People will always want free things; that's nothing new! Especially on an Internet that was born free (aside from the cost to connect).
The average "Reddit" business is pretty odd; they want:
* Paying subscribers _and_ advertising revenue
* Free content: posts & comments
* Free moderation: voting & ToS enforcement
* The ability to monopolize said content
* Contributors to continue to pour millions of man-hours to make content for the site and never ask for anything like ad-free viewing, an enjoyable user-experience, tooling, etc.
Social platforms present a difficult balance between the users, contributors, moderators, and business - all within a very hostile internet (in terms of security, spam, etc).
For payment to happen, users do demand significant value to be parted from their $. In Reddit's case, the 3rd party apps are strongly desired because the 1st party app does not meet their needs (users _pay_ for these apps!). Reddit doesn't want to compete on UX, as they're demonstrably bad at it; partially due to lack of skill and due to mismatched incentives.
It seems like they incorrectly assume that they own the community, rather than the other way around. Reddit's primary value is in the content they are _given_ in exchange for hosting & tools - both of which are have significant downward cost pressure (which _should_ trend towards free, given a large enough community).
Reddit is trying to switch their customers from users to advertisers in order to make a profit, which is difficult after years of _generally_ serving users. It is bait and switch at it's finest and most egregious.
OpenStreetMap costs a few hundred thousand dollars a year to run. Wikipedia is about $3 million. Redditors are cheap, but you can have a backend doing the heavy lifting for a community (assuming mods work for free) at a cost that can be sustained with a small pool of financial contributors.
> VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI
None of this needs to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yeah, if they just dropped image/video hosting on the site, it's just a bunch of text and javascript (aka text), etc. Serving that is extremely cheap. They went from 400 employees in 2019 to 2000 now. I subscribed to Premium for years (not anymore due to their recent actions), and they should absolutely be able to run the site easily on the ~$600M in revenue they make now and be handily profitable.
Partly it's because Reddit is in an antagonistic relationship with its users. People want a good message board. A good message board doesn't make for very good advertisements. What do you advertise on /r/ChangeMyView ?
Partly it's because Reddit has squandered its users' goodwill. I'd be willing to pay for Reddit if it was clear Reddit was going to work in my favor. Since right now it's doing its best to run off the mobile app I'm using, why on earth would I do that?
> * The ability to use a 3rd party app that does not track, advertise, or monetize you in any way
I disagree on this point - I'm pretty sure all the big 3rd party apps at least have ads. The problem is fundamentally just that the 3rd party apps are a lot better than the official app, and have been for some time. If Reddit had made the official app better (which they've had _years_ to do) then significantly less people would care about any of this.
They also could have gone the Spotify route, which I think would have gone over significantly better - Keep the API as-is, but require a paid premium account login to use it. Functionally it's not even really a difference, but it means Reddit deals with all the details rather than the 3rd party apps. However, functionally the goal was to simply price the 3rd party apps out of existence, so that's probably why they didn't do this.
It's also pretty clear from the response that they never thought this through, which is hard to believe. They had to have it pointed out to them that tons of stuff currently uses the API which has no replacement, you'd think they'd have reviewed what currently uses the API before drastically changing it. Reddit has gotten significant value for free by having people write code against their API, that's code they didn't need to write themselves.
> I'm pretty sure all the big 3rd party apps at least have ads.
I use(d) Relay for Redit, paid a small ($5?, maybe) one time fee for the "Premium" version a few years ago and have never see an ad. You are correct in the sense that if you use the free version of Relay (and possibly others), you would have ads from the app, not Reddit, but if you're willing to pay a small amount, you can get rid of them.
That's just the average internet user. They want something for nothing and often get it.
If you do ask for a few dollars a month you have to provide a ton of perceived value. That's despite the fact that they would spend it on snacks without hesitation.
Look at the vitriol that YouTube premium gets. I get it there are a lot of people that know how to have an ad free YouTube without paying. I don't like that some basic app features like background video playing are locked behind premium.
But at the end of the day the I am sure that for a large portion of people complaining they spent the majority of their video watching time watching YouTube. If it's not worth it to you to pay the equivalent of a big mac meal month to get rid of ads that's fine but don't act all morally superior to those that do.
A lot of that must come from actual children with no easy way of paying. The value prop is so obvious for any adult spending considerable time on the site that’s not in actual poverty that I doubt the vitriol is coming from them.
That is the sad truth, the minds of most people disintegrate completely from all kind of logic or soundness when "free" is in the equation. People line up for long times to get free food that would've cost them a couple of bucks, people who are highly paid spend hours and weeks of their life arguing on the internet about why they can't and won't pay $5 for some software or online service.
As patience of creators and curators begin to run more thin, today's information society will split into tiers of those who pay and get good information vs those who demand free and will splash around in the filth of the free information sewers. The filth being ads, spyware, malware, low quality content, spiritually harmful content, government propaganda and worse.
The 3rd party app issue, and most of the API problem consequently, wouldn't be such a big issue if they didn't take forever to release the official app, only to put out an awful one when they finally did. You don't see many people using 3rd party apps for other social media.
You think Facebook would let a large percentage of users use a 3rd party app that blocks all advertisements, tracking, and other monetization? Look at how Meta treated the whole Apple tracking ordeal
If a lone dev would have made an app like Apollo for FB, they would be under 10,000 pages of litigation the next day
People don't use the FB app because its great. They would love a non-tracking version of the same service. It's just not allowed
Without vc, cheap and ad supported is reasonable. Vc pumping in millions and expecting returns that requires building a company is the problem
Does reddit really need, hr, middle managers, sales, marketing, design teams. It wouldn't if it had a focused goal. Now it has all sorts of crap and extra features to try be profitable.
Reddit was launched 17 years ago. How many Redditors have lived with this state of affairs their entire lives - since before they were born? If Reddit's minimum age is 13, people who are 30 who signed up as soon as it appeared have never known life to be different.
(And, when Reddit was launched it was the era of the single core Pentium 4; storage and compute and bandwidth were expensive. Now they aren't. Store Reddit comments in a compressed file, they fit on a $50 SSD).
See: Wikipedia, Craigslist, AO3. all perfectly great websites not ruined by spam, tracking, backend, fancy graphics. Just great content, lightweight and clear UI.
> VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI
VCs are free to ask for an ROI.
They are not owed an ROI.
Only the kids think they are. Especially childish people who think people are owed money for a crap product just because they put money into a business before where the goal was growth, not necessarily profitability.
absolutely. and ironically that's the one thing i would be willing to pay for - the ability to keep the site as free (as-in-beer) as possible for everyone. any gating of actual features or capabilities behind a paywall just turns me off the site, not in a "how dare they" sense but simply in a "good luck to them but the site is completely irrelevant to me now" sense.
Yeah, I suspect paid social media isn't going to work. It sucks because it's probably the only sustainable model. VC has really warped people's perception of software costs.
So people want a social media platform that has broad reach, high availability, (some) algorithmic curation, never ending content, moderation, first-class mobile support, but aren't willing to pay for it in any way (ads or subscriptions). This is precisely why I don't see anyone replacing Reddit. Niche communities will continue to exist and thrive on the internet but the mega social media aggregators like twitter, reddit, etc only seem to be viable (who knows for how long) with the same old business model: ads and VC money.
I don't mind A paid model for interaction personally, but as others have pointed out it is difficult to make the call when you can't view the content.
You already did open up your content, but personally I'd lead with that. Make lurking free and any interaction part of the subscription. This would include posting content, as it does remove the most blatant spam and gaming of the system.
Having said that, while I do think it is commendable that you want to reward the people that provide content, I am not sure if you should do so based on votes. Because that will just make it so people will try to game the system with clickbait and fluff content.
As we are on HN anyway:
"The Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it."
What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:
1. An article - takes a few minutes to judge.
2. An image - takes a few seconds to judge.
So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E en F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them so they gather votes faster.
Some things out the top of my head you can do to mitigate this are:
- Don't tie it to voting, make it a different action people have to explicitly give. Basically reddit gold, but then still with the monetary reward tied to it.
- In addition to that, don't make it an infinite resource people but a monthly budget people can spend (this might already be the case? I didn't check too closely)
- Technically a bit more challenging, but if you could tie it to engagement time in addition to votes it would mitigate the fluff content issue somewhat. Some metrics you might be able to use are time spend in comments, time between clicking on an outbound link and voting (don't count votes with no outbound interaction either), etc.
As a seperate thought, I am not sure if there are liability issues when you reward posted content with money. Not all posted content will be owned by the person posting it, but they are effectively being paid for it. So that might make you as a platform more liable for copyright claims and such. Not a lawyer though, just something I thought of.
Unfortunately, lack of a website I can use on my desktop browser makes this unusable for me. Also I am not sure any of the user generated content on this app would be discoverable by search engines. I fear it will be locked in forever.
It's really up to your interests, but I'll say /news/ because that's what I used Reddit for mostly. Here's a handy list: https://wiki.bibanon.org/4chan_Boards
What makes you think that apple can even compete at all? The businesses they are competing with in this space have actual monetary incentive to do research in the field, this sounds like the comments people make about apples electric cars and AR headsets that are always just around the corner and better than anything that already exists
That's fair. Apple does work on all kinds of stuff that never makes the light of day, mainly because it shouldn't. It's not better than the competition until it ships and proves it in the market. Apple have their misses too.
I'm not convinced Apple needs to, or is interested in competing in this space. Yes they have Siri, but there's no guarantee these language models will ever actually be safely functional in a role like that.
Even if they are, is this really an interface people will want to use? I did use Siri to set alarms and such for a while, but even though it did it reliably and conveniently, eventually I stoped bothering. Who want's to talk to their phone on the train? I just found it cognitively less intrusive to just set alarms manually.
You have to remember that you are not the only patient in the hospital. A Caesarean section requires a lot of setup including OR, anesthesiologist, ensuring adequate care for the newborn, etc. Any of these can cause a delay. Of course there is other cases triaged by urgency like crash sections. It would make no sense to show up to the OR 30 minutes before you can begin operating. An elective Caesarean section will always get bumped for emergencies.
