Why did Reddit even have an AMA for this? Everyone knew it would turn out exactly like it did. The most difficult questions went unanswered. The answers they did give were either just bland corporate speak or actively detrimental, giving their critics more ammunition including opening Reddit up to accusations of libel. The whole ordeal seems to leave them in a worse position than if they just never did the AMA.
1) Ego and emotion are driving decisions at reddit
or
2) Reddit's leadership has run the numbers and genuinely thinks it will benefit their profitability plans if the users reacting negatively to these changes all leave. This is well past the point of just killing 3rd party apps because the API changes alone would have accomplished that.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." What do you do when incompetence would be unbelievable in scope and malice would be unbelievably incompetent.
> "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence."
This is a digression, but this saying has always frustrated me. It makes sense for a second, but then I wonder if whoever came up with it had any idea how much malice exists in the world. Many cases of "malice is at least as adequate an explanation as incompetence, given the facts or lack of them".
Why? People want you ousted for malice or incompetence. They don't want either and also punish either. It sounds like it would be circling back to incompetence to think one could get away with looking hugely incompetent.
> This is a distinctly Western perspective: that intent matters
I am kind of curious about the perspective here. Is the argument that "eastern" (I assume, as opposed to "western") perspectives do not consider intent in evaluating actions?
It's a very interesting episode, If you're curious I would advice to listen to it in full. On this topic I perceived 'western' as a proxy for individualistic societies. The argument is indeed that these very collectivistic societies do not consider intent as an important factor. Within those societies shame is also a very important emotion versus the individualistic 'guilt'. One other interesting finding was that self-confidence has no correlation with life satisfaction in those societies.
A country like China would actually be in the middle on that scale, and it was also discussed how it's rapidly becoming more individualistic due to a number of policies, most notably the one-child policy.
I don't recall the exact quotation nor the source, so there may some factual inaccuracies in what I'm about to write, but I think I read somewhere that under bushido (the samurai code), no distinction was made between someone returning a wallet because it was the 'right thing to do' and someone returning a wallet for less altruistic reasons (fear of being seen as a thief by others, etc).
This would seem to support the hypothesis that not all cultures value intent as much.
yes, exactly. what exactly the point of distinguishing between malice and incompetence if the result is the same? in the end it just sounds like a cope or at worst an excuse for bad behavior.
If this is a genuine question, I will happily share my belief.
Because people are often incompetent because they haven’t been taught/mentored. Also, people are often incompetent in one area of life but incredibly skilled in another, and because life is not just a series of transactions. Give someone coaching and you can change their life.
If I assume malice, it would not be worth continuing engagement.
It is an attitude that has given a lot of cover to very malicious people over the years. Bush is a great example of that. Many people thought he was a moron and during his administration a lot of the things that happened on his watch (no-bid contracts to Halliburton and Abu Ghraib spring to mind) were often brushed off by people citing Hanlon's Razor.
I thought the general consensus was that they were both malicious, but Cheney was the brains behind the operation. Sometimes someone is malicious and incompetent, but self-aware enough to delegate.
Because generally little aren't mean. It sounds like you think there is more malice in the world than the person who came up with this. I believe there is less massive than you think there is.
My theory is desperation. Reddit isn’t profitable, which was fine in the past few years because they could just raise another round of funding by pointing at their user growth.
They can’t easily do that in the current financial environment. I suspect that they’re also seeing a plateau in year over year user growth. Bundle that up with everybody seeing advertising revenue decline and there’s no good story to sell to investors.
I think that they’re probably under tremendous pressure right now by their investors to at least get close to profitable so that they can IPO.
Ironic given many third party app users would likely pay $60-100/year to continue to use their third party app. Now, we'll just stop using reddit and be sad about it.
Missed opportunity due to... what? Desperation at Reddit?
That’s the end goal already with their API fees. They just handled the entire execution and messaging poorly.
I think the Apollo developer mentioned that in order to break even with the new fees, they’d have to have subscribers who are paying $5/mo. To make a profit, third party apps would need subscribers who pay within the $60-100/yr range that you mentioned.
Reddit probably knew this would cull the number of third party apps out there, which is to their benefit since their mobile app would have fewer competitors. I bet they’re also banking on most people not caring, or eventually coming back to the platform after a short period of time.
I sincerely hope that they’re wrong and the user base doesn’t return.
I fully agree. Money is not free anymore, and investors want to see a path-to-profitablity. No one wants to dump millions into a possible profitable idea.
A bit under the radar, but Twitch is having a similar moment with new ad directives which would kill independent streamers. It caused an upset in the community. Twitch backtracks but the damage is already done.
Making wildly unpopular changes and then "rolling them back" to something "more reasonable" is a very commonly employed corporate management strategy for implementing unpopular policy changes with both customers and employees.
Want to drop PTO rates by 5%? Announce a 10% reduction, ignore the furor for a few days, then the CEO publishes the already-written "oops" letter and says that they listened to feedback from employees, looked at the "books" and decided they could compromise to 5%. Half the company thinks he's a great leader for listening and pushing back against the evil bitch running HR.
If they wanted to just make more money off API calls, they would have announced the pricing, but then rolled it back part-way. Unfortunately, the Apollo dev recording his conversations with them, and their sheer incompetence/ego, seems to have taken all that off the table and instead they're just doubling down, which definitely does not work.
Yeah, but the thing is, you've broken a lot of trust with your employees once you pull shit like this. Places like Apple and Google, who have been shitty in different ways with their RTO plans, are never getting back that trust, not fully. If they go full-blown cynical like this they'd see really serious attrition in places they didn't want it to happen, and no amount of stock would bring those people back.
I know it's not you personally; not trying to shoot the messenger here. People need to understand that these tactics are bad for the company in the long term.
To a certain extent, it's the people making decisions shitting in the pool. Often times they will be at different companies by the time they have burned all the trust in the previous company.
Doubling down works when you can be confident that you'll be able to keep rolling the dice indefinitely, because no matter how great your losses have been so far, no burly security guards have come to escort you off the premises and block you from reentry.
This is pretty much the story of the internet at this point, perhaps accelerated by the success of certain celebrities who proved that fame for fame's sake can become an indefinitely self-sustaining reaction, and there is no such thing as a downside as long as someone will stick a camera or a microphone or some kind of amplifier in front of you. Thus doubling down has become such a ubiquitous strategy.
reddit receives hundreds of millions of dollars per year of free moderating from their community. The community is the only valuable thing in reddit. The website is worth nothing, the eyeballs and free labour are everything.
When the parts of their community with outsize influence start talking about abandoning the site to somewhere else it threatens both their hundreds of millions in free labour per year, and also the future of their site.
Reddit exists as it does today because Digg made a series of bad decisions that led to mass movement away from Digg. The same thing can happen to Reddit.
You're not wrong, but that's a very one-sided view. The alternate outcome is that when the current mods abandon ship there's likely going to be many more people waiting in the wings to get their shot at modding their own sub. What other service is a perfect substitute for Reddit? The thought that most users will give up Reddit cold-turkey and stay away permanently is a bit naive. Internet use can be an addiction and addicts staying away under their own power and no alternative is unlikely. Ultimately a vacuum will be created, it will be filled with fresh bodies, and Reddit will continue along after a short period of unrest and uncertainty, with new mods running new subs.
"The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets."
I don't think most users will quit cold turkey. However breaking muscle memory is a really quick way of breaking addictions. If people can no longer use their favorite apps to check Reddit then it'll force them to make a conscious choice to download the official app and relearn their bad habits (assuming they consider using Reddit a bad habit).
If a significant portion of users (especially power users who are more likely to contribute to discussion and posting content) leave the platform then it could cause a lot of issues for the future of Reddit.
new untrained and inexperienced moderators will disrupt the site experience. The poweruse and mod community fleeing to another site will start it becoming more common among barely involved users. Its exactly what happened to digg. The site became (to quote huffman) "profit driven" and it quickly fell from grace.
Could also say it's happened at Twitter, too, outside of sports Twitter. When I had my main account with 2K followers for years engagement was pretty high and consistent. Then Twitter made sharing links to your own content impossible to drive engagement to your own content which, considering the amount of anger and virtue signaling on Twitter, caused me to use it less and less.
Then Elon bought it and it became a right wing platform for what I can only describe as fascism disguised as "free speech". I'd log in and see virtually no one over time. Granted my main account was very tech/developer heavy and those communities seem to skew left. But I decided it just made me sad to login and have to see how hollow it was.
Glad to have experienced it 2014-2016 though. That was peak Tech Twitter for me.
Labour isn't necessarily influence, that is where things break down.
Reddit knows that if all the malcontents (From their point of view) leave they will be replaced by newer content creators/community participants who either don't know the story or don't care.
The problem with the Digg comparision is that the internet is a vastly different place today both from a legislative and a payment processing point of view. I would venture a guess that the legal and financial barriers to entry are and will continue to prevent anyone from making the next Reddit; or the next Twitter, for that matter.
We've gone from the Wild West to the Dust Bowl, lads
>Reddit knows that if all the malcontents (From their point of view) leave they will be replaced by newer content creators/community participants who either don't know the story or don't care.
Do they?
What if the demographics of the malcontents and newer content creators is different?
I'm not completely sure, but I think that the malcontents are the people who are noticing what is going on; while the potential newer content creators are the people who lack such an insight. If this idea is correct, then the malcontents leaving is effectively a brain drain.
>hey will be replaced by newer content creators/community participants
I'm not sure why inserting discussion of content creation here. Totally irrelevant. Nor is it about participation, its about moderating.
>The problem with the Digg comparision is that the internet is a vastly different place today both from a legislative and a payment processing point of view. I would venture a guess that the legal and financial barriers to entry are and will continue to prevent anyone from making the next Reddit; or the next Twitter, for that matter.
Funny I never gave digg or reddit any payment information.
> Funny I never gave digg or reddit any payment information
And you never saw any ads because you used a third aprty app and ablock? This is why reddit doesn't give a shit if you leave. You were never anything but a cost center to them. They're more worried about making money than replacing moderators.
That may be true in the US but it's not everywhere, and it certainly won't be for long.
Anyway, for many, the competition is "nothing at all". I will never download the official Reddit app. It's that bad. The mobile experience is worse. I'll just find something more productive to do with my time.
> Anyway, for many, the competition is "nothing at all".
Yes, this is what people miss about Twitter too. They scoff at Mastodon, for example, and of course Mastodon is unlikely to ever attract hundreds of millions of users, but the biggest "competition" to Twitter is simply disengaging from Twitter. Quitting, not switching. You don't have to be on any social media site; you can spend your time in other ways.
This is exactly what I did when streaming TV starting becoming so bad. I tried a couple of other services via account sharing, and they suck too. So instead of watching an hour of TV at night to relax, I do something else.
Yes, their user experience is atrocious. The mobile site tries it's best to push you to the app and the app is just... bad.
I like to consume text content in public transport. Unfortunately, Reddit is like the worst app possible with bad/interrupted connection. Even a real-time strategy game I'm playing that needs constant data exchange works better in the subway than reddit.
At least they stopped forcing you of the mobile version onto the app.
I use the official mobile app, and also use Apollo (because I like having two separate apps for two separate accounts I use).
The official mobile app is just inexplicably bad. The other day I was browsing through the 'Popular' tab, and every time I clicked on the thumbnail for an article, it took me to the web page... of some other article. Completely unrelated as far as I could tell. Tap on a CNN article about Trump indictment, instead get an EW article about Gwen Stefani (or whatever, I don't remember what it was).
It was consistent, too. Every article went to a different article instead, but tapping on that article always gave you the same different article. Tapping onto the comment screen and then onto the article gave the correct article.
A few weeks ago, the problem was different; I would tap on an article, and it would load up some other article, and then also the article I was trying to read. I'd read it, close it, then have to close the other article, then I'd be back at the main list.
For the longest time, refreshing an article list would result in a bunch of broken-looking entries in the list view; entries without titles, titles overlapping images, entries that were too big, and so on. Refreshing again often fixed it, but then gave me a new set of articles as if I'd already read the messed up ones it had brokenly tried to show me. This used to happen every single time; then it was just sort of random, about 50% of the time. I haven't noticed it lately because I got out of the habit of refreshing lists and I just kill the app when I want to get newer content.
There's also a little hovering downwards-arrow symbol to skip to the next top-level comment. It's black, it's fairly large, and it hovers over the content. You can't get rid of it whether you want it or not. The best you can do is toggle a preference that says "I don't want this to be movable", and then it sits in the corner, over top of the content, forever (except when it bugs out and sits in the middle of the screen on the left side forever).
For the longest time, the comment box to type your comment into was a fixed size; if your comment didn't fit into two or three lines, then your text wrapped onto the fourth line or whatever, except the text box wouldn't scroll so you couldn't see what you were typing. I got in the habit of copying the text to Notes, writing my comment there, and then switching back to Reddit. 50% of the time, the Reddit app would reload and I would lose the comment that I was replying to, but the other 50% of the time I could paste my comment in and post it.
When creating a new post, you first put in the content you want (title, body, image, whatever), and then you hit 'Next' and choose a subreddit. It gives you a list of suggestions, based not on subreddits that you're subscribed to or post to regularly, but rather subreddits that you've engaged with lately. I saw a post from /r/doordash yesterday, so now the app is suggesting maybe I want to post there, or /r/Weddingattireapproval.
Note that some subreddits don't allow self posts, or don't allow image posts, but you have to create your post first before choosing a subreddit that maybe doesn't allow it, forcing you to go back and change your post type/content. This feature seems just generally really stupid.
It goes on and on. It's a genuinely horrible app which can rarely even get the basic functionality working, and bugs stick around indefinitely.
> As has been mentioned a few times: When Digg fucked up, reddit existed as a growing but small competitor. Reddit has no such competitor.
In all honesty I think Discord is the competitor. You can join dozens of communities under one login, lots of creators and studios set up their own server, set up a private server for friends, and there's more control over who can join and see content. I mostly use it to keep in contact with a couple of friends, so I bet there's even more that could be done.
You can't make a community go somewhere. The the place that it ends up is on discord (and irc in times before), then discoverability for the rest of the population that aren't participants in that community will suffer along with the companies that previously hosted that content and were able to monetize their eyeballs.
... but isn't that what people have been wanting? "Down with {big corp}!" be it google or reddit or Facebook?
Thats not true, the site is full of passionate, experienced users in all different interests and areas. I dont know what you've been looking at but it hasnt been my experience at all. You get a really good consensus on whats good, whats bad, where to start with so many different things. Its essentially an add on for google search now if you want good quality opinions.
Honestly, if Apollo and RIF got together and pointed themselves at a different backend, they could basically be that competitor. They're already got the users, and the frontend code is good.
Their standing agreements with Reddit inc. may prevent them from doing so however.
Switching APIs isn't seamless. Switching to a federated backend is even more of a hurdle.
None of the backends are likely able to support the load that Apollo (and RIF) would do (see also what HN did to Lemmy the other day).
Many of the users of Apollo and RIF are using them and the APIs that reddit was providing for free before to avoid paying for things and seeing ads making monetization of those and supporting the backends even more difficult (not that Lemmy and friends want to pay for server costs with advertisements - they'd rather donations - but that isn't a reliable income stream).
Discord has no threads/comments/subcomments structure. It's nearly Impossible to find old information and every discussion has 50+ messages about other topics inbetween because it's a chat, not a forum. Unuseable as a reddit replacement.
The thing is that most users of reddit and discord don't care about older topics. Go to any large sub with lax moderation and watch how many times the same questions are posted.
For many communities, it doesn't matter if its a reddit replacement with the reddit functionality but rather that it is a place to host that community (that will adapt to and complain about the confines of their new home).
It only lacks real functionality as a reddit replacement for those people who are lurkers and want to consume a digest of past content (and maybe add a forgettable comment to the end of a too long comment tree).
So don’t do it for free. Start with paid subscriptions to post or something and build that way. Similar things have been done before - the famous tenbux.
Most Internet forum mods are low lifes who moderate for the little sense of power it gives them. There are plenty of those to go around. The reality is Reddit can literally ban all their current mods and get a new set of mods pretty easily.
That's a harsh accusation. I moderate bc i love the topic and want to encourage others.
Banning and blocking posts isnt the powertrip ppl think. It's not like being a cop and stealing cash, cocaine, and raping hookers.
It's more "oh another bot is posting chat room ads in bad grammar.
Ive seen many interesting forums falter bc a mod gets a six month interest and never logs back in again, forgets their password to their alt, etc.
And reddit already has AI duh to delete spam. It'a just not 100% so ppl have to do it.
Also mods do more than just enforce rules. It'a more abt setting the tone through pinned comments, certain flair and CSS etc. Also, intelligent cross-posting. You know, all kinds of nurturing shit. That takes TLC and passion. Lots of people like my subs but no one ever wants to help mod them.
You are far off the mark. If I were you, I would get some real data and while that is in process, reconsider comments, until you know they have a solid basis.
I have helped to build 100k plus subs and currently moderate smaller subs I have a personal interest in. Along the way, I got to know people and have asked enough questions to get a sense of it.
I am about to step away from it entirely due to the damage Reddit appears to be doing right now. I showed up for the original by users, for users vision Aaron was a part of.
Each Reddit sale has burdened it so people could turn future value into cash today and we are now at the point where making that equation work YET AGAIN just might not go as well.
Fact is a ton of the smaller high value communities are moderated by people who value the topic the sub is about and who have domain knowledge. These communities are great!
Now there are low lifes power tripping for sure. Don't get me wrong there. And they are replaceable too. I do not see the percentages being in line with your statements here, that's all.
Few moderators care about getting some compensation. But they really do care a lot about being able to do for their users.
Reddit is not by users for users anymore. Has not been for a long time.
Seems a line got crossed this time around.
Now is the time for someone to build out the original Reddit vision. It was workable, sustainable and all that too. It would even pay out a nice living for the owners.
What it won't do is generate bazillion of dollars.
And what the current vision won't do is garner trust and loyalty among users.
Calling them "lowlifes" is too far, but you're absolutely right that there are hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands, of users who would jump at the chance to moderate any given subreddit with 10k+ subscribers. For more popular subs you could even get them to pay for the privilege.
Those are exactly the wrong people to be moderators. The best ones end up doing it.
The worst are paid to do it.
Those are the extents of the moderator space. One conclusion I came to is to never promote anyone who asks to be a moderator. Always approach solid candidates.
I think it's a bit of both. I'd agree that the mods handling for free, several very large subreddits - which would require as many hours as a full time job - are doing it because having power over others gives them a high.
But the mods running smaller subs might spend an average of a few minutes per day moderating and the rest enjoying their community.
I'm not defending Spez by no means, I've been a user of reddit since early 2010 and it has changed A LOT and I really don't like how it's now, I prefer the more anarchy reddit from that era, but 95% of the times data backs up decisions, even bad ones, and users don't know shit about them, and when something bad as the Apollo drama comes out, it becomes a hatred echo chamber. I really hope this is case because I use a 3rd party app for reddit (Relay, the best one obviously) and I would hate to see it die in favor of the mountain of shit the official app is, I don't know went through their minds when developing it, there were apps with literal a decade of experience to take example from and they did that crap.
I feel its something like #2. Correct me if I'm wrong: reddit userbase us say, a fraction of FB or TikTok. They've made the numbers and attracting and tailoring the site to the TikTok audience is way more profitable than what they have now.
They've been doing that since the reddit redesign thing, trying to go more mainstream yet.
I think that's why they feel they can burn bridges
People will leave Reddit as much as they have left Twitter, i.e. not much. The main problem is in the fact that lots of Reddit users seem to think that Reddit is some kind of “community” that “depends” on its users, when the truth is that Reddit is a company and the dependence relationship is the other way around. It’s hard to accept but Reddit is a dysfunctional colossus that is simply not feasible to replicate at this point, and as such the management can pretty much do as they please.
> It’s hard to accept but Reddit is a dysfunctional colossus that is simply not feasible to replicate at this point, and as such the management can pretty much do as they please.
History proves otherwise. Colossuses have fallen. You can't rely on size to guarantee impunity for shitty actions.
I still think Huffman’s decisions might yet end up a cautionary tale.
Even if he brings in strikebreakers to moderate the closed subreddits the site will face a tidal wave of spam which isn’t going to make the causal users happy.
I think a simpler explanation is one that’s missing from a lot of the conversations on this. Huffman is singularly focused on pumping up the valuation for Reddit’s upcoming IPO. All other considerations are secondary. He doesn’t care about the users. He doesn’t care about third-party developers. He doesn’t care about the long-term survival of the platform. He’s just razor focused on his big payday.
I think maybe the "vice versa" version works equally well, too. As long as you can convincingly appear incompetent enough, you can often get away with supervillain levels of malice these days.
Either way, your genius twist on that old phrase wins an upvote from me.
IMO, the profitability plan involves moving everyone to official App. They expect backlash, but believe they could manage it with various tactics, which they are making it up as they go.
People want a free website where they can do whatever they want, but they can’t be required to pay, it has to be financed through ads but they have to be able to block these ads. Oh, and content advertisers don’t want to be associated with has to be freely accessible.
Unsurprisingly this is not sustainable, investors are paying for the site and ultimately they want to see a return. Money talks, bs walks.
Reddit gets over 4 billion visits a month. That’s really not comparable to the Chans. And they surely have a lot of trouble staying afloat because nobody wants to advertise there. Moot let it go for a reason.
>What do you do when incompetence would be unbelievable in scope and malice would be unbelievably incompetent.
Given that incompetence is more harmful than malice, you stay pessimistic, and still blame incompetence. Simply because, if you're pessimistic, the worst that can happen tells you that you were right.
A malicious but competent person will cause damage to a few, when it's desirable for him. While an incompetent but non-malicious person will cause damage to everyone, including himself, at random intervals, regardless of his own desires.
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On-topic. I think that Reddit is trying to capitalise on business customers, using its platform to train its AI models with. If that's correct, then even if the users reacting negatively leave, and this puts a dent on Reddit's profit, Reddit will still profit more from those business customers.
Even if that vapid saying was in any way a rule, we already know they are malicious -- this is the same person who silently edited the content of users' posts.
>Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
Why not both? This is the platform that literally built itself off of registering fake accounts and posting spam to make themselves look more active than they were, after all[0]. Reddit administration is a unique blend of malicious incompetence. I call it malicincompetence.
For example, spez in particular notably was caught editing the posts of /r/the_donald posters he was in a shouting match with. This is malicious, because the admins demonstrated that they're willing to fuck with historical records to defame their enemies. But it's also incompetent, because it turned a bunch of fascists[1] into martyrs. If he had just banned /r/TD then and there, or even just that poster, it would have been less malicious and less incompetent at the same time.
Going deeper, a lot of malicious behavior is itself inherently stupid. That's the idea behind the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: betrayal is advantageous only when you don't think more than a step ahead. Once you do, then tit-for-tat[2] becomes better, possibly with some kind of forgiveness term if random or accidental betrayal is possible. None of Reddit's CxO suite[3] thinks this way. They think their users are resources to be taken for granted, except they're also really bad at doing that. And Reddit users have just gotten used to shouting down these kinds of stupid changes until the admins fold, which they usually do, because Reddit doesn't have the kind of user lock-in to make people just stick with it.
[1] Ok, I don't have citations for the victim of Spez's tomfoolery being a fascist, but /r/TD was notorious back then for banning anyone who wasn't enthusiastically riding the Trump train that hard.
[2] Do what the opponent did last round.
[3] Except maybe Ellen Pao, only because she wasn't around long enough for Reddit to rub off on her.
The reality is that the Reddit users that actually care about this enough to show up and rage in the AMA are also the ones that are almost completely unmonetizable. So I doubt there was ever really any risk of major loss from this.
But the markets have never ever judged websites by "monetizable user count", just "user count". Click-through rate is about the closest thing to the metric and that itself is highly context specific.
I guess so. But I also suspect that their value isn't as much as they think it is. Some will actually leave, but most will stay and just continue to grumble about it. And keep working for free.
It's worthwhile pointing out his wasn't a genuine AMA - it was a "ask me anything we have a pre-written answer for" [1]. It's an obvious thing to do because the whole situation has been received badly by the community, so you'd expect some preparation of good answers to likely questions, but to copy and paste blindly the pre-written answers from the PR team is just pure laziness and a blatant disregard for the community you've built.
Almost EVERY question went unanswered. He spent approximately 35 minutes replying to 14 questions, essentially all of which were from Reddit "PowerMods" (that cadre of 6 moderators that control >118 of the Top 50 subreddits), and most of those answers were single paragraph rehashes of the same point: "We'll keep talking to developers", and multiple of those questions appear to have scripted, as noted when he answered a question: "A: blah blah blah", then rapidly edited out the "A:".
The whole idea had Bill Cosby "meme me" vibes right from the start and after he answered the blackmail question I think he'd have been better off talking about Rampart. Why would you even answer that question?
The first dozen posts on its user page are for subreddits not listed on here, all of which it moderates: randominterface, aistuff21, genkicourses_com, genkicourses_cheapest, I could go on and on and on.
So I have no idea what this random snippet is meant to disprove. It's certainly not reliable or complete.
Automoderator is a bot. It does auto moderation tasks like spam removal.
Did you forget that you wrote 'top 50 subreddits?' That is the list of the mods for the top 100 subreddits and which top 100 subs they mod in. I am not sure how you think that makes it a 'gist'. I suggest you expand your ability to parse datasets properly.
It's actually funny how exactly it went how everybody expected. It's like watching a movie that's setting up an incredibly obvious ending, and so the whole time you're waiting for a last minute plot twist to happen because it's just way too simplistic if they don't.
But no, it went exactly as anyone could've predicted, no notes.
1. they didn't budge an inch
2. spez is a fucking jerk as always
3. it was over after only a small handful of questions, some of which may have been preplanned
4. we learned nothing new.
It's exactly what everyone saw coming. gg.
This most definitely seems to me like it was more of a "how dare they question me" spur of the moment decision by spez than a legitimate PR effort. At the same time it just reinforces the obvious conclusion that third party app devs were lied to and set up to fail.
Just shouting this request into the ether, but if these reddit client developers teamed up to create a new alternate backend with a small API fee, the result could be amazing.
A combination of their power user base and a small monthly subscription fee for access could result in something that can retain a niche subreddit feel across the site.
With the possible exception of /r/science the larger subreddits are flooded in low effort posts and mostly unusable.
If they don't say anything, they're incommunicative. But if talk and say effectively nothing, they might get egg on their face for people watching. However they can convince people who don't pay much attention that it's just a disagreement.
You’re asking why do CEOs speak out? Do q&as? Fireside chats? Of course they all speak corporate speak
Most of the top questions were childish and useless, asking to get rid of the ads, go back to the original spirit of Reddit. Comparing the pressure and decision making process of a CEO who raised 1.3 BILLION dollars to some basement dweller who’s shutting down their app out of spite (pretty sure they could sell the app for $5M today no questions asked)
After so many rounds of raising, I’m being generous if I guess that spez owns 5% of Reddit stock. Reddit is being run right now by the biggest investment firms in SV. Rigjtfully looking for ROI. It would literally make them more money to shut down Reddit than to do what everyone in the AMA is asking them to do
In terms of accessibility, I understand they have a roadmap. I don’t understand how they don’t have 400 ADA lawsuits on court right now. Every corporation I worked for had been flooded by copy paste ADA lawsuits, and an app or 3rd party apps aren’t enough, the website has to be fully accessible
Too many sales. Too many dollars handed out today for expected value in the future.
The trouble is people showed up for what Reddit was. Let us call that the Aaron Reddit. That Reddit was sustainable and could be expressed as by users for users.
That vision picked up a ton of users who love threaded, frank, unfettered discussion. It was never going to make millions, but it would have endured for a very long time.
All that changed upon each sale. And this last one is brutal, leaving current owners holding the bag.
These changes to crank out big returns are toxic to a very high percentage of users. And they are where the content comes from too.
Someone else is going to reproduce the original Reddit vision and when they do, this one will dry up just like Digg did.
Really? "Rightfully"?? I guess someone owes me money, because I did a few investments where the ROI was $0, some of them intentionally bad (family > money).
But in the startup world it’s make profit, sell, or shut down
Do people really prefer Reddit shut down or be owned by Meta, just because of an app made by a single dev, that someone could buy and keep alive, or 10 companies could recreate tomorrow?
> But in the startup world it’s make profit, sell, or shut down
In the startup world 90% of companies are shut down because their ideas are not viable. If reddit still isn't viable after 18 years it might be time to pull the plug and move back to something sustainable.
> or be owned by Meta
I voted for kodos
> or 10 companies
Would that be the total number of companies that could pay the money reddit wants for API access?
> Would that be the total number of companies that could pay the money reddit wants for API access?
That isn't the issue. Even those who applied for access willing to pay have been ignored -- it was never about paying for access, it is about shutting down apps they don't control.
I’m fine with Reddit being shut down. Been a user over 10 years with 200 k-ish karma. Tried using the official app for years, switched to Apollo, and haven’t looked back. I’ll probably Shreddit my account and find other uses of my time.
Thank you for this. I know people thank you a lot, and maybe it gets old to hear it, but it’s genuinely nice to see someone who’s librarian-like in the midst of drama. Organizing all of these threads is just really nice, and something that you really didn’t have to do. (If you didn’t do it, it’s not like someone else would.)
Reddit cannot go public. Its product is volunteer work by moderators and users to produce value. There’s no way to take that work and guarantee its delivery on a quarterly cycle.
This is all a ridiculous self-delusion that Reddit management has engaged in that the platform is really the “value add”. It’s not. Reddit has become the shorthand for cut through ML spam and that’s based on users constantly posting up to the minute accurate data. There’s almost no historical value to that data.
I think a place like reddit should be a non-profit foundation rather than a business. The Archive Of Our Own community was able to do it, the reddit community can do it too.
I'd feel a lot more comfortable giving my time to "the community" under an arrangement like that, too. The fediverse has its place, for sure, but I think a centralised platform run by a non-profit has the best chance of unseating Reddit in the short term.
It could even connect to the fediverse, but with its own moderation hierarchy etc. so it has its own culture and doesn't _rely_ on the fediverse.
I'd suggest raising money to buy Reddit from their investors, but this point I don't want Steve making a profit. I think it is basically possible to build a new Reddit that's run by a non-profit and (hopefully) stays off of variable cost infrastructure for stability.
Or more precisely, it was great when the internet was small and people were mostly well behaved. And as forums and then platforms with easier access and better moderation tools took over, it became nothing but spam, only leaving alt.binaries, so much that many people saw USENET as just a network for piracy, like The Pirate Bay or Megaupload.
I don’t know about the better moderation part. With the right reader one could subscribe to a moderator of choice. That’s an elegant feature I’ve never seen anywhere since.
Plus the vast vast majority of reddit content consists of mindless nonsense, or even worse, so it's probably best that USENET didn't continue growing in popularity.
Thats actually the best structure for reddit because of its coopertive nature, and the difficulty of making money from it without compromising its essential nature.
It's not even profitable _now_ with all their monetization. But their overhead is millions of $/year. There is precedent for non-profit sites of that size but it won't be easy.
Honestly with the amount of charity fundraising that reddit does, I bet they could pull it off. Just recently someone accidentally gave $15k to charity and in response, a bunch of users raised an additional $55k [1]. If they did intentional, annual fundraising with clear goals I wouldn't be surprised if reddit the non-profit organization could be self-sustaining.
But I'm just some guy on the internet who doesn't actually know anything about non-profits.
I also suspect their tech stack is a huge ball of bloated inefficiencies that costs them much much much more than the bare metal and the bandwidth would.
I think Archive Of Our Own (AO3) solves a much easier problem (hosting bbcode text), and even then, after many years, they are unable to get enough volunteers to implement a direct message system. It's not quite apples and oranges, but I still don't think the same model could possibly work for Reddit. Yes, Reddit users have made some amazing tools for moderation, but they are still fully dependent on preexisting, complex engineering work by the Reddit employees, including the API. Maybe a better comparison would be Wikipedia, but again, much simpler problem.
This would assume that spez is not doing exactly what the Board of directors want.
I think is he, I think they think this will be better for the long term, users will be upset for a little while, but will not actually leave.
He has already said 3rd party apps make up a small amount of "traffic" and "90% fall in to the free plan" anyway.
So they are betting this is a tempest in a tea pot...
Sadly they are probably right because people are sheep and creatures of habit, for me I am going to archive my data before the 30th and purge all of my accounts. I personally am done with reddit, but I am likely the minority
> inflame their most passionate users against the company
this is think is the disconnect, they do not believe that is what they are doing, and given my tech bubble I am not sure they are wrong.
they have the data, i dont. I am sure their "most passionate users" are the ones using the official apps, and new interfaces, posting, upvoting, and commenting on cat photos, and cute animal memes, which is where their ads are targeted.....
I think he's referring to poor judgement by the CEO in immature PR handling. Even if raising the API prices is the right business decision according to the data, publicly slandering the Apollo developer seems like an unambiguously childish move
I highly doubt this is what their board had in mind when they said, "we need you to be on track to being profitable by q4 of 2023 so an IPO can take place".
I also don't trust what they are saying with regards to 90% will fall into the free plan. Is that 90% by volume of requests, by api key, by user id? It seems like the data isn't being shared in a transparent way.
You can have 90% of Reddit oauth clients never hit the free tier limit, but that doesn't mean shit if 90% of those oauth clients aren't actually being used. The fact that Steve keeps getting called out with receipts doesn't give me confidence in their assertions, given the lack of data.
haha, imagine any HN'er giving social-media users (sorry, "community reps") a position of power and governance in their startup. No. God no. Fuck no, nobody in their right mind is letting the redditors drive the bus and set strategic direction and monetization/profitability/ec ("governance").
and you're probably guaranteed those community reps are the most annoying powermods/etc who you really kinda want gone anyway. No, don't, stop, come back, etc.
Look, this is going to be a bit blunt but I've seen these crises in major social media before (see: the Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka story) and the reality is that people's estimations of the value of their posting is much higher than reality. Yes, it will be a big ding to have powerusers and powermods depart the site. Yes, they will get some shreddit and GDPR removal of valuable content. The vast majority will not GDPR, and will keep posting cat pictures and discussing the merits of Android phones and scrolling memes and jerking off to hentai and onlyfans models, and that's what Reddit apparently wants to optimize for.
The takeaway from the Q+A with spez today is that they get it, they understand where you're coming from and they understand the community frustration, and they don't care. They've set their course and they're going to ride through it and the traffic on new.reddit and the native app is more important than losing 20-30% of users. And you can debate whether that will have long-term negative impacts (probably!) but that may not even be something that spez cares about after he cashes out. Or he may view it as a critical long-term goal that is worth a substantial amount of short-term pain.
But when you're Twitter, or Reddit, or even Tumblr, you can ride it out. Hell even Facebook is still fine.
Nobody is going to put redditors on the board to keep powermods from leaving. If that's your metric for success, put powermods on the board or I'm Going Outside, just close the browser window and get started with the grass-touching.
If you do that on your ycombinator startup you probably won't be running a ycombinator startup anymore.
Apparently the value of all that shit posting is in powering LLMs. Something Stackoverflow, Reddit, Twitter are all upset about. Most likely all the image/art hosting sites and forums as well.
It’s a bit strange, on the one hand content is cheap, on the other hand it props up some very impressive tools (and valuations).
It feels like these two should be better coupled, but thats a problem I haven’t seen a solution to.
The Reddit board of directors don’t represent the founders, who have probably been long ago diluted to less than 10%
They represent investors who sunk 1.3 billion dollars into a company who was spending millions providing 3rd party apps a free api where users can’t be monetized. And is not currently profitable
If my previous experience means anything, the board wanted the price to be 100x higher or to shut down the api completely, and were talked down by spez
> This is all a ridiculous self-delusion that Reddit management has engaged in that the platform is really the “value add”. It’s not. Reddit has become the shorthand for…
I don’t understand how people can argue that Reddit is somehow not valuable and then go on to explain how Reddit is valuable.
The “work” that posters and moderators do isn’t a deliverable that investors care about in their quarterly reports. They only care about revenue, be it from ads or customers paying for features.
It's going to be a fun thought experiment at the bar for years now - how would you have brought reddit to profitability starting in Q1 2023?
Maybe there was a way to lever that value for ML training - and the constantly updated nature of the "training database" - into a profit model unlike any other social media app. Not the kind of innovation this team wanted to build, clearly.
She was talking about how, for example a wine forum could make money connecting wine sellers and buyers
do it
Instead of boring ads, make it possible for communities to engage with relevant businesses. Affiliate links, coupons and such. Meaningful dialogue. I am a former mod of /r/usbchardware and we were close to this a few times, with Sanho Hyper and SlimQ. Make yourself the "house brand" of the sub by engaging in good faith and you should be rewarded.
But even just affiliate links, as a former mod of /r/usbchardware, we very often recommend this and that and if we did that with affiliate links then everyone would be better off. And you can make a reputation system here which makes it much harder to just spam garbage.
This is an off-the-cuff idea which probably needs refinement but no way, no way you can't make good money from such hypertargeted communities. Just think outside of the box a little. Corporate spam gets you booted. A company offering insight, honest good advice gets you boosted. It's ... possible. There is a way making money for everyone involved which doesn't involve dirty play.
...or charge users $x/mo if they want to use third-party clients.
None of reddit's monetization so far has been even remotely appealing to me. I don't click on the ads (except by accident), I don't buy the NFTs, I don't pay for gold or get the coins or whatever. It's all stupid, asinine bullshit as far as I'm concerned.
Just like Twitter, the monetization plan is "a bunch of stuff that doesn't make the core experience better". A blue check mark? A stupid-looking avatar hat? Give me something tangible and I'll pay for it.
An MMO selling cosmetics makes sense. A social media site selling cosmetics... not so much.
Having actually done this, it is a loosing direction (sadly). The idea is great, but people just don’t participate in that way. The closest I got was a Watch community that linked to eBay and I would add affiliate links if there were none. But that was one forum out of a million.
I work for a photography site. While money is tight thanks to less money being in the industry, most of the money we make is still with direct contacts, be it the major companies advertising their products, or smaller merchants advertising their stock. All context targeted, not user profiled.
I help manage a few associated medium sized reddit communities. We share a mod team. We are joining the protest.
We talked to an admin who reviewed our logs and they were surprised by the fact that our community was modded as a team because most of the communities that they had seen and worked with were apparently modded almost exclusively by a single person.
I thought at first that this was a joke because our head mod does most of the work and because we get new mods every year and they always leave.
So when our head mod leaves the subs will die. We'll become /r/worldpolitics. And there's a good chance that he'll leave during the protest.
What I'm trying to say is that we often see moderators as interchangeable, one leaves and another joins and nothing changes, but the reality is that good mods are scarce. I don't expect an inexperienced mod to join a sub with half a million users and know what to do. Most of our team doesn't know how to use the automoderator. I'm the only one who knows how to use the custom automation bot that I wrote. And then there's the issue of understanding the culture.
So whether reddit lives or dies in my opinion won't be a matter of how fast reddit can replace moderators but a matter of how many moderators will stay and put up with the bullshit because it has become part of their lives.
Yeah, my experience was that there's like 20-100 people total that spend all day every day actively modding for the whole of reddit, then a ton of people who do next to nothing
This is the issue that it feels like Reddit doesn't get. Maybe those people are 0.0001% of the user base, but if they leave then everything they were managing goes straight to hell, subreddits become choked with off-topic posts, spam, porn, and toxic behavior. The 99% of users who only ever lurk, and only rarely if ever comment, will stop having a reason to come around, and they'll just dwindle away.
It feels very much like every story of the toxic boss who says "my way or the highway" and then is all surprised pikachu when the only person who knows how things work chooses "the highway" and everything falls apart in their absence. I guess we'll see how it actually plays out.
You will run out of the people doing it remotely well very quickly though.
The high quality modding of askhistory, anthropology and other science sub reddits are provided by actual domain experts working for free. You can find someone to replace them, but the quality will plummet and the users will leave.
You're assuming that the current mods are already doing it "remotely well." There are no shortage of cases where people have been banned from a subreddit for ridiculous reasons, myself included (e.g. talking about studies that support safe sleep practices for infants). When Ceddit still worked, it was eye-opening to see how much shadow-censorship was happening, and for the most petty reasons.
The subreddits you mentioned are good examples where domain knowledge is a very desirable trait in a mod. But by and large, it's not necessary for a mod to have deep domain knowledge in order to be able to enforce rules consistently. There's a reason why it's called being a "glorified internet janitor."
All they have to do is keep the ship afloat until it goes public, once thats done they cash out with their millions/billions and then to hell with the site. They'll resign, get fired or whatever but they wont care because they'll have their money by then.
> ...calling out the developer, Christian Selig’s, “behavior and communications” as being “all over the place” and saying he couldn’t see Reddit working with the developer further.
Yes, there's only one problem spez, aside from your track record, we also have basically every other major API user voicing the exact same concerns. Maybe the somewhat erratic communications have something to do with breaking over a decade of trust and giving only a few weeks notice.
On another note, I definitely can't see myself working with or using Reddit in any way in the future.
Reddit is another notch. They got to where they were by building goodwill. It was open source, the APIs were openly accessible, they fought against censorship and they were relatively measured in their moderation. Now? It's just another fucking ad company. There's nothing left.
I was hoping that Spez would say something like "we're reviewing our decisions based on feedback" or similar, but no. The AMA clenched it for me, and I deleted the Apollo apps off my phone and iPad in solidarity with Selig.
Maybe keep the app around if you have a subscription; Selig is going to do refunds for Apollo subscriptions, and you will probably need to have the app installed to decline the refund (if you want to continue to support him rather than get your money back).
Christian also built the app out of college and is now thrust into C-level conversations? I would nominate him next CEO of Reddit if he wasn't a bit all over the place.
It’s extremely clear that Spez doesn’t know how to handle Christian.
Christian hasn’t been beaten down by years of corporate ladder climbing. He knows how to protect himself, but does it in ways that others don’t often see in the business world.
Even the whole “$10m extortion” thing feels overblown. Like I can’t believe a CEO would ever take a comment like that anymore seriously than a passing joke/jesting comment in that situation. Christian’s point is true. If Reddit is having such a hard time delivering a quality app, they can buy any third party app.
The fact that Spez seems so stuck on that seems to indicate the success of Apollo is really weighing on him.
>The fact that Spez seems so stuck on that seems to indicate the success of Apollo is really weighing on him.
He could've just listened to users. Instead, Reddit became what it became. Users derided the various changes and redesigns, even its own app. Yet the entire time, and I've said it elsewhere on HN, Reddit's attitude towards users has essentially been, "Nope, we know what's best, you are wrong. The beatings will continue until morale improves."
I'm not so quick to assume that Reddit hasn't listened to users.
I read something that only 10% (or less) of people are still using old.reddit.com. There very well could be data indicating that 90% of users are just as happy and engaged on the new site.
That being said, my impression is the “legacy” users are a vocal minority. I suspect legacy users will notice a decline in quality, but “new” users won’t. The new experience is already so muzzled that it’s barely even the same communities.
Christian would be a much better CEO than Steve Huffman, despite his clear lack of negotiation skills. Reddit is phenomenally mismanaged, it's somehow worse than both incarnations of Twitter
Being profit-driven is a fine model for a business. However, it doesn't make business sense to alienate developers and users in service of that goal.
Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity. They have this huge diverse community and can't seem to find a way to monetize it in any way other than the most basic advertising model.
They always seem to do things in conflict with the community rather than in concert with them.
> Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity
I thought reddit was really clever for the first ~7 years of operations. They replaced forums, fostered communities, gained a reputation as a place to get real people's takes, and attracted people willing to have interesting conversations. The upvote/downvote system that is now so common was made popular from reddit. They brought awareness to important political topics surrounding net neutrality. They were leaders in early Web2.0, where each user saw content that appealed to them, because everyone could choose which subreddits were in their homepage. It was highly social and highly engaging.
After a certain point in 201X the dark patterns began to appear. I was almost fully disengaged by the start of 2013. I can't remember the details, but I remember being increasing disappointed with reddit every time I returned for a brief visit.
I remember when they fired Victoria Taylor who was the ambassador for their celebrity AMAs. At that exact time, AMAs were absolutely hopping with celebrities and even President Obama. Reddit was getting huge media coverage and that was likely lots of new traffic.
...and then they killed it...
They still have celebrity AMAs but that was the peak and it immediately lost most relevance.
Victoria getting the boot really was a major turning point for a lot of users I think, certainly for me. The site hasn't felt the same since.
I still have some pretty negative feelings about that whole situation, and am confused every time I'm reminded of it. Why wasn't there more explanation? Why didn't they at least replace her with someone who played a similar role in a similar way? Did they not realize that people really liked her approach, or did they just not care? A lot of goodwill was burned that day.
I'm kind of vaguely intrigued by the current situation, but I'm realizing I mostly stopped actually caring much a long time ago. It feels like there's been a vast & growing chasm between the better parts of the community and the site's management for quite a while. They did not in fact "remember the human".
Yeah I feel the same way. Reddit was this organic thing and IAMA being created out of nothing and growing into something unique and interesting is just one example. It was fun and interesting and Victoria was part of the Reddit organization that was in on that.
When they let her go, it was a signal that Reddit corporate doesn't want to be a part of the fun. They just want to do their own thing that nobody likes while the rest of us do our own thing. Reddit the site started being hostile to Reddit the community instead of embracing it.
Hey, whenever someone is building a very strong reputation that could survive outside of Reddit, they get shutdown. Maybe there's a pattern? I'm genuinely asking.
There was a dedicated AMA app and it was poised to become an independent revenue stream. The leadership's outright destruction of the AMA platform in their attempt to monetize it looks like a microcosm of what they're doing to the entire site today. If they start booting moderators during the blackout, that will complete the congruence.
None of that was all that original... Slashdot had the links & stories with votes and a thriving, nested comment section (although it was curated), and link aggregators were a dime a dozen. And I mean, there was Digg. They put it all together in an effective way, though.
Nearly all businesses are profit-driven. My wife owned a medical practice, and while she chose the profession because she wanted to help people, she built a company around it to put food on our table. There's nothing wrong with that.
But optimizing for short-term profit over long-term revenue is just nuts. Apple didn't become a trillion dollar company by focusing on maximizing profit above all else every single quarter.
Why do you assume Redditors won’t just use the mainline mobile app? Honest question and I don’t mean personally why you won’t, but the average user that looks and clicks on ads on Reddit?
The long and repeated history of social media platforms shutting down 3rd party apps, despite lots of outrage, is not the best track record to bet on some mods closing down subs for weekend making a difference.
People might say Reddit is different because they like to get stirred up fighting authority like net neutrality but the next question is where will they go instead?
Betting against the network effect is a losing battle.
Whether Reddit should have acted differently and reformed their bottom feeding design/web/mobile teams long ago is a different question.
> Why do you assume Redditors won’t just use the mainline mobile app? Honest question and I don’t mean personally why you won’t, but the average user that looks and clicks on ads on Reddit?
I'm sure that's what reddit is counting on, and it's probably true.
The issue is that subreddit moderators are not normal users, and work entirely for free. They don't get paid, and are vital to maintaining the health and tone of each subreddit.
And unlike e.g. content creators on twitter, they have nothing tying them to the platform. They don't benefit financially, even indirectly, from the arrangement. They're working for some combination of a sense of (altruism/community responsibility) and (satisfaction/egotism). That's a setup that practically encourages them to jump ship in this situation.
I'm sure that won't immediately hurt the extremely large, general subs which reddit would actively support regardless, but it could do a lot of damage to everything else. In a vacuum the remaining platform (a small percentage of valuable subs) might be exactly what reddit wants! But if a competing network of forums starts up, it might be able to eat reddit in exactly the same way reddit ate digg.
I’ve always thought this too. Especially because I believe (I have no data to back this up) a huge amount of their traffic is from search engine results.
As search results became gamed and sites became SEO machines, finding a Reddit thread discussing the thing you want to know about is a breath of fresh air.
Nobody else has that. Reddit has a ton of really niche content that people want to read, spread out over a large amount of time. Why are they focused on becoming a place where people infinite scroll reposts of TikToks?
Instead, they went the route of introducing features that at best cannibalized other features (chat and the regular message system - it’s confusing) and at worst just seem like hasty add ons or complete stabs in the dark.
Even Discord has a system to directly monetarily sponsor servers you want to support, why on earth doesn’t that exist for Reddit? Good lord. It’s such a simple thing to add. Instead they charge money to customize your avatar like it’s a Fortnite skin. It’s insane.
They also try to monetize the whole thing with Reddit Gold or whatever where you can pay like five bucks to put a badge on someone else's post or comment.
Although I wouldn't know a whole lot about it because after a decade-plus on Reddit I've still never bought any.
This was such a confusing feature to me. I just looked and my Reddit account is 13 years old, and I've also never bought any of these "rewards" because they seem so empty and useless. The person you're giving it to gets nothing other than some images above their post, so I _know_ that if I spend the money on one it's basically just a donation to Reddit which I'm not keen to do if I get nothing out of it. They also have their "premium" subscription which seems even more useless.
Now, if they had implemented it in a way similar to how Brave did their rewards where people would get some share of the reward (say, 5% of the money?) then I would be way more likely to buy it and would probably also participate a lot more. Imagine if some people could make a living off of Reddit the same way they do off of YouTube or Twitch!
I pay for Reddit Gold. Reddit has brought a lot of value to my life, I don't like seeing ads, and I like the idea of supporting non-ad-based business models.
I've supported it on and off for years and currently have Reddit Gold. It's easy to justify the cost when considering the conversations over the years and the amazing resource it's been for making decisions or learning.
I was already considering dropping Gold at the end of this payment cycle due to some of their advertising bedfellows, but this mess has really sealed the deal.
Maybe Reddit doesn't have a breakout competitor for people to jump to atm, but I suspect blood is in the water and we're about to see an influx of alternatives.
Twitter engagement is definitely lower[0], though it’s difficult to know from the outside how much and we can’t trust their numbers.
Anecdotally, the accounts I follow in various niche subject areas have both depleted in number, with I’d estimate around 20-25% having stopped posting altogether, and cut back on how often they post if they did stay.
My personal impression of post-purchase Twitter is that the quality has declined significantly as paid accounts crowd the top responses. But, I don't have a good sense of it, since I removed multiple accounts and haven't been back.
I'm serious about not participating in or contributing to products and platforms It could be bias, but I don't think I'm alone. Maybe new people will take my place, but this whole thing obviously puts a damper on the word of mouth marketing they were getting out of me.
I have never bought them but I have actually received a few silver and gold badges like that for some of my comments. So I guess that makes my account a fake then?
they used to give out reddit silver badge and other badges for free if you used the official app. I used that to give out a lot of badges to the community I moderate.
Ironically all the badges are from memes that were born on reddit...
Right! My reddit comments are public and reflect my preferences and interests pretty well. Yet I’ve never ever felt like clicking a reddit ad. Instagram on the other hand had me clicking on ads occasionally
Maybe they need better ad tooling and promotion of it. Probably big improvements to be made just in getting enough ad inventory to show something remotely relevant to a user.
Ads are Reddit are a notoriously poor investments compared to other social media sites. Maybe it's an intractable problem given the nature of the site or again maybe they just aren't engaging enough with the communities to target ads more specifically.
Maybe they should buy Apollo for $10m, at least it would be a revenue stream based on tangible user benefits rather than whatever cosmetic meme bullshit they think of next.
I installed their official app and just love how direct links from wrb, like this, or within app itself, just do not work at all. Otherwise, itstnot _that_ bad but compared to RIF (which I use/d) it's bad usability.
To Apollo and RIF guys, if you read this. You got some technical chops, you got some ux skills, you got some clout and, after all, you have some cash.. why not join forces and deploy reddit's clone to be used as a backend for both of your apps? You can hijack userbase, and keep growing on top of it, just like imgur did. (Follow me for more business advice)
The amazing thing to me was finding out how much the data the official app was using. Granted it has been a few years since I switched to Apollo but I was using in the 10-20 GB/month from the Reddit app.
> How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
Had he a modicum of awareness regarding the question, he would have also addressed the community engagement part of the question - to users, the most important part of the question.
"The community built our platform and we'll never forget that or make engagement unpleasant. We need your engagement." Had he said that, and then segued to profit, he at least would not have been betrayed by his predetermined inflexibility.
I think Reddit probably had a path to making a modest profit, but investors don't want the 2x dog. Now they're probably going to do the social media equivalent of selling the copper wiring from the walls.
It is wild that a company that is nearly two decades old and seemingly has never been profitable is doing an IPO. Who is going to buy their stock? What would make someone think that Reddit will suddenly turn things around in year 19 and actually become profitable?
anyone who wants to train an AI model on relatively authentic data and natural (for certain definitions of "normal") human interactions, I would assume
like IDK what the comps are, what is another large corpus with authentic interactions and scoring? internet archive is probably the closest (although substantially more valuable), maybe the google library project is semi analogous in scale and value (although obviously very different in nature).
I know this is repeated over and over but in the case of Reddit I think it’s pretty true. They should never have taken VC money. I don’t think technically they are doing anything that is very tricky. They have surely innovated on their tech stack but even the things they have tried to do seem pretty miserable. Their media player is horrendous and while they do have scale problems, I don’t see much happening on the product side. They have not done much to make admin’s life easier. Beyond the new UI they got years back, I am not sure what they have done to improve the product.
Maybe I have not paid close enough attention but Reddit feels mostly the same since forever.
They have tried all kinds of new offerings that have all fallen flat on their face since they keep ignoring their core product and power users. A few examples are: user profiles and following users directly instead of communities like Instagram, live chat rooms like Discord, live video streaming like Twitch, and a bunch of NFT nonsense like Trump.
It feels like there have been some desperate attempts at monetization over the past few years, with their "Coins" that you can use to "reward" comments/posts, NFTs, and paid avatar personalization. I imagine not very many users buy these, and they aren't really something that even a "whale" would end up buying a lot of because they are largely useless and don't enhance the experience of the site at all.
At this point, I think he should back up his claim that Selig has acted disingenuously by saying one thing in public and another in private. I'm not sure it's legally defamatory, but it's definitely a bad look for a nominal leader. The only example I'm aware of him providing (the 'threat') was pretty soundly debunked by the audio recording. Ignoring the merits of their individual cases, Selig has been transparent, and so is capturing the public sympathy, while Huffman looks like a sweaty Joseph McCarthy, claiming to have a briefcase full of evidence he won't show anybody.
Selig's response to that private/public claim was "Please feel free to give examples where I said something differently in public versus what I said to you. I give you full permission." He's doing very well at making Reddit look like a lying bully.
Funny was that he seems to have gotten his responses from a shared document with answers that his team prepared for him. At one point he copied "A: ...", which users noticed so he removed the "A:" afterwards.
To be fair to all parties, it doesn't seem unreasonable to have the CEO workshopping answers in a shared document with other team members and counsel during such an event.
To also be fair to all parties, it seems unbelievable such oversight would still result in him making the comments he did.
What'll really bake your noodle is that the question he was answering was almost certainly a plant. Extremely common "town hall" technique (see: the scandal where Clinton was fed "town hall" questions in advance by the DNC chairwoman.)
Any time you see an AMA run by a major corp or media property, it's all just a dog and pony show. Listen to some interviews the same person is giving media personalities and you'll see the same topics and talking points.
Thinking about it your theory makes absolute sense. Realistically such a shared document would otherwise just have a reference to the question and the answer without the necessity of describing the answer using "A:". Wow.
that applies to basically every company, Stripe is mentioned in the article you posted as well. Rising interest rates do that to high growth companies, Reddit actually declined slightly less than Stripe in comparison
I don't think he would; it's not anywhere near the echo chamber Twitter was when he bought it. He had a huge army of supporters cheering him driving the company into the ground...Reddit in the last year or two has pretty collectively come to despite the hell out of him and his "fans."
I can't remember the last time I saw an /r/all comment thread where Musk was spoken of in anything approaching a positive way. /r/programmerhumor absolutely eviscerated the man almost several times a day, in threads that saw wide visibility, where programmers explained to non-programmer redditors just how dumb the stuff he was doing was.
>it's not anywhere near the echo chamber Twitter was when he bought it
Are you really implying that the fact that Twitter (as opposed to Reddit) actually had a visible diversity of opinion on Musk as evidence that it's an echo chamber? The seething, petty hostility to Musk that is routinely on the front page of Reddit is so objectively correct to you that dissent from it must reflect echo chamber dynamics? Incredible.
If Reddit slightly disprefers Musk over preferring him, the entirety of the top of the comments will be anti-Musk. (And depending on sub, it's more than slightly.) Comparatively, tweets are more selectively filtered.
The fixed sorting of Reddit comments gives much less chance to come across comments you'll like if you're in a minority opinion.
Yeah, ultimately I think Reddit is structurally much more likely to lend itself to echo chambers because its community-based nature (organized around subreddits) gives it centralized targets of partisan attack: You can effectively disrupt speech not by actioning individual users at the account level but by just banning or heavily censoring subreddits where the disfavored speech is taking place.
This is of course largely what has happened, where subs with substantial right-of-center populations have been either banned (usually under the pretext of not being aggressive enough about policing for ever-evolving standards of "hate speech") or just co-opted by moderators who punish right-of-center speech in various ways (often indirectly, such as simply banning users who upset others by expressing disfavored views for the sake of community harmony.) Twitter cannot be co-opted in this way, really.
That said, it hadn't occurred to me that some people are so hostile to right-of-center perspectives that they would consider this censorship to result in a net reduction in "echo chambers", because presumably these perspectives are all so horrible that surely they can only exist in toxic, tightly-controlled spaces such as a Flat Earther community, etc.
/r/conservative is an odd example because I'm pretty sure everyone knows that the subreddit would be completely overrun by left-wing voices if they didn't enforce guardrails on this. At some point when tribal hatred becomes become sufficiently hot and lopsided in power, then the minority has no choice but to either leave or establish echo chambers. That describes the /r/conservative case imo.
In any case, I'm fully open to the idea that there are still right-wing echo chambers on Reddit. But the whataboutism is a weak distraction. The number of neutral spaces where people are allowed to effectively and openly disagree on hot-button policy issues has declined precipitously since the mid-2010s. Prominent powermods openly dictate what sort of opinions are "allowed" on various issues, and of course these boundaries are far to the left of the actual Overton Window of the populations whose democratic processes actually create policies.
What we're seeing here is exactly the sort of executive immaturity/arrogance that gets SO MANY startups in trouble.
Young men/aspiring founders: for the love of god understand that your investors are NOT the whole picture when it comes to leadership. You need to find yourself a graybeard/executive coach and pay them out the ass to tell you about things like:
That sounds a bit like Alexis Ohanian. Reddit really thrived under his leadership. Alexis approached reddit with curiosity and understanding. He was not a perfect leader, but he understood what reddit is.
Everything implemented after Huffman took over has been for the worse with exception for /r/place.
Felt so disappointed when I read that in the AMA thread. I guess it's not unexpected, someone stupid enough to make such an obvious lie would of course be stupid enough to also double down, but it really does dispel any remaining droplets of hope that their priorities could still be in some tiny way in the right place. Here's to hoping their valuation drops like a rock.
If it wasn't for stuff like that I might disregard it as another negotiation in the media, but yeah that's nuts. But at the same time I think they're uncorking a lot of festering resentment about other things that are wrong with the platform.
>The response was surprising. Unlike most companies, which try to soften their blows behind corporate PR speak, Huffman answered rather plainly.
I strongly disagree. The response is line with his past behavior and notice that nowhere in it does spez response address the fact that he was caught lying. That is exactly what corporate PR speak is. Deflecting away from lies and guilt and refusing to answer the question. He wants us to be mad the Apollo dev protected himself by recording the conversation.
Something similar also happened to me with my previous employer. After I quit, the founders tried to make it look like I was blackmailing them. Shortly after, they were forced to change their story (at least the one told to my ex-colleagues) because my colleagues knew why I had wanted to quit since months and they knew it didn't make any sense... Cringe. Anyway in my case, they told one story to employees and a different story to investors. Unfortunately, it's very easy for certain founders to tell 3 different stories to 3 different sets of people these days and the lies exist in parallel and never reconcile for years due to divergent incentives and class divides (and media filter bubbles).
"Unfortunately, it's very easy for certain founders to tell 3 different stories to 3 different sets of people these days and the lies exist in parallel and never reconcile for years due to divergent incentives and class divides (and media filter bubbles)."
"These days" .. but was it better before?
The ruling class literally spoke a different language (aristocraties in europe french and the clerics latin).
That made it even easier to seperate realities and not accidently share insights to peasants what they are not supposed to hear.
An intangible key performance indicator is qualitative rather than quantitative and can't be easily measured. Community clearly falls under any common definition you'll find.
That said, I don't think community could be considered tangible in any context?
I said "Community is an intangible KPI" and someone asked "What makes you say Community is intangible?" -- but I didn't say that. Then I said "Community is tangible" and what I meant by that is: There is a well understood definition of what a community is. Now you ask "How do you define tangible vs. intangible assets?" but I'm not saying that community value is easily convertible into economic value.
An asset is a resource with economic value that an individual, corporation, or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide a future benefit.
Assets are reported on a company's balance sheet. They're classified as current, fixed, financial, and intangible. They are bought or created to increase a firm's value or benefit the firm's operations.
An asset can be thought of as something that, in the future, can generate cash flow, reduce expenses, or improve sales, regardless of whether it's manufacturing equipment or a patent.
One thing you could consider is moderator interaction as increasing the value of the platform in proportion to the hours spent, like you do when accounting a salaried software developer as increasing the value of the product by getting paid. (It's a proxy, of course.)
I assume that shareholders are not stupid when it comes to the cost of potentially killing communities, and they believe that more ad exposure + some AI model based on Reddit's data will deliver more economic value than the current free API.
I think where the difference in conviction is:
- How much will killing 3rd-party apps as we know them affect Reddit's community health?
- How much will a deteriorated community health affect the future quality of Reddit data?
This happened to me too. After I left our company, my business partner told new investors there was never a CTO. However, for nearly a year we had jointly agreed I was CTO -- and he routinely put it in writing.
When the new investors found out, my business partner demanded I remove CTO from my website, writing it was "technically incorrect".
> founders to tell 3 different stories to 3 different sets of people these days and the lies exist in parallel and never reconcile for years due to divergent incentives and class divides (and media filter bubbles)
The cost of automated detection of story arbitrage is also falling, e.g. hypothetical StoryGPT analysis of testimony to a blockchain (or paper) notary.
The whole point of YC was to imbue every founder with "do not be evil" in their DNA. Otherwise, it's a cartel.
This is pretty clear-cut case of Huffman not only trying to lie publicly (for no apparent reason, no less!) but then further trying to damage his reputation.
I'm unreasonably upset about this, and should probably step away from computers for a bit. I don't know if I'm getting old and just feeling like "it's the end of an era," or what. But I grew up in a 2008 that was unlike anything on display here.
I thought someone would be on the phone with Huffman trying to convince him that lying publicly about a developer is a bad idea. But if they are, they're not getting the message through.
EDIT: the replies further illustrate the disconnect. I grew up on pg’s essays. You wouldn’t say those things if you merely thought of YC as an investment vehicle.
The fact that people are saying don’t be evil isn’t a big deal is… well, if you’ve ever read I Am Legend, the book (spoiler alert) ends with the main character realizing that he’s in a world of zombies, and that they have their own culture, unique and distinct from his. The zombies aren’t even zombies; they’re people, with their own views. But the culture is so foreign and alien to him that he realizes he’s a minority of one. Am I the only one who cares about don’t be evil?
Huffman isn’t merely a YC alum. He’s the alum. There were no alums before him. And now he blatantly made up a lie, publicly, about a developer, for no apparent reason and no apparent gain. It wasn’t even theoretically going to get him any gain. There seems to be no reason for the lie at all, and it’s hard to imagine something more evil than damaging someone’s reputation like that for no reason (short of doing something to physically harm someone or take away their money/resources). Reputation is everything in hacker culture.
> The whole point of YC was to imbue every founder with "do not be evil" in their DNA.
I'm sorry to say, but that's not in line with reality. Is there a specific source that has led you to believe this?
"Do not be evil" is a fairly vague tenet anyhow. The "whole point" of YC (if there ever was such a thing) at inception, was to test a thesis that pg et al had regarding startup incubation. It was actually a somewhat controversial idea at the time, so much so that YC had trouble finding investors.
Afaict, as long as you are a success, YC doesn't really care how you get there, as long as it isn't something illegal or otherwise obviously detrimental for investors. This is, of course, in part because one of the simpler proxies for "evil" is legality. Investors do often end up benefiting from legislation lagging behind tech and moral gray areas.
> I don't know if I'm getting old and just feeling like "it's the end of an era," or what. But I grew up in a 2008 that was unlike anything on display here.
The US has been pumping money into their economy (AKA, some chosen entities in it) since the middle of the 90's, with more and more countries just copying their strategy with time.
There was a decrease on the rate of money pumping on 2000, and a reversion for a month or two in 2008 (followed by an increase by an order of magnitude). It was an era.
> But I grew up in a 2008 that was unlike anything on display here.
Reddit in 2008 had open groups for sharing ("legal") sexually suggestive photos of underage girls. ie. they had like swimsuits and stuff on. Reddit has never been about morality.
At this point, they haven't been very successful financially and at acquiring power. Nobody cares what reddit wants... they're nobodys on the tech / business scene.
Now they're looking at all these financially successful and powerful companies and are regretting not selling out earlier. The reddit that people love probably wasn't ever going to be forever. Maybe as a non-profit like wikipedia? What's the point of continuing if you won't even get your "bastion of free speech"?
Reddit was never going to make it much further as a company with no moderation or explicit ethos (other than free exchange of ideas), with minimal advertisement and monetization. These changes have been executed poorly, but they needed to act quickly. Basically, they're trying to put the genie back into the bottle, not be "the cool" social media company, and keep things afloat.
As upset as we may be have they really failed? Have they done anything to substantially lower their standing as a company. They haven't lost users, the growth numbers don't look bad to me, especially compared to some of the better recent years.
What they haven't done is turned that into money or status. Tons of businesses are successful with the "be a dick and hope they don't care strategy". People generally don't like big sacrifice. A monthly charge isn't practical, nor would it be welcomed either. They need to be in full control of the eyes and start monetizing.
YC exists to gain a return on capital investment. I see no reason why a group of people making money from the labour of others would care about morals.
the era of getting good value by providing good value seems foregone.
now we focus on extracting maximal value in the short-term/for self and acting that it's naive and dewy eyed to expect anything else. which casts such behaviour as the status quo instead of being
shameful. which results in an overton window where "i got mine" is all that matters.
Not necessarily. With a recording you need to take the good with the bad. Recordings can become toxic as you can’t get rid of them when the shit hits the fan. There are people who record their entire working day on their phones or Apple Watches and get themselves into trouble… do you know that the guy in your conference call was in Maryland? Did you say something dumb? You’re always going to run afoul of something in doing that.
With contemporaneous notes, you control the editorial aspects of it and have no legal risk in most situations. If you know you are exposed to some sort of problem, email yourself to make discovery easy. Otherwise, keep a handwritten journal.
> With contemporaneous notes, you control the editorial aspects of it
This is what makes it weak. You show me your beautifull contemporaneous notes which show that you are a saint and you are dealing with the devil and I will assume that you left out the bits undermining your viewpoint.
> and have no legal risk in most situations
This is acknowledged by the very thread you are responding to. They said they wish every conversation were 1 party consent. The very fact that they are wishing for this means they understand that they might have legal liability now.
Also not a lawyer, but you should strive to document "contemporaneous notes" as substitute for a recording. A good way to do this is to document the conversation as soon as it happened, with a clear timeline, and email it to yourself.
This is one of the most important things I've learned in my career- after a meeting where any kind of requirements are decided upon, just write up a synopsis and email it to all parties and say "Here's what we decided, let me know if I got anything wrong."
99 times out of 100 it's immediately forgotten but there have been a few times when I've been really really glad to have a contemporaneous record of a meeting.
I wonder if an automated stenographer would be legal even when recording isn’t. (A device that listens to the conversation and writes down the transcript automatically without recording anything.)
A good "PR answer" does not raise concrete questions, it makes all questions feel equally invalid. In this case /u/spez'es answer did not calm or invalidate the questions.
Spitballing here, but for the interpreting-as-a-threat thing he could double-down on the misunderstanding claim -- it sounds like the CEO wasn't actually on that call, so he can throw an unnamed underling under the bus for how it was represented to him, and backpedal on the specific accusation while trying to still convey the vibe that he thinks Apollo was being unreasonable.
"While we do understand the concerns of individual developers we are moving forward with them as a community on these changes. As for mentions of acquisitions or valuations of future partnerships we consider those talks private and unfinished until we have something to announce" or some similar corporate bullshit.
It's not an answer I would have liked, but it seems like it would have been far more in character.
People keep saying he was caught lying - to be honest, I don’t really see where where that happened.
Reading the transcript of the conversation with the Apollo dev, it was a fairly awkward exchange, and the Apollo dev was using all these innuendos to imply that a monetary exchange would avoid a negative outcome.
I don’t think we know who it was specifically at Reddit that acknowledged the Apollo dev was not delivering a threat. The transcript notably attributed that to a general “Reddit”, not the CEO. Do we even know that the CEO was on the call? Why didn’t the Apollo dev note who was speaking?
Especially after the way he was acting on the call to try and negotiate a cash payment, I don’t entirely trust the Apollo dev’s telling of events.
I didn't get that vibe whatsoever. I got much more a vibe of him calling BS on Reddit's numbers. Like, "Really? My app's API calls are costing Reddit $20M/year? Why has this never been an issue til now? You could have reached out to me, you could have limited my API calls, hell, you could have written me a check to say "please shut down this resource drain"!"
> I strongly disagree. The response is line with his past behavior and notice that nowhere in it does spez response address the fact that he was caught lying.
Was he though? In the audio it's clear he took it as a threat straight away. He literally said so. And the threat he understood was that the ApolloDev would create a fuss and make a lot of noise. Which the ApolloDev went on to do. The ApolloDev's response to Spez saying this was "I didn't think you took that as a threat" while posting an audio of him taking it as a threat. Then saying it's a blatant lie. While posting audio of spez saying he's taking it as a threat and using common language for moving past threats in business calls "I'll hope that's not what you meant" which is always code for "I'm going to pretend you didn't do that." You can say he was wrong but I don't think you can say someone is lying for believing something that is wrong.
Yeah I think it's pretty obvious Spez took it as a threat the whole time and just wanted to save the Apollo devs face by moving on without making a fuss of it.
I don't know why but I really, really hoped he'd come into the AMA with good intentions, or maybe even to announce that actually, you know what, they've reconsidered and now they're going to walk back some of the changes to the API pricing so as not to affect average users.
I knew that wouldn't be the case when it came within 90 minutes of the Apollo announcement and was just "uh, some time tomorrow". Clearly well thought through.
"API pricing"? The absurdity of thinking that it's normal to be needing to ask permission for and even paying to essentially access a site with a different user-agent is what lead to this situation in the first place. It may not have gotten to this point had people almost all realised what was really happening to the Internet when sites started offering "API access" and rejected it.
"third party app"? My browser is a "third party app".
(Note: I am not actually a Reddit user --- I use the site read-only.)
I for the life of me can't figure out why they are charging so much money for the API. They could do other things such as:
- Mandate as part of the TOS[0] that API users must display the ads in the application unless they pay a higher fee. I get alot of people use 3rd party apps to escape ads, but this wouldn't be the end of the world, it also allows the developer some discretion on how the ads can be formatted visually which could actually be a big win for Reddit in some ways. Make all this contingent on app review and auditing of the app.
- Work with the community to establish a more reasonable API fee. I'm sure everyone can find an agreement here somehow. All but the smallest players likely would find this agreeable.
- Only allow premium (and therefore ad free users) to use 3rd party apps. If they aren't a premium Reddit user they need to use the official client. This seems like the most pragmatic option to me, since those users would by pass ad revenue anyway.
It's pretty obviously the latter, the decision to kill access to NSFW posts via the API while the official apps will (AFAICT) still be able to access them means that 3rd party apps will be on the back foot even if they pay, for no good reason Reddit has been able to articulate.
NSFW on Reddit isn't just porn, the tag is used in the literal sense of "your boss wouldn't approve" or as a content warning for violence, heavy subjects, etc.
This explains the API changes themselves, but not the leadership team's behavior throughout the process. Holding this AMA didn't do anything productive for that objective but resulted in even more foot-in-mouth, now with even more attention than before.
Reddit's leadership had the potential headline "3rd party developer claims tiff with reddit administration in post" and took it upon themselves to upgrade it to what's here.
Yeah, I don't think people truly appreciate how valuable the data collected by mobile apps is for selling to marketers and advertising (which can't be blocked anywhere nearly as easily as it can be via browsers.)
There's a reason everyone pushes you to install their app; they want all that sweet, sweet time/network/location data and the ability to drive traffic to whatever degree they want via notifications.
I believe notifications also allow them to wake their app and collect data at that point in time, which they couldn't ordinarily do because iOS and Android have much more restrictions on background activity?
> or they're intentionally driving away 3rd party apps
This doesn't seem to make sense. If Reddit wanted to kill 3rd party apps, they would just disable public API access entirely. The reaction would be basically the same it seems.
I think they want to collect a few huge checks from large orgs that want to scrape Reddit for their own analysis while also killing 3rd party client access.
Another reason a lot of users like to use third-party apps and old.reddit.com is to avoid all of the "Coins"/"rewards" and NFT avatars that litter the page these days and make it a distracting experience to try and read comments and posts (which should be front-and-center).
LLMs will just scrape the website like they do with the rest of the internet. For Alphabet, Microsoft and some others they don't even need to do that as they already have everything stored for search results.
Just append .json to any Reddit URL and you'll get a full dump of that page, we'll see if they get rid of this feature as well. Way easier than scraping.
I'm pretty sure Reddit can figure out how to sell API access to LLMs, and how to differentiate that from my 'API access' because I happen to use Reddit through a mobile app.
> I for the life of me can't figure out why they are charging so much money for the API.
The claim (made by several mods) is that they are spending > $10m annually on the API once you include eng effort, and they want a return on the opportunity cost, not just the pure compute cost.
Additionally, they've run reddit so shockingly incompetently that they appear to have separate, better APIs that they only allow their internal apps to use. So when they complain about the inefficiency of use of the available APIs, keep that in mind...
Clearly, however, they just don't want other frontends. See eg them moving to measuring API calls on a per-app basis, rather than on a per-app per-user basis. It's dumb, imo, to not just say so.
And like everything reddit does, this was done wildly incompetently. I'd ask how they could possibly have not thought through the impacts on accessible frontends, or mod tools (which itself demonstrates the fractal incompetence of reddit: why do mods have to build or buy their own tools?), but... well, reddit.
NB: so fractally incompetent that they apparently can't even measure api usage and share that with API users in real or near-real time. Like... how. Just how.
> allows the developer some discretion on how the ads can be formatted visually
this is absolutely the opposite of what they would want. Brands have very tight control over display advertising and would have to approve it everywhere
I'm thinking more about how it flows in the feeds, not arbitrary control. The nuance is a little hard for me to explain, but basically I just imagine they could do a better job highlighting this is an ad!. Current Reddit default approach makes ads seem like they're from a normal user or its a subreddit.
because they want to push people to the first party app to boost userbase and data collection before IPO, it's all more money in their pockets because they're looking at cashing out in the short term and don't care much about the long term
in the immediacy people are still going to use reddit either way because there's no easy and popular alternative, just like twitter held on to most users despite all the noise
Fwiw, if you get a call from a debt collector and would prefer not to speak to them, tell them the call will be recorded and ask for their permission. It’s been some time since I’ve had this happen but I’ve been 6 for 6 on them not giving permission and the conversation ending. (Yes, even after I consented to them recording the call)
Yep, been a long time, but as I recall they usually start by saying "this call may be recorded".
Back when I was young and poor in in debt collector land, choosing to interpret that statement as permission to record and responding "that's great, I'll record it as well" always ended the conversation.
When Capital One locked my card four times in a row in three days, left me stranded while traveling (partially my fault for not having a backup), and then didn't answer their customer support line for 12+ hours, and then lied about all of it to me, I tried to record my calls with them. I've never heard someone get so freaked out and cagey on a phone call in my life, and of course they hung up. Utterly despicable, I'm glad I'm in a place now where I don't have to even disclose.
Shareholders don't care, the shareholders are the VCs that are now demanding profits and dividends for their initial investment. Why do you think the sudden push for the monetization of the API and the "lost opportunities"?
The only valuable things that reddit has are the free labour of the mods and the eyeballs of their community. attacking them seems counterproductive to making the website more valuable.
Just throwing it out there: I love Reddit, but only via Apollo, so when Apollo shuts down, I’ll probably quit Reddit. What a dumb move for Reddit to blow their best UI like this!
He wasn't actually a co-founder though, his startup got merged into Reddit and he was given the "co-founder" title, but my understanding is that Reddit was created/co-founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian.
Reddit’s current situation is an interesting case study in the difference between running a sustainable, profitable business, growing naturally, vs trying to grow unnaturally quickly and trying to extract as much “value” as possible from the business at the expense of long-term stability in a frankly sickening and vampirish manner. It’s something I see repeated again and again in this industry.
Those at the top of this play all still make off with life-changing money. Who cares about business stability once you've secured your personal wealth?
Such a shame, I've used reddit for over a decade and enjoyed it for the most part. There's a lot of value in the communities and discussions on reddit, but I think the writings on the wall for this one. Hopefully someone can build something that captures the reddit experience and pulls in the communities
Can anyone explain the joke to me? Why would reddit cut Apollo a $10M check? Is this just a cheeky "so you think my use of the API provides me with $20M of value" comeback at the ridiculous API pricing? It did, in part, sound like a "half serious" (as in completely serious but with plausible deniability) attempt at "give me money and I'll announce my completely unrelated retirement and stop making a stink about this", which I'd agree is a bad look.
> Apollo: Well that's a silly number that doesn't add up and you're basically comparing me to a DDOS, if I'm just a botnet I guess you can just pay me half that to shut the botnet down.
Also Apollo doesn't cost them shit. Unless they're arguing that they lost $20m/yr in ad revenue you can't do the math like that. Reddit users cost Reddit $20m/yr.
I think they use the language “opportunity cost” which would imply to me its a lost ad revenue figure instead of an infra figure. Its fuzzy math at best.
The joke is that the opportunity cost is NOT 20 millions. Asking them to buy the app for 10 millions is supposed to illustrate the point. Imagine we both have a phone an you try to sell me yours for 20 million dollars, I would reply saying well you can buy mine for 10 millions, hopefully that makes it clear that your asking price is ridiculous.
That doesn't make sense. Reddit is (charitably) arguing that Apollo is costing them $20m/year. "Splitting the difference" and just losing $10m on a one-time basis doesn't make sense when Reddit can of course just cut off API access.
If Apollo were delivering $20m/year of incremental value to Reddit, then this would've been a sensical bargaining strategy. But the Apollo dev wasn't prepared to make this argument.
Even if it was a threat, I don’t see why that’s a problem. Reddit is a multibillion dollar business. At that scale businesses routinely threaten each other - I.e., “If you sue us over patent A we will sue you over patents B, C, and D”. Apollo saying “If you move to kill my business I will deploy my consumer goodwill against you” is a completely reasonable thing to do.
But that's not exactly what happened here. I'm totally with you on mobilizing your users to affect change, but this was asking for hush money instead of enabling Apollo to continue operating?
Which is basically just boring normal business leverage.
"My customers are more loyal to my portal to your platform than your platform. You're literally putting me out of business so you can buy my app and keep running to keep those users for a price.
I doubt it was about making a stink, it was likely along the lines of "It's your site and your rules, I get that. You're clearly trying to kill off 3rd party apps like mine even if you won't admit it, so I'll make it easy for you and kill it off myself for some compensation."
Communication from executives is just like communication from politicians. It's designed to get the outcome they want, to manipulate, to make the strategic commitments they want, avoid those they don't, hide the things they don't want you to know yet, play to 40 different audiences etc..
On one hand I get why they do that, on the other hand it's made communicating with these people or believing them completely impossible if you just want to know what they think or what their plans are.
It seems ill conceived to discuss with Reddit at this point in time. It is a misunderstanding of motives that Reddit executives work in favor of Reddit. The end goal of this non profitable relationship of devs with Reddit is to
bait and switch the allegiance of the userbase right before Reddot"s large IPO cash out.
Moving users towards the main site and app, firing a few people, claiming to do a cleanup is just somethimg that would sound good and look good in the balooned financial projection numbers.
Long term growth or even sustainability is irrelevant right before the IPO so app and devs need to understand the motives behind those actions. Devs may stop developing, users may leave, mods can stop modding, subreddits can go dark as long as the effect of those events does not have time appear in the IPO documents.
Yes ofcourse Reddit execs could allow nswf, yes ofcourse Reddit execs know that the reddit app sucks, yes ofcourse Reddit execs knows the API is essential for moderator apps, yes ofcourse Reddit execs know they add work or outright screw free labor moderators, yes ofcourse Reddit could use the external apps to deliver reddit ads and get some profit.
But that would make them lose control of the IPO future profitability narrative, which appears to be as a "fake it to see if we make it" narrative
So the AMA had 21,294 comments/questions and it included a total of 14 comments from u/spez (some duped), and a total of 21 comments from all the staff participating. LOL, why even bother with a "Ask Me Anything"?
Hey, you can ask, doesn't mean you'll get an answer. I feel like this AMA was just a way to let users vent their frustrations and concentrate the vitriol in one space instead of having it spill over throughout the entire app.
Watch the IPO dollars. That’s what this is all about. Whoever is hitching their wagon to this IPO should be taking a serious look at management and comments made by the CEO which were clearly demonstrating immaturity and a loss of touch with both product and community. Reddit for the base is dead. What that means for the IPO will be interesting. Devaluation is in the process.
> “His ‘joke’ is the least of our issues,” the CEO wrote. “His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.”
I think that can also be true.
I mean he did leak a private conversation, for support to get a followup discussion at all. Then they used that action to disassociate further, but that doesn't make the actions invalid or unreasonable on its own.
We already know what they are going to do with the API, this isnt more damning than before
He “leaked” the legally recorded private conversation after being libellously accused of blackmail by the company. I think it’s a perfectly legal and morally valid defence. This, plus the fact that permission has been given to Reddit to show that there’s literally any example of him saying something different internally vs externally.
> Effective July 1, 2023, the rate limits to use the Data API free of charge are:
> 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication and 10 queries per minute if you are not using OAuth authentication.
Am I missing something? That doesn't make any sense. What does the auth mechanism have to do with interaction rates?
If I upvote 11 posts/minute would that be higher than their rate limit?
I was essentially looking for someone to post this:
Q: How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become
increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
Spez: We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.
Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
Reddit or any other business that thrives on user data will eventually, at some point, will have to use their data for profit. Especially during the period of LLM training with huge dataset, I understand the API rate changes. But I don't understand why they can't have reasonable exceptions for third party apps like what they have done for accessibility apps except the opaque 30 day exception withdrawal clause. While reading everything together - blocking NSFW data, increasing API prices hastily etc seems like Reddit wanting to disallow users third party apps and limit the users to use only their first party app.
I've been a reddit user for 15 years. I paid for a subscription to support what I thought was the front page of the internet, but I've cancelled it after this debacle. It's clear that Huffman doesn't care (does he even want to be CEO anymore?)... even if he gets replaced, the damage has been done.
I can't stomach the thought of using reddit and being spez's useful idiot. I want to migrate to a new community but I don't know which. Where is everyone going? Mastodon seems a bit pie-in-the-sky if I may be honest.
> I want to migrate to a new community but I don't know which. Where is everyone going?
I don't think you'll find a similarly large or diverse community like Reddit has anywhere else, at least for now. The network effect is very much responsible for this, I'm fairly sure that many will still keep using Reddit until some viable alternative actually shows up.
> Mastodon seems a bit pie-in-the-sky if I may be honest.
Personally, I quite like Mastodon. There is some nice content to be found, it doesn't feel like it's spamming you with advertising just yet and in general it's not a hateful place. That said, Mastodon is more like Twitter than Reddit.
A more apt fediverse alternative to Reddit would be something like Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/
Of course, while the platform is there, the content isn't. Oh well, at least the UI/UX feels fairly user friendly, a bit like using Gitea instead of GitHub.
I only met Steve a couple times in passing, long ago, so I can’t say I know him at all, but he always seemed like a nice guy. I really hope he can see the folly of this API pricing before it’s too late.
I think it’s already too late for the API pricing situation, but there’s always the opportunity to learn from this and never make a series of mistakes of this magnitude again.
I removed Relay and blocked reddit on my computers. Capitalism is one thing but Steve has shown himself to be void of any integrity. It's very obvious that it will only get worse as they ramp up for, and then after, the IPO.
"the Apollo guy" mentioned that they were willing to pay for their API usage and were in multiple discussions on pricing over a period of months with teams at Reddit.
Imagine if you were willing to pay for API usage and asked a company what the costs would be, and they gave a number that was infeasible for you to the extent that it wasn't even considerable, such as $1 million per user. Obviously you wouldn't be able to pay that amount if you were making far less money per user of your app, and would feel as the Apollo creator does.
If you can agree to that, then it seems like you just disagree on what a reasonable cost for this service is, which is fine, but I wouldn't call it entitlement.
I agree that Reddit ain't a charity. And I agree that HN isn't either. But I'd also add that Apollo isn't.
I don't think he does? To be honest if someone continued to spread lies about me even after I had released recordings disproving them I would be more than a little upset.
His company isn't a charity either though. If his strategy is to cause massive PR damage to reddit, he's allowed to do that, and its currently working.
He doesn't. He made it clear that he understood why Reddit would charge for their API, and that it seemed reasonable to him. He is shutting down his app because of the amount they are charging, which is outrageous. Additionally, he is shutting down his app because they have given him only 30 days to prepare for the new pricing.
This whole drama is very odd to me and feels like a (very) vocal minority of users incorrectly extrapolating their preferences to those of all Reddit users.
Reddit owns its API. It has every right to price access however they see fit. It is wild to think that will spend $10s of millions to support 3rd party apps. Or to expect that they would acquire third party apps.
I predict Reddit will stick to their guns and that this entire brouhaha will have little to no effect on Reddit's user and engagement metrics over the medium term.
If you're outraged and highly engaged with this controversy, do you think its possible you're in a bubble?
I'm a moderator and poweruser on reddit and I have very mixed feelings about this.
I think the truth is somewhere between the middle--reddit does genuinely not want to support 3rd party apps (shucks, but that's fine), but powerusers/mods want to use third party apps because the official one sucks ass and 3rd party apps want to, well, survive.
I think a compromise must be reached.
Also spez is a horrible CEO and should probably step down. I care more about reddit as a resource to me as an individual than what his feelings are.
The part I’m outraged about is that the CEO of Reddit was caught in a lie about how 3P app developer tried to “blackmail” them and when said developer released the audio it’s clear that never happened and now Reddit is doubling down on dragging this developers name through the mud still.
Sure, Reddit can do what they want with Reddit. That’s their right. And Reddit users (or a subset of Reddit users) can complain when Reddit makes product changes that they don’t like. That’s also their right. In this case, people find it frustrating that a) products that they like will stop being usable b) devs that they like will go out of business abruptly c) that communications from Reddit about this have been not great.
Even if this is just a subset of users being mad, it appears to be the subset of users that also run many of the larger subreddits. If Reddit doesn’t want users like that to have the power to make highly visible demonstrations they should stop relying on them to do volunteer moderation.
I think for a lot of people, they _want_ to see Reddit not as a "company trying to be profitable" but more as "the de-facto community message board on the internet" where everything is free, open, and equitable. Shutting down third-party APIs makes the site less open in a lot of ways, which is rubbing people the wrong way.
That being said, I do agree that they own the API and have every right to charge for it. I am going to be very disappointed that my preferred way of browsing Reddit is going to stop working, since the official app is not a great experience.
I just don't understand why the big app devs are so against making their apps subscription based. The Apollo dev even said they'd have to charge like $2.50pm for each user. Do it then? If you lose users, you pay less for the API anyway. Maybe less users means less income and less time to spend on the app, but I'm pretty sure most Apollo users would be willing to subscribe to it.
It seems like all the 3rd party apps took this stance and are now just giving up at the first hurdle instead of adapting their business plan. Reddit's own site and app is so bad that people are boycotting them over losing third party apps, and third party app devs don't think they have any way of charging for their apps? Like, are they even listening.
App developers can just close off their apps until they implement the subscription. I literally can't understand why the 30 days is an issue. Instead of inconveniencing users for a few weeks while the changes are made, they're inconveniencing users for a lifetime by discontinuing the app.
It's not covered extensively because it makes no sense.
>Why not just increase the price of Apollo?
>One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating costs I had at the time (server fees, icon design, having a part-time server engineer). Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1/month each in Reddit fees. That's $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days.
>So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. First month $50,000, second month maybe $45,000, then $40,000, etc. until everything has expired, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be cheaper to simply refund users.
Ok, so there's existing subscribers. They will have get new subscribers at a higher rate, and then wait for existing subscribers to renew at the higher rate before it will cover the API charges. Makes sense.
But they suggest they're just going to refund users. So why not just refund users and make a new subscription? This is what I don't understand. It's not a binary option here of closing the app or trying to cover existing user's API fees out of pocket. The middle ground of just refunding those subscribers and starting a new subscription exists.
The whole argument is that they will be out of pocket. But that is going to be the case regardless because they're going to refund users anyway.
If a platform forced you to refund $250,000 worth of subscriptions because they made a sudden chance to their API costs and treat you like you're some kind of criminal, would you be inclined to support that platform?
> It's not a binary option here of closing the app or trying to cover existing user's API fees out of pocket.
Well pretty much all the successful apps have decided to shut down but perhaps you know something they don’t and you can profit from their ignorance.
Here’s Apollos developers thoughts:
> Why not just increase the price of Apollo?
> One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating costs I had at the time (server fees, icon design, having a part-time server engineer). Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1/month each in Reddit fees. That’s $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days.
> So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. First month $50,000, second month maybe $45,000, then $40,000, etc. until everything has expired, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be cheaper to simply refund users.
> I hope you can recognize how that’s an enormous amount of money to suddenly start incurring with 30 days notice. Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple’s fees that would just be enough to break even.
> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That’s a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it’s just not economically feasible. It’s much cheaper for me to simply shut down.
> So what is the REAL issue you’re having?
> Hopefully that illustrates why, even more than the large price associated with the API, the 30 day timeline between when the pricing was announced and developers will be charged is a far, far, far bigger issue and not one I can overcome. Much more time would be needed to overhaul the payment model in my app, transition existing users from existing plans, test the changes, and have users update to the new version.
> As a comparison, when Apple bought Dark Sky and announced a shut down of their API, knowing that this API was at the core of many businesses, they provided 18 months before the API would be turned off. When the 18 months came, they ultimately extended it another 12 months, resulting in a total transition period of 30 months. While I’m not asking for that much, Reddit’s in comparison is 30 days.
> Reddit says you won’t get your first bill until August 1st, though!
> The issue is the size of the bill, not when it will arrive. Significant, significant charges for the API will start building up with 30 days notice on July 1st, the fact that the bill for those charges being 30 days from then is not important. If you hear that your electricity bill is going up 1,000x and the company tells you, “Don’t worry, the bill only comes at the end of the month”, I hope you understand how that isn’t comforting.
> What would be a good price/timeline?
> I hope I explained above why the 30 day time limit is the true issue. However in a perfect world I think lowering the price by half and providing a three month transition period to the paid API would make the transition feasible for more developers, myself included. These concessions seem minor and reasonable in the face of the changes.
>Well pretty much all the successful apps have decided to shut down but perhaps you know something they don’t and you can profit from their ignorance.
I won't profit because I don't have an app. But all the other third party apps that won't shut down will just start charging and power users will pay for them, because they are better than the official website and app.
>Here’s Apollos developers thoughts:
The thoughts are fundamentally flawed. They're saying their owe existing users a service and can't charge them more for using the app. But... they're suggesting they will just refund them anyway. So, why can't they refund all users that are paying for Apollo and then reintroduce a subscription model. Those 50,000 that paid for Apollo beforehand will most likely renew their subscription that covers the Reddit API charges and nothing changes.
I don’t think any app store or payment provider would look fondly on a process that refunds that many transactions just because you want to turn around and double/triple the price. Credit card companies/payment gateways hate mass refunds and normally it could be cause to terminate your contract. To refund people because the app was forced to go out of business is one thing, but if you want to implement a price increase the supported way is what the developer said: to announce it in advance for next renewal.
Probably what you’d have to do is close the current app and publish a new app with the new business model (subscriber-only at a higher price). The amount of people who would move to such app would only be a tiny fraction of the previous userbase (as most app users were free before), and now you keep having to deal with this chaotic company who could just change the rules again at any time with little/no notice. Plus you’ll never get the kind of reach you had before without the freemium model. I think most indie devs would likely choose to just quit and move on with their lives. If someone wants to buy his code from him and publish their own subscriber-only app, probably it’s an option.
The App Store doesn’t allow for mass refunds like this, you have to ask Apple and they only grant it in special circumstances such as the third party Twitter clients.
I do not see them approving a mass refund just for a price increase.
Why not make Reddit itself a paid service by that logic? This whole 'Oh we need to make strides toward profitability blah blah' corporate spiel is such bullshit when they could snap their fingers and become profitable overnight by switching from an ad model to a subscription model. Further, by doing so they wouldn't be forced to gradually ruin the site with more dilution into sponsored content.
This is the arc of American business, though. A steady money printer isn't enough. That money has to grow, and it grows by reducing the surplus utility held by the users.
