Ye, this "it is non of your business as a pleb consumer to complain about companies, use another one" trope is getting old. If Reddit's lusers don't like Reddit they should complain, threaten to leave, then leave.
It is like this "Karen"-meme where the protagonist and antagonist are mixed up. The nominal protagonist blames Karen for the employer's fault. If you make money as being a firewall between the Karen and your boss, you are the problem, not Karen.
I don't think it's capitalism that's the issue. After all, that's existed for hundreds of years and across so many countries.
This seems like a more narrow problem, where the goal of new companies is no longer "Build good product, acquire users, slowly and steadily grow", it's "Build a product, give it away for free at a loss for years, get millions in VC funding, sell your users out, destroy product while laughing to the bank to repeat the process". Seems to really have picked up in the past 20 years or so, and largely specific to the United States.
Every contributor and consumer of every post on Reddit was being exploited for profit. That’s why social media platforms exist, to exploit its users for profit.
The users are the product, always have been. It’s unfortunate, but the internet is businesses all the way down.
I also said it was a matter of user expectation. There's a level of extractiveness that is acceptable for users, because users get information, entertainment, etc. in return for their participation on reddit.
Of course, that's setting aside the more radical position of "social media is fundamentally harmful to humans, therefore we should all stop using it regardless".
It is just switching the roles which side is exploiting. Before it was communities, now it will be instead of Reddit. Surely it is reasonable to call people who used platform that didn't make money for their personal enjoyment exploitation. Even if they didn't know they did it.
You can host your own community then. At the end of the day, someone has to pay for hosting all of that data. Trying to not lose money from hosting said data is not a "distort[ion] at the whim of capitalist forces."
"You can host your own community then"; Sorry but I'm not really a fan of this "make your own (...)" attitude, especially when excusing corporate behavior against volunteers
I mean that there is a spectrum ranging from paying the bills and making profit to blatantly exploiting everyone involved. Based on the Apollo logistics, reddit API pricing seems to fall on the greedy end of the spectrum. At the same time we have examples with high-traffic websites (e.g. Wikipedia) which manage to build upon volunteer effort and be sustainable without pissing everyone off within a few days.
> I mean that there is a spectrum ranging from paying the bills and making profit to blatantly exploiting everyone involved.
They're not making profit, that's the entire point.
> Sorry but I'm not really a fan of this "make your own (...)" attitude, especially when excusing corporate behavior against volunteers
I'm similarly not a fan of discounting just how much money and work goes into building a company with millions of users, having helped do that in the past. My comment was not glib, it was entirely sincere; if you want to know just how much it costs, host your own community and see just how "greedy" it is.
The thing is that they should be able to introduce their API pricing without triggering the events of the past days. I'm not even remotely an expert, but the pricing seems too aggressive and seems to contradict was communicated earlier (again based on the apollo transcripts).
On the other hand they are supposed to be experts, or they should at least ask one, given the millions of users, thousands of mods, etc involved.
How do you know whether it was too aggressive or not? They could have always revised their estimates when they did the calculation for how much each call costs as well as how much lost revenue they get from third party apps not showing ads. Sure, they could have given more than a month's notice but the bill comes due at some point. Based on the API call figures Apollo has posted and having worked on API products in the past, I can entirely see how $20 million a year is reasonable given how much Apollo is pulling from Reddit's servers.
I infer it was aggressive, based on the following:
Per Christian (the Apollo app dev): "(...) Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls." [1]
All assuming he is not lying (which I have no reason to believe, contrary to the reddit reps). Two orders of magnitude over Imgur pricing sounds a bit greedy, unless Imgur is also at the verge of collapse, which I'm not aware of.
There is no $166 plan. The least expensive $500/month plan is "only" 7.5M requests per month.
50M requests under the ultra plan (7.5M requests and then $0.001 for each one after) would cost $43k/month - and it would be more sensible to go to the "mega" plan then which is $10k/month for 150M API calls.
Not all high-traffic websites are comparable when it comes to sustainability. Comparing reddit and Wikipedia is definitely an apples and oranges situation. The software, data model and infrastructure are wildly different.
Just the simple fact that most of Wikipedia can largely be cached long(ish) term via CDNs reduces the capital needed to keep it running. reddit on the other hand, has constantly changing content, user configured listings, threaded discussion, media hosting, etc. Caching those types of things is a lot more difficult.
> reddit on the other hand, has constantly changing content
You mean like how Wikipedia has pages that anyone can edit that can (and do) get edited many times per minute?
> user configured listings
Kind of like how Wikipedia supports saved articles and reading lists?
> threaded discussion
If only each article on Wikipedia had a discussion page where you could talk about edits to the page. We could call it the Talk page. But I guess that’s too dynamic for them.
> media hosting
I’ve always thought Wikipedia would be better if they had images and maybe even videos to go with each article. Maybe we should petition them to add this.
Those 'capitalist forces' you're talking about are 'you have to pay for resources if you want to use them'.
But I'm sure this wouldn't be true in magical communist land. They'd be well up for ploughing resources into r/cats and absolutely wouldn't be sending you off to dig up a field to improve production for the next five year plan.
I guess you should pray that the CCP invests more money in Reddit in order to make sure it's no longer subjected to the "whims of capitalist forces".
Of course, I have trouble taking this seriously when I suspect there's a huge amount of overlap between people decrying profit-seeking behavior here but who also are fine with wrongthink communities being banned out of advertiser revenue concerns.
