically a dev would sell a Reddit client for a fixed amount and when the user would fire it up to view Reddit, then that would trigger a native Reddit's API subscription, paid by the user directly to Reddit.
This can be streamlined to be nearly zero-friction IF it's supported on the Reddit end.
Will we ever have a culture that is not this naive? I find it difficult to understand how people still fail to see this coming every single time. No matter what companies say (and they'll say anything), they're for profit and on average must grow or die. Why is this not part of common sense and basic education by now? It's time for the world to grow up and stop playing pretend.
This fiasco may push me away from Reddit altogether. Though, it seems Reddit could greatly improve the situation by allowing individual users to buy API access for their account. For example, make this a perk of Reddit Premium or a separate purchase priced appropriately.
Nice in theory, but I don't see it happening until there's a Lemmy instance that's reasonably neutral with enough users to fuel steady growth. From what I can see the only instances with a decent number of active users are off one deep end or the other on the political spectrum which most people don't have the stomach for.
I still don't see the fuss. People were using one free tool to access another free tool, and are now mad that they have to use a different free tool to access the original free tool that offers its own free tool? And the tool is largely a platform for disinformation and bigotry, and cats?
And we know the complainers will just keep using it because they are addicted. 0% of them will leave the platform despite their complaining.
I mod three small (at most 5k) subs. I'm alone on two of them, and there's two of us for the third one. We've already decided that the subs will be locked and closed once 3rd party apps lose access.
It's unfortunate, but when you hitch your wagon to a corporation's API, you are taking the risk that one day they wake up and say ok we're ready to control our narrative and turn off the API (or set exorbitant prices to access)
Writing was on the wall when facebook/instagram did this years ago.