I had a job interview with Reddit last year for a modeling related position and it was one of the strangest and most user-hostile interviews I've ever had, even as someone who's spent many years working for SV adtech companies. All product interviews were laser focused on maximizing a few specific advertiser revenue metrics, anytime I brought up effects on the consumer it would immediately get dismissed and I'd be asked to refocus on advertiser effects. My guess is their leadership is pressuring the company hard to boost their numbers, no matter the long term cost.
I’m not sure how much to read into an interview, but how many times are we going to be surprised by this cycle? They don’t care about monetization until their user base has grown large and established, and then they do and monetize aggressively. Where have I seen this movie before?
Looking too closely at that abyss leads to some disturbing implications, for people who like to sit on their ass and collect dividends while other people work.
I think the point he's obliquely trying to make is that the monetization of attention is not a thing that can actually be done right, at all.
We should have solved the problem of bandwidth costs another way - taxes or paying individually for each thing. People keep saying the internet failed. No, the internet has been working perfectly while a bunch of bridge trolls came in and setup shop.
These two things have nothing to do with each other and this is a very black and white mentality. Reddit already had ads and already made money. This is about squeezing more money out of users, not any sort of charity for a system that doesn't sustain itself.
It's well known reddit has been eyeing up an IPO, and as a result it's pretty unsurprising they're searching for ways to juice their metrics in the build up. Tells a nice growth story so you can dump stock on retail and it's not really important if you do long term damage to the business - because it'll no longer be your business. Can't imagine that would be a great place to work unless they very strongly align your compensation with the IPO (commonly employees get the oppsite, a lock-up period after IPO to make sure all the juice is squeezed by the time they get to sell).
I do not remember the specific metrics, but there was a big focus on the fact that their CPC/CPM/etc was lower than alternative social media, meaning advertisers put less value on clicks/views from Reddit than other platforms. And they believed this was because their ads were not targeted enough since there was (is?) no fancy ML models behind it, advertisers could just chose some basic rules for what subreddits they want to target.
To solve this they were building out a huge ad relevancy team to target ads at users using posting history, similar to Meta/LinkedIn/etc.
I've been in marketing and media for almost 20 years, been a Reddit user for almost that long, and have run teams owning both buy and sell side, including at a publisher platform.
My $.02 CPM is that yes, Reddit can improve their rates by improving relevancy. But they don't capture anywhere near the volume or quality of signals to inform relevancy models as compared to others in the space.
From their privacy policy it looks like they may engage with vendors who enrich data that can be tied back to a hashed identifier. This seems in sync with the increased pushes to create accounts with emails (one of the main identifiers the industry relies on) as well as use the app (to get a MAID, though those are increasingly worthless for identity resolution vendors from a match rate standpoint).
Reddit is in a tough spot because a huge chunk of their users want to use them anonymously, or with minimum PI provided. This leaves Reddit in a position of needing to either push harder to get it (like if they added profile fields to collect more PI), or infer it from modeling based on the subs you visit, content you read or post, interactions with other users, etc. Which puts them in the crosshairs of privacy bodies depending on how far they go.
This is all my own personal opinions and conjecture.
It speaks to their incompetence really, because when I look at the list of subs I have subscribed to and interacted with, my Reddit history is very, very closely aligned with my interests, much more so than any of my other social media profiles. If they can't mine that data effectively then they don't deserve to make money.
The problem mentioned by parent comment is that it basically ends there: they struggle to cross-reference your Reddit persona (faithful ad it may be) with the bucketloads of signals advertisers get from other sites.
If you talk about buying a car on some random app, chances are that you'll then see ads on Facebook about used cars. Facebook gets to know what you do elsewhere, and offers advertisers extremely precise (and hence more valuable) targeting. That's what Reddit can't do.
They need a pixel/SDK to make that work. That should have been step 1 in relevancy. Seems like they could also gave used their sharing buttons but whoever is running their ads strategy may not be focused on the right things (i.e. Dr advertisers from adult and gaming to start with).
This jibes with my experience. I was looking to come in on a web platform team there but they tried to shift me over to an ad focused team. I said “no dice” and parted ways.
Ironically I now work for an email marketing platform company, but it’s great work and we just provide the tools to annoy people. It’s our customers that actually do it (I know, I know).
Back in 2018, I had incredible results running Reddit ads. A CTR of 1.7%, a cost per click as low as 22 cents, and my landing page was converting at 18%.
Even back then, 100% of traffic Reddit ads was coming through Mobile, which explains why they really want (need) users on their mobile app. Desktop users just don't click ads, and mobile users using other clients don't see Reddit ads.
The tools available to me back then to run Reddit ads were a joke compared to other platforms, but with user acquisition was costing me around a dollar per user, I didn't really care!
I try not to get all rose-tinted about reddit but this doesn't surprise me at all and appears to be the natural progression of what was signaled with the firing of Victoria Taylor. Reddit has clearly forgotten that, despite its more recent professional veneer, it is still held together by duct tapes and prayers - both of which are largely provided by their own moderators and 3rd party app developers. Yet with every passing year they've become increasingly hostile to both. Steve Huffman threatened to ban all of us last blackout, as if a bunch of volunteers (many of which probably would relish the opportunity to step away from reddit and just need a bit of a prod) can be truly threatened.
They're trying to saw off the table legs while they're setting the table for their big meal.
It would be the highpoint of immature unprofessionalism to reveal company strategy or policy in interview questions.
I ask a coding interview question where I tell my candidates "Assume you have to do everything in memory; there is no database - you just receive events; everything is in one host, or multi-tier architecture." That's because it's a test of their ability to reason about data structures, and implement a short (20-30 minute) algorithm.
In real life, there is no way the "feature" I ask them to implement would be done in memory, and the data would naturally be in a database. It's not a architectural design question (i have others for that), it's a coding question.
I should hope nobody comes out of it thinking "wow, the engineers at this company are under pressure not to use databases, or have durable L2 caches"
I suspect you are reading into the constraints of an interview question, and the effects on the consumer was just not relevant to the technical concepts they were trying to evaluate.
Reddit, making a blatantly obvious case for why third party apps are necessary on a post about stopping third party apps: https://i.imgur.com/3yEJ4oX.jpg
It's not the first time I'm seeing this and, having worked at places that have mobile apps and a ton of UGC, this is as illogical as things get.
Mobile apps go into stores. App stores (especially the Apple app store) have many rules about UGC in apps. Including rules that may be incompatible with ToS of your service. Like the rule saying that NSFW content must not exist.
On your website, on the other hand, you're the king. You set your own rules. There's no one to tell you what can and can't be done unless you're breaking laws so hard some government notices.
So by virtue of that, there's usually LESS content available in the app than on the website. This, though? You have to look at this content in the app BECAUSE it is unreviewed? This is bonkers. This is completely backwards to everything my own experience tells me.
This is just a lame excuse to make you install the app.
I had this exact thought. I believe Reddit is the #1 app/service people point to when discussing how inconsistently this rule is applied (Reddit is simply too big to impose that kind of sanction on, even for Apple.)
I believe I encountered a situation like this before, and what it really means is that you just have to log in to see it, and Reddit is just lying to you.
It’s amazing how much worse the new redesign is. I’m not usually a “new is bad” kind of guy but it’s just way less functional. Apparently a majority of people use it at this point though, and I guess “new” is relative here.
It depends on what you’re trying to achieve with it. If you’re consuming, scrolling through content and memes and such but mostly not dwelling on things, the new one is way better than the old one. But if you’re using it as forums (announcements, discussions, that kind of thing—e.g. /r/rust for me), the new one is hopelessly bad, and the old one is rather good. Reddit is clearly not at all interested in the latter class any more.
Reddit's image hosting implemented blocking direct linking to image files and started substituting an HTML-ish page like imgur does a few months back. After much complaint they actually fixed it so that the image in the hijacked URL's HTML is a real image tag (<img src="ht..) with a real URL to the image file. For a while it had been a javascript defined custom html element (web components) instead of an <img>.
So at least they did that right. imgur has been failing hard at this for ~5+ years.
Their design is to control how the uploaded images are accessed and minimize the load on the backend.
They don't want hotlinking so the image data doesn't have a permanent url. They only want the backend to be responsible for sending image data. This then requires an image viewer written in javascript. This is not a bad design. This is fulfilling business requirements successfully and efficiently.
EDIT: efficient for the business not for your browser
It doesn't just require Javascript to load the image, it requires Javascript from 13 different domains (thanks, NoScript.)
- imgur.com
- btloader.com
- ccgateway.net
- cloudflare
- facebook
- google analytics
- media-lab.ai
- sascdn.com
- scorecardresearch
- stretchsquirrel
- amazon adsystem
- assembly exchange
- run.app
3 of these, imgur, cloudflare, and medialab appear to be the minimum to load the image, and also seems to make everything on the page work (upvoting, commenting, etc.)
I don't think it's efficiency even on their end they're looking for, its tracking and revenue maximization. Which is the reason I block Javascript.
EDIT: actually it seems like you just need imgur and medialab unblocked, so just 2 of the 13.
imgur has gone to shit as well. I'd imagine the trend is happening across most sites with surveillance as their business model.
I also don't understand why discussion of this topic rarely touches on adversarial interoperability? Explicitly published and versioned APIs are a nicety. If companies are going to choke them, then why not just use the same API the web interface uses rather than paying the Danegeld?
That error happens because your browser is broken. I had the same issue because my image viewer assumed i.imgur would always serve images but they've recently been serving redirections and html (presumably to force people to see ads).
The obtuse message seems to be Firefox's fault, but even with Chromium or wget I just get an HTTP 429. "Too many requests" from an IP I have exclusive use of, which hasn't tried to access imgur in days. No, the site is just broken because some business knob decided that breaking the site might help revenue.
It's obvious they're trying to push the app as hard as they can get away with, but I'm confused as to how "unreviewed" content relates to the viewer using the web or the app. If anything, I'd expect the opposite; app stores sometimes object to spicy content.
Yep, nearly any important posts seem to be labeled as NSFW so you won’t be able to see them other than how Reddit wants to have you see them. This is the future we paid for with enormous amounts of VC money.
I have Reddit posts auto open in Apollo but specifically went to this one in browser to see how bad it’s gotten. It’s not just an annoying pop up. You literally cannot use most of Reddit in a mobile browser now.
And I came from the link in this post which was supposed to go to old.reddit
That’s how dire things are. I have been a reddit user since 2009, almost 15 years. But I’m not a nostalgic person. As awful as it has gotten it’s still the place where most discussion on the internet happens (and has happened for over a decade.) That can’t just be replaced overnight. They’re sitting on a huuuuge amount of content that is fully indexed by search engines too. This would be a huge blow to the internet in general I think. All so they can have a Groupon style IPO.
It works for now; I wouldn't bet on it still working in 6 months. They've already killed i.reddit (the old non-shittified mobile web layout) "in an effort to streamline the experience and reduce the number of ways you can access Reddit on the web" [1].
Or maybe just a non-venture-backed, privately owned company who isn’t beholden to shareholders and isn’t greedy? A “man and pop shop” but as a social media company.
Like many of us I’ve been using Reddit for a very long time (over 10 years) and am saddened by how much worse it’s got since the beginning. I also think they’ve greatly enshittified their default clients to push people to worse clients and hate that - they could have just given people a reason to want to use the new clients.
But I have an unpopular opinion: it’s totally ok, and I mean morally ok, for Reddit to charge for API access to this extent. 3rd party app usage incurs direct operational costs on Reddit, requires them to support an API with clients outside their control (and further, if a client uses the API inefficiently, Reddit has a lot more overhead in working to reduce that), and prevents supporting those efforts through advertising monetization. The actual API cost is not wholly unreasonable. Reddit shouldn’t be expected to work for free.
That is not to excuse all the other terrible dark patterns they’ve implemented. This wouldn’t even really be a problem at all if they had incentivized their own clients by making them better, what with all the funding and employees they have, and the ability to make backend changes to accommodate client changes. They’ve been using entirely “stick” tactics to encourage their crap clients instead of “carrot”. Even for people like me who don’t want to use the app at all, if they hadn’t made the default mobile web client (which I still use) so annoying and restrictive, probably Apollo would have much fewer users.
Basically, this is only a problem because they have given users no reason to use their official clients besides artificial annoyances
If reddit shouldn't be expected to work for free, neither should the users be expected to create content for reddit for free nor should the moderators be expected to moderate that content for free.
For starters they could display media like videos in ways that aren’t possible (or much harder) to do on the Web, that alone could be huge for the core user base that just wants to look at pictures and videos. Presumably some users would prefer the app because you’re always signed in. You could configure it to send you push notifications for replies or something. They could probably figure out a better way to render deeply nested comment threads too - basically make the experience smoother without pageloads or visual clutter, which some users might like.
Any sort of game or seasonal “interesting” thing like /r/place could very well be mobile-only
At the very least, they can get the default mobile version to a good state, remove all the artificial blockers and nags they’ve put in place, set it to maintenance mode from a product perspective, then only add UX improvements and new features to the mobile apps. The problem is they don’t even seem to make UX improvements most of the time… just UX annoyances
I'd like to offer a different perspective: let reddit kill 3rd party apps.
reddit has only gotten worse in the past years and even if we manage to somehow "coerce" them into supporting 3rd party apps, the core issues will remain and will re-appear under a different form.
We've had forums before and centralising *all* into one place never seemed like a good idea.
(yes, I know my comment might be perceived as "simplistic" or "narrow", but we, the users, made reddit what it is today - we also have the power and duty to undo that)
Considering the company's apparent lack of concern over the intense backlash from moderators, I suspect that they're not just planning to kill third-party apps, they're planning to eventually kill user-managed subreddits as well, i.e. bringing ownership/moderation of the most popular / highest revenue subreddits in-house (employee mods able to use some of the internal admin tools) and making the rest some mixture of read-only and quarantined.
Could they realistically do this? Aren't user-modded niche subs a big thing? If all that's left is a handful of subreddits curated by reddit themselves is the site even the same? Why would anyone want to visit at that point?
I would wager that 90% or more of their revenue comes from the generic TikTok meme slurry of r/all and the front page. I think some big % of their users aren't even signed in.
So the long tail of hobby subs are probably just noise and operational burden. So if they're wanting to IPO, they probably want to cut costs and focus hard on ad revenue. I'm guessing banning nsfw stuff is probably in the works too.
that seems going too far from me, they would be killing their strongest positives (easy to access communities for niches) just to become tiktoks sewage outlet?
I'm not suggesting at all that Reddit as we know it would survive the transformation, rather that Reddit management probably has reasons to think that the transformation is worth the fallout. At this point, I think their "ideal user" is basically the opposite of people who cut their teeth on classic Reddit: the person who doesn't use ad blockers, scrolls the default subs for hours, rarely posts problematic content, and never gets angry at the admins.
They may not be able to accomplish that without backlash, but I believe that Reddit deep down would love if they could get rid of user run subreddits. Therea more profit to be had giving the keys over to big corporations to propagandize through their own "communities", just like how most tv/movie fan subreddits are at least partly managed by studios and production companies.
Reddit is like Twitter and Instagram - it really depends on who you follow. All three are full of wonderful creative and interesting individuals and ideas that I'm really glad I follow. Also a lot of toxic crap.
You wouldn't say radio is useless simply because there is a genre of station you don't like.
The parent comment is talking about the presentation, too, not just the content.
This situation is more like if all of the radio stations were owned by the same company, were all jam-packed with the same crappy advertisements, and it was quickly becoming evident that the only way to listen to any of the stations would be through the crappy radio offered directly by the company.
I think this is what FM radio basically is, and def what SiriusXM is. It might also be why radio is less interesting to many than Android Auto or Carplay.
I miss Slashdot's 2-dimensional voting system, and meta-moderation system. It seemed to work fairly well, it's just that the submissions got stale over time and the community smaller which is all that matters in the end for this kind of site.
hn really ended up replacing Slashdot for me. Disappointingly, I took a look at /. in the past month and realized I hadn't even loaded it out in 4+ years.
Ideal would be hn style sites, decentralized like forums, and managed by individual communities. Then, stick to a standard, unlike the old phpBB, vBulletin, etc, so there can be some level of access by API.
What you're describing sounds a bit like Lemmy [0].
In essence it's a federated reddit.
Anyone can host their own instance with its own rules/topic. And each instance can have communities (subreddits).
You can subscribe/comment to any of the other instances' "subreddits" from your own instance.
> it's just that the submissions got stale over time and the community smaller
In my experience, the people in that community want to keep it small, and private. They don't want folks not like them, around.
A good way to ensure that happens, is treat anyone that raises issues about the way they are treated, like crap.
We won't stick around for abuse. The people that are gaming the system, will endure it as "cost of doing business," but the folks that want to get something from the community, won't stick around.
I hardly ever ask any questions, anymore, and have absolutely no interest in visiting, just to answer them.
At one time, I was quite enthusiastic about SO, but no more. The shine wore off that knob, long ago.
> Even stack overflow doesn’t make me click “read more comments” to show full content of the thing I’m looking for.
this is a symptom of the site redesign/official app (presumably, I don't use it) - you don't see this behaviour in old.reddit or in the unofficial apps (I use Relay Pro).
Reddit was my last hope for a non-user-hostile social network.
The biggest problem with the media's complete abandoment of all principle in continuing to treat Twitter as a high integrity platform is the message it reflects to all other social media platforms : your users are captives. They can't leave. Once you have enough of a network effect going, no amount of disreputable behaviour or abuse is too much.
In my view, it's becoming imperative that Twitter (and now Reddit) actually fail to save the internet. (You could put Facebook there too but I think these days it's actually lately been more benign than the other two).
It may be impossible to have a situation where a for-profit company makes a service where the users are not the paying customers and users are treated well indefinitely. Reddit has experimented with a paid premium service, but they couldn't paywall any core functionality because having as many users as they can get is critical to their success.
It's probably a mistake to rely on things like that for socialization, communication, or creating communities. I would like to see federated technologies take off; there are at least two Reddit-alikes using ActivityPub, Kbin and Lemmy, which seem to federate with each other smoothly. They're currently much farther from critical mass than Mastodon (though they sort of federate with that too).
> Reddit has experimented with a paid premium service, but they couldn't paywall any core functionality because having as many users as they can get is critical to their success.
Businesses can certainly be "successful" with premium services, especially at Reddit's scale. What's happening there is textbook greed, where leadership chases hockey stick growth. At this point they must understand that this will be the downfall of the service, yet they're intentionally willing to make that sacrifice for short-term gains.
Good riddance. There are plenty of other services that can replace Reddit. The circle of the web.
That's why the digital markets act will be devastating when it will apply to social media apps, the first target is chat apps, next social media platforms.
Unfortunately, Mastodon is designed to look like Twitter, with people disorganizedly shouting at each other rather than being clearly organized in nestable threads.
I am confused why he is upset. He has built a big business for himself on the back of Reddit. Reddit realizes that he is extracting value from their platform, since they aren’t able to harvest ad review, discourages registers, etc.
Now Reddit wants rent to compensate for the lost ads. My guess Reddit also noticed most people using Apollo doesn’t create content, so Apollo users are just extracting value from Reddit.
I’d like to see the hard numbers before having an opinion about who yo be upset with.
If you watch the video you find that he has valid complaints, and he's not opposed to paying Reddit but thinks these terms are designed to sink 3rd party apps. Some highlighted points.
* The API access charges about 10x the price compared to the revenue per user they would expect if the users accessed reddit via web or official app.
* There was 30 days notice of the new pricing. He has many customers that pay per-year that he is going to lose money on until renewal.
* The price is too high. Compared to similar platforms that charge for API they are charging way more.
* An individual from the company called him out for having 'inefficient' code, which he took personally and mounted a good defense of his usage.
* The API is losing feature parity with the first party website/app.
* Reddit is itself building a bigger business on the backs of reddit users generating content. Many of those users use a 3rd party app. In fact, 3rd party apps were largely responsible for transitioning reddit into mobile usage. They seem to be overstepping their position in the ecosystem.
His “defense” for using the API inefficiently is that the official app makes a similar amount requests as Apollo, ignoring whether those are actually API requests or just telemetry (as mentioned in the linked video). Apollo makes 3.5x more requests than other third party apps. That’s a lot.
Not really "a lot". When you think about providing absolutely best user experience, you gotta leave the engineering efficiencies out at the doors and live with the redundant API calls. The over optimization often comes with sacrificing the UX.
It’s possible to make fewer requests without negatively impacting the user experience. For example, batching requests would result in a more responsive app.
He specifically cited situations where the opposite is true - for example when first opening a subreddit, he requests only 25 posts so the UI can render something quickly, then requests a further 100 posts to prepare for the user scrolling.
He could just request 100 posts first, halving the API requests, but the app would be less responsive.
Your comments seem to have a confidence level that their content doesn't justify.
That’s a great example of something that could be optimized without impacting the user experience. For example, just request the next page of posts when the user starts to reach the bottom. The reason for my confidence is that I’ve worked with Reddit’s API before and I know exactly where the pitfalls are.
That’s too late to be sending the request if you want the premium feeling of no loading times while scrolling, especially if you also want to do rich thumbnails of media.
He is upset because they told him API pricing would be “fair and reasonable”. But when they announced pricing, it comes to ~$20 million per year for Apollo. He doesn’t make anything near that from Apollo.
He isn’t opposed to paying for API access, but he feels the rates they are charging are exorbitant to the point of being designed to forcel 3rd party apps out of business, not extract value from them.
...or, has facilitated a large number of contributions to the site in terms of posts, comments, votes, views, community building and fluidity, and user stickiness.
I can't see the relationship between Apollo and Reddit as singularly one sided.
Reddit encouraged third party clients for a long time, and made no effort to monetize them. The piracy analogy is completely inappropriate.
Reddit could still encourage third party clients and also monetize them in a reasonable way, but they have chosen to be unreasonable and will almost certainly kill the market for those apps.
A simple reasonable way is that you have to pay a subscription to Reddit to use a third party app. The app maker would then just have to charge enough to make a profit for their time spent creating and supporting the app.
Milking? He made a great app that I use daily ( guess it will soon be _used_) and he used the money I paid him to improve his work setup. How is that _milking_?
You improved his work setup but app hasn’t been improved lately with thousands of bugs reported and ignored. Just go to his Apollo GitHub, I am an ultra user and it’s been frustrating to use that app as a Reddit Mod.
Please don’t give me that “he’s the only one working”.
Why did you put the word "need" in quotes? I don't see it in the comment you're replying to.
That said: least for me, I've found that some equipment actually does make me more efficient as a dev, even if I don't "need" it as the bare minimum to do my job. I could do my job on a 15 year old ThinkPad. But having a modern computer with a nice mouse, keyboard and a big external display makes a measurable different in my productivity
You could get a large monitor, what does the dynamic range do for you? Nobody is saying to use old equipment just why would you buy something so clearly suited for one purpose for a domain that doesn't even involve HDR content?
This is also talking about an iOS dev saying this would help test for iPads. How exactly does any of that make sense?
I'm guessing I'm not the only one who just uses the web and the official Reddit app, and basically is happy with it - no issues, no complaints. And so maybe only sees this as a business decision (good or bad) that's up to Reddit to make that will really not impact me at all.
I would feel similarly if Reddit did not force you to log in to get non-shitty UX on those clients. I’m not even against ads necessarily, I just don’t want all my viewing habits to be tracked. It shouldn’t even be necessary to run relevant ads as they can simply be served based on the page/subreddit content. And given that Reddit seems to be generally bad at engineering I don’t trust them with any more data than they need
I'm a Reddit Mod and no issues with their web and app. It's basically very hard to moderate with third party clients, so there is no choice but to use their official platforms.
Third party apps are just missing too many features that I use like chat, voting in polls, live threads, etc. No idea whether that’s Reddit’s fault or the dev’s, but it’s a deal breaker regardless.
The APIs for those features were never made available to devs outside of Reddit, no doubt also a decision to drive users to the official site/app. If they had been made available, clients like Apollo would've been using them somewhere between a week and month after release.
I know I'm in the minority here on HN, but....look: I feel bad for the developers of the various 3rd-party apps that this is happening. Having the rug pulled from your livlihood just absolutely sucks.
Having said that: Can you really blame Reddit here? Reddit is company which is trying to make money. One of the ways it does that is by building its own app and selling its own ads and showing those ads on its app which it controls and in the way it wants.
Whether or not we agree, and whether or not we think it's the right move, you can't honestly be surprised by this can you? Facebook doesn't have a 3rd-party client. Twitter stopped having 3rd party clients. This is how the game is played.
The mobile app is fine. I use it every day. Is Apollo better? Maybe? Will most of Reddit's users care about this? Doubtful.
Is it? Twitter had a golden opportunity in its early stages to become the message bus of social media before it killed 3rd party apps. Looking at twitter today I can say for a fact that stunned their growth and now they are just a zombie.
Monetizing your service doesn't have to mean killimg 3rd party app. Also, keep in mind that the users of Reddit are what makes Reddit Reddit. You fuck with them and you'll end up with a ghost town. How are you going to monetize a ghost town?
You could have written the same thing to explain Microsoft bundling IE and crushing competing 3rd parties back in 1999.
Can you really blame Microsoft here? Microsoft is company which is trying to make money. One of the ways it does that is by building its own browser and locking users into its platform which it controls and in the way it wants.
EDIT: And sorry, I know you're not defending or excusing Reddit here. My comment is just about how we sometimes mistake "what a company obviously will do" for "what standard a company should be held to"
Ironically, Reddit doesn't have any interesting technology or a novel product design; it fails to compete as an ad-tech platform. They are just a community. Its value is the goodwill of the Reddit members, and that's it. Their revenue is Reddit awards and premium memberships.
Acting against the interests of their own users will make the platform less valuable in the long-term if moderators and users lose trust in the platform.
Reddit shouldn't even try to go IPO. It's basically a collection of forums. They should be a private company that makes a small profit hosting the forums instead of trying to be like Facebook
If they're doing that then why are they following the Tumblr playbook? Reducing access to pornography, making user hostile changes. Next thing they'll hire Marissa Meyer probably.
One could argue that, from the point-of-view of a reader,
Reddit is a clone of Usenet, or Fido, or BBSes.
Not the back-ends, of course, but the UIs, the organic growth of communities,
the community spirit that often develops, the meta-arguments about
policies, moderation, moderators.
The clones that drew the most attention all ended up becoming right-wing cesspools. I remember they were often created because of free-speech absolutism which was code for "I want to express hateful views without consequence".
Voat was hijacked by neonazi communities that used bots to massively pre-register popular community names and effectively prevent anyone outside of their circle from using the site. It also was absolutely full of tech issues and spent at least a quarter of its first few years down.
As for the usage.. there's some, but it is niche. The average user just won't move unless something goes from so-so-satisfactory to offensive. This is how mastodon got its (seemingly brief) user spike.
If you think about Reddit as each of its subreddits being little islands, each island has a timeline of user posts, each post has a tree of comments, and there are moderators who enforce the rules of that island.
To me that starts to sound a lot like each subreddit could be replicated as an instance of something like Mastodon, and you're really only some kind of shared user database away from being able to make something that functions exactly like Reddit, but without any corporate control.
The problem with that is that you need to spend money to either host your own instance or pay someone else to do it for you. Most people are tech-illiterate and do not want to pay to host something which doesnt even reach the threshold to be a "hobby"
There is years and years and years of amazing content and community on Reddit. Rallying people around a replacement looks challenging. I am hopeful that it happens.
I wouldn’t go that far. Often there’s a bigger and/or better community elsewhere, but the Reddit one is also passable because so many people are on Reddit.
When you create an alternative to big tech sites, you end up with the people who can't or won't use big tech sites. It's usually the former, and they suck. You get Nazis, commies, anarchists, and all the sorts of people whose posts you don't want to see between memes and cute animal pictures. It takes effort to prevent these people from taking over your website and driving away the normies.
There are dozens of Reddit clones, many have come and gone. In my eyes they don't work because they aren't novel or innovative. There's no reason to switch for the average user.
I've written three of them. It's not technically difficult, but good luck getting people to actually use it (and if you do, you may end up with a userbase worse than 4chan).
This will fuck over a bunch of blind people. Using the site is just not doable with a screen reader. There has bin aps made for blind people to use and these will all stop working.
It'd be tough. Private websites are not required to comply to the ADA to the same extent as government domains or public-facing businesses. Maybe a case could be raised after their IPO.
I can't see Reddit as "Big Tech". It's absolutely not in the same weight class as Google, Facebook/Meta, et al. Which is not to say it shouldn't be allowed to die, but if nothing else we should keep the true scale in mind.
For not being in the same leagues as the big boys, they have outsized power to twist and shape political narratives, they know it and they gleefully exercise it.
Consider the fact that their CEO (admittedly!) abused his admin privileges to fraudulently impersonate users, posting fake messages AS them, expressly to frame them.
We would not know about it, and he might still be doing it today if not for some observant moderators. But nothing happened to him, at all - in fact the people and subreddit he hacked were themselves banned.
THAT is power. THAT is what is meant by "big tech".
It's power, but it's not what people mean by "big tech". That is still a lower tier of power than Google, Meta, or Microsoft. It's just not close. Consider how many congressional lobbyists they command, for instance, if not their effects on speech.
No, its not; not being traded on the open market, it doesn’t have a real market cap. It may have once had a $40B market cap, but that doesn’t mean it does (or would if it were on the market) now.
They also don't get fixed just because people keep whining. Nothing is going to change, any more than when people complain about Facebook design changes or whatever. The answer is stop using reddit. I already shredded my comment history[0] and deleted Apollo from my phone.
By releasing an API, and letting third party developers pick up the slack, the community grows and the main company doesn't have to invest as much themselves into this annoying UI stuff. And even if their own efforts are misguided, there are other options, so people stick around. Once they've decided they got all they need from the third parties, and users are too attached to leave, they cut off access. It's a rug-pull from under the people that helped build the community up so I can see why it feels like a betrayal.
While they have technically not 'cut off' access, they chose their pricing for a reason, and it will have this effect. As to whether third party apps are superior, to me that's a side issue - if main-Reddit makes a user-hostile decision, their site and app won't support ameliorating that since it goes against their plans. Third Party apps can and do, which is beneficial to users.
No, and for many that's one of the selling points of Reddit. It's one of the few social media services that lets you use the client that suits you best instead of having no choice but to be force-fed whatever the marketing department and C-suites have had the engineers shoddily build into the first-party app.
I see the argument that this openness makes the service harder to monetize, but it's not as if Reddit (or Twitter) ever gave it any actual effort. For example they could mandate that API usage past some threshold requires the app using it to present ads delivered by the API, and if users want to get rid of them they could subscribe to Reddit Premium. I don't think there'd be much resistance to this from heavier Reddit users — most realize that the free ride wasn't going to last forever, but the prices being asked for now are outrageous and many times greater than what Reddit is losing to users not seeing ads.
I don't know if they do. But the fact is Reddit did offer it (presumably because they saw a benefit from doing so), so that is why people now expect it. Changing the rules on people like this is always going to upset them because they get used to it. But I think unlike past situations, there's no good target for a mass exodus so it probably won't impact them much.
Haven't used the app recently so can't compare them. But there is the question of user vs developer incentives that even if not applicable today, will always be there. As another example, I hate how I cannot mute Stories in Instagram, and videos don't show a progress bar. But I have no legitimate third party app to help with this and as a consequence I limit my use of it.
For the API I think only someone with access to Reddit data can answer that. They likely have internal reports about why they chose this price point - that would be the starting point for any conversation I think. One example - if app users are highly motivated and produce a lot of content and engagement for the remaining (ad-viewing) users to interact with, then free might be the sensible price. But I have no idea if this is the case. Being able to design a pricing scheme is not really a prerequisite for being unhappy with things changing anyway, feedback is important.
It is not entirely clear how they can change to make less requests, or if the Reddit employee even compared apps fairly. There is a floor count of API calls needed.
Since this is a thing with VC-lead platforms, how could this be done different, while 'almost' maximising revenue? Something that pays for cost + healthy extra margin.
What is a path for something like Reddit, supporting 3rd party apps, obviously showing ads in whatever feed gets served, but also being able change where and how ads are shown, or change monetisation strategy? I see a lot of handwavey and simplistic remarks, but how exactly, then?
Would a user subscription work? How much would you pay for an ad-free reddit per month? Probably can't be less than $20. Would it be viable? If not, how are these platforms ever going to exist?
Or is it never going to work and do we have to go back to crappy forums and discords and check 15 separate places? (RSS? never heard of her)
replace Reddit with whatever comes next that shows your favourite niche content you can't find elsewhere, all in one place.
How am I supposed to stop them? Reddit is not a public resource. The suggested method of “complaining” is unlikely to work since it’s not like they don’t know that users of third-party applications don’t like the change; they’re just betting not many will leave over it (probably correctly).
I think Reddit's executives are implementing these changes to create amazing revenue forecasts out of thin air and sell the company for the next sucker.
Maybe Meta or Microsoft will buy Reddit out and ruin it further.
I'll just add to the comments here that various apps or using .old don't support reddit nfts, which reddit has repeatedly said is a current business priority.
They don't stand a chance in competition against cheaper ways of getting data from them. In the end, they still give all the data for free in the form of HTML pages.
They've had it coming for some time now and I will have great enjoyment in seeing them finally self-destruct when their time comes.
They've been making mistake after mistake in the public free-speech sphere and nothing more than crumbs is left over from their inital base platform values.
I do get that they need to adhere to the advertisement companies to earn money, but I have to say that I am immensely disgusted by their lack of integrity and virtues.
Aaron Swartz will be happy to see them disappear from the public eye at last. And this will surely be in the right direction in that regard. I left that platform 7 years ago, haven't looked back.
I'm no fan of Reddit's management and the choices they've made in recent times, but I've yet to find anywhere else where I feel a true sense of community and source of knowledge.
Reddit is one of the first places I search for almost anything; if I'm using a search engine, it's almost always to "site:reddit.com <my query>".
I didn't downvote you, but one thing that surprises me that for all of the expert communities I follow and participate in, there are basically never links to Reddit threads. I do hear complaints from a few friends about how misleading/non-factual some of the comments are.
These are very broad categories. For my own interest reddit is not always the best place. For example for owners of Multistrada motorcycles there are some old school European forums where you can find everything. For a distro like openSuse, their matrix channel and their own forums are a lot better. For programming in go, again a 2nd level (not the most popular) matrix channel is fantastic. For the latter too the reddit crowd is mostly newcomers with a lot of opinions but not much of it very useful.
After having tried to make use of reddit by subscribing only to the smaller more focused subs as is usually recommended, I can say that for my own use case the results were meh.
I do keep a mobile client on my phone so reddit links will open there but my engagement is very very low these days. All the better because it's predominantly a very negative place.
I think you need to define "better". If you're not set on having the same amount of people (because network effects are the biggest pain, and if it was as big as reddit presumably you'd have heard of it)
TV/Movies has forums at dslreports.org, and people sort of discuss on mastadon.
Technology as Ars Technica, here, mastadon instances and hashtags, discord, and if you're talking work, stuff on mailing lists via google and others, and maybe teams?
I have mostly given up on politics - I can't imagine having useful discussions in public online anywhere anymore.
Home DYI had the HOYUZZ (??) forums I think. But again, that's mostly web based I think.
I'm not into the other stuff so IDK on those. I could imagine someone trying to build a competitor - I mean there is lemmy I think.
> where I feel a true sense of community and source of knowledge.
To me HN is the closest to a degree. You need a system where users agree on what they want to see, and its not just a select few who enforce the system, but the community self-polices. HN self-polices quite a lot, though I wouldnt be surprised what sorts of mess the mods deal with behind the scenes, having moderated other communities elsewhere online.
I fucking hate these companies that exist solely to take the work and effort of individuals entering data into their systems who then turn around and lock it all up in the name of money.
I’m keeping an eye on Wikipedia but the worst offender next to Reddit is IMBD. They aggregate information and reviews and ratings from users and for like, two decades? Share proper dumps of that information because why not…give back to the community. They wouldn’t exist without them. And then decide to strip those dumps of all useful information and paywall the rest behind some expensive API while what…expecting users to keep contributing?
They’re all scum bags and the whole lot needs to be federated. I’m already paying $30/year for mastodon (as a donation) and I’m sure this can work with Reddit as well. I hear the front runner is Lemmy but haven’t explored it yet. Now I will and I hope it’s good.
Holding data hostage (to a subscription) is such a strong attractor that it has completely obliterated every other model. And I hate it. It makes everything worse, for everybody. I don't know what will replace it, but my clients are all already groaning under the load, and I don't blame them one bit.
//
On a completely different subject, but to end on a happier note, I want to thank you for recommending citrulline a couple weeks ago. It's made a surprisingly large difference for me, and it hadn't been on my radar as something to even try before you mentioned it. So, thanks!
You’re super welcome for the recommendation. Been taking it and it’s been good so far. Another one I came across is Tribulus and it seems like the NIH has good things to say about it but the Wikipedia entry for it has it backwards so I’m making it my homework to go over the NIG studies before suggesting edits.
Now back to IMDB…it really saddens me to see communities build really elaborate software around these websites just to have the rug pulled out from under them and turn their efforts into monoliths of nothing. We’ve had decentralized forums since the days of BBS’ (Usenet), spent 3 decades pouring knowledge into branded communities just to end up locked out of them and are now finally going full circle back into federated platforms.
I hope the momentum sticks because now we have the potential to democratize and open source AI but that’s only possible if the zeitgeist isn’t paywalled. I’ve heard rumors that Reddit execs feel miffed about not turning a profit from the recent wave of LLMs because for a lot of people it really is the front page of the internet and lots of information has been poured into it. If that’s the case, then it’s as the old saying goes “good things are often ruined by the few”.
Don't forget Gracenote, who was founded on this very principle.
It just keep happening and happening, too. https://thetvdb.com/ is the latest one I've seen. User generated content, open API (with request throttling to prevent abuse) for years and now some media company swoops in, buys it and goodbye free API! It's spitting in the face of their entire community and really infuriating.
Got sold to Roku right? Yea, I’m just waiting for the day where they block us out of that one too. I have scripts that download all of their initial data and then daily diffs for a project I gave up on.
Who's presuming? Swartz was remarkably vocal about his aspirations for the internet, and I definitely don't remember hearing him say that the future we ought to fight for is one where APIs wrapping user-generated content are only accessible to institutions with deep pockets.
Banning hate speech and legal grey area porn subs fits pretty well with this item in that they're both things you would do if you wanted to run a business and not have a little unmonetizable niche site.
