Reddit isn’t profitable, despite having more than 50 million daily active users. In preparation for an IPO, CEO Steve Huffman put the platform’s API
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“Risks” assumes it hasn’t happened yet, the truth is this happened many years ago.
I think it hasn’t ‘happened’ or ‘not happened’, I think it began losing its way and losing its identity years ago, but I think what we have seen recently is a big acceleration of that process, and for many the straw that broke the camels back was the recent changes and toxic behavior of the ceo and pr team
I agree that saying ‘risks losing its identity’ makes it sound like it is hypothetical and in the future which is not accurate.
I figure they’re trying to say they risk losing their user base, of which they only lost about 3%. But yeah it’s identity began to transition to it’s lesser form of today when they launched the official app, back in 2016.
Reddit has changed more than once. But this is very different. Your comment struck me as cynically dishonest. Almost dismissive of what has brought me and many people to even hear about lemmy let alone discover it even exists.
Nothing like this has ever happened to reddit before. Full stop. To act otherwise shows both ignorance and also insensitivity to the millions of people who feel like they just got evicted from their portal to the rest of whats happening in the world.
Because i can still use reddit if i use it differently, that barrier of usability shows what a vast number of people who use reddit want. Perhaps it also shows how invasive our digital habits have skewed or affected our physical world behaviours.
And perhaps my bias is showing, i have been on reddit for longer than some, if not many, reddit users have been alive.
It was a place i learned a lot about the world around me and now have to try to figure out how to live without it. And im old now. To quote the simpsons "I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!
I think unfamiliar and confusing is more accuarate than weird and scary but it seems a strangely prohetic quote.
Fun fact. I can remember watching the simpsons on a black and white 12" CRT TV (KVOS TV 12)
Im 42
In summary this did NOT happen years ago your truth does not match my reality
I was a Redditor a long time as well, since before the “Narwals bacons at midnight” thing first took off. Ive been on its ups and downs, but usually was like “it’s fine i guess”, but this last move was I guess the straw the camel’s back for me.
They’ve already lost their identity. The parties over, spez has turned it into corporate garbage no better than Instagram
Already gone. We Lemmy now.
We Lemmy now. ahu
Qapla’!
True! We just need a few more people from Reddit over here and then the party can really start
This article is mostly useless. It states the problem, but doesn’t have anything new to add.
They already did. They killed so many things.
Reddit basically lost any semblance of respect the community should have for it. You know, the people who give them all their content and do all their moderation for free.
Fuck 'em high.
Whatever they’ve lost, they still retain their hard-earned reputation as being a cesspit of trolls and bigots.
Some troll bigot racist xenophobe ablist literally downvoted my chungus post. Im so done with reddit.
reddit kept the_donald around for years after they helped organize a literal nazi rally. Because they helped organize a nazi rally. Don’t pretend reddit hasn’t earned it.
I hope lemmy remains unwelcoming to bigots.
So…every business ever?
Any app that doesn’t have ads is a better product to me
It already did.
The blatant astroturfing is what really icked me out. From day one of the API changes, it was clear that Reddit had spun up the spin machine and had begun to misrepresent the issues.
The main one was how they tried to push the “they just want the API for free”, “we’re entitled to charge for our services” narrative.
Yes, I loved it when Christian Selig let Hoffman (fuck spez) know his lies were exposed because he (Christian) had recorded their conversation… and provided proof. Would love a video of Hoffman’s reaction.
Hoffman’s reaction
Care to share a link if you have it readily available? Otherwise I can hunt around for it :)
Not sure one even exists, but would love if it did.
Christian is not talking to Huffman there.
Also, fuck spez, but Christian looks pretty bad in that sound bite. The $10 million thing really looked like a threat, and Christian tried to back pedal only after he got called out.
I always interpreted it along the lines of
“Apollo is losing you 20m per year. Buy me out for 10m. You save 10m the first year, and 20m the following years. I make a one-off 10m, which is 50% of what you value my app to be worth per year.”But I agree that whole exchange doesn’t go great.
Easy to misunderstand without hindsight!
However, it is quickly clarified and agreed upon (from both sides) that it’s not a threat.
So, spez takes part of that conversation massively out for context and said Christian threatened Reddit. Which isn’t in good faithI know the full context. It doesn’t really make it any better. Bringing it up in the first place is bad, regardless of any “clarification” (a.k.a. damage control).
Besides, do you really think your interpretation wouldn’t be considered a threat? Reddit won’t say publicly they considered it as one, but it is very clear they took it that way (and, probably, correctly).
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I gladly would have paid $2.50 per month to access reddit as it was. But I guess they didn’t want my money or because they couldn’t have all of my money they weren’t interested.
I was paying $2.50 since Reddit Premium is $30/yr and they still block your API access.
I cancelled it and won’t be going back. I no longer believe in the platform.
TIL reddit premium is a thing… What do you even get? My gut reaction is it’s a waste of money…
Ad blocker and gold. It is mostly a waste of money, but if you believe in the platform, it’s a way of paying back (which is why I cancelled it).
That was super disingenuous and turned me off, too. Like you’re saying, Selig noted that by reddit’s stats, each user cost .12 cents a month and reddit was asking for $2.40. The 3rd party developers provide a service to reddit that reddit could have monetized through various arrangements, such as requiring their ads to be displayed, requiring premium as you said, or a profit sharing arrangement. 3rd party developers were not taking advantage of reddit or demanding free access… they objected to reddit pulling out the rug suddenly and then lying and misrepresenting everything about it.
This has been like going to a restaurant or working somewhere for 8 years and then you finally meet the owner and are WHAT? Fuck that.
It was the setup as well.
Conversations in January saying API and API T&C were not changing anytime soon (clarified to mean multiple years).
The change announced shortly after with 0 concrete details.
Then 6 weeks notice of the details to then implement the changes before costs incurred.6 weeks notice is fine for consumer stuff, but not business-to-business, and not at the scale of $20m.
The narratives you mention in your last para are completely true, that’s what annoys me, IF they had engaged in good faith with users. As it is, it’s like a shopping centre that’s been free to enter saying “right, it’s now €100 to enter and any underwear shops are closed to you unless you wear our uniform.”
Just completely crazy prices for a poor service. No shit that’s unworkable. Just be honest and say you want to bring those users in-house, just fucking say that rather than trying to gaslight everyone into believing that all these competent developers are all unreasonable arseholes who are screwing you, a multi-billion-dollar corporation over.
There are probably multiple factors going on. First, there is the belief that you can’t take away functionality people already expect. Second, while there would be a number of people willing to shell out money, they probably believed a majority of folks would not. Look at what people are willing to put up with at Facebook. I hate it, but most of my friends and family are on it so I’m there. Third, their backers would never approve because of point two.
Yeah that’s my point. The fact they were suddenly asking for astronomical fees was conveniently skimmed over in favor of this ‘greedy 3rd parties want stuff for free’ narrative.
I legitimately would’ve paid for the reddit subscription if it meant keeping Reddit Sync. It’s nonsense. They just wanted the apps out of the picture.
My Reddit use has declined 70% because I only access it from my computer or through Firefox for Android (which is damn near unusable).
My reddit use has declined 100% because I refuse to go to that website. And I was spending hours on it a day.
My usage has declined to “surveying the situation” because [email protected] is now forced back unprivate and is made to look like all is ok
You just reminded me to cancel my Reddit Premium subscription. It was $30/year. Not sure what to do with my 75K coins.
Blow them in r/modcoord
Maybe go find some comments recommending Lemmy and gild them?
Make your own comments promoting lemmy and guild them
Thats terrable… l like it
Looks like it’s on sale! How’s that profitablity coming along spez?
I would have happily paid $5 a month for baconreader, probably as high as $10.
In both time and quality, I used it far more a month than netflix, hbo, or hulu.
I don’t know what it would have cost to keep baconreader active with the API changes, but from what I read the price was intentionally design to be unsustainable.
It wasn’t about making 3rd party access to the api profitable, it was about making 3rd party apps go away to push ads and harvest user data.
In the final weeks, myself and many others said we’d be happy to pitch in to keep baconreader alive, and the feeling I got was that just wasn’t an option.
Oh well, I’m here now, and can watch the whole mess from the sidelines while getting to be part of a new and growing community, instead of a bloated dying one.
$10/mo is probably in the ballpark.
I honestly don’t think the pricing was unreasonable. The main issue was the execution.
Only reasonable for an individual, bulk tools need more juce than a reg user, reddit holds a lot of cards for what to do to adress the power users
A lot of the mod tools were exempted. I imagine the ones that weren’t didn’t even try in protest.
A lot of power reddot has over mod tools that want to stay now. No wonder devs left
I agree. reddit acted very poorly; however, you could get your tool exempt by licking their boots.
There was one comment that really gave me the ‘holy shit, ick corporation’ reaction… in an article about reddit’s traffic going down, a reddit spokesperson said “we do not comment on incorrect statistics from third parties”. Like please, calm down, you’re not a lawyer for a politician on trial here.
They said this about The Verge. Big “you’re liars” energy when journalists reported factually.
They have a new identity that they keep reinforcing with every new decision. They’ve lost their previous identity and become just another web service looking to get the most money possible out of the users they can still attract.
The funny thing is… for me it wasn’t even the API changes, it was how Steve reacted to the community feedback. If you need to make your app profitable that’s fine by me, but don’t ignore your customers so bluntly. They could’ve easily worked politely with devs to find an agreeable API price, find alternative funding streams for those devs, etc. They did none of that, instead Steve acted like a jerk.
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Which is incredibly stupid and shortsighted. Third party developers have made the UX actually tolerable, and of course the users are the absolute cornerstone of the whole website
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Honestly if they’d worked with the Apollo dev and he’d turned around and proposed something reasonable like $2 a month to continue using it I’d still be on Reddit.
Treating Reddit users like shit, treating devs who have made their whole business about making Reddit better like shit, fucking with unpaid mods, and finally, this weird manifest destiny attitude that Reddit will succeed despite all of the above turned me to the Fediverse.
Just make it part of reddit premium! Ugh, why wasn’t that the solution.
Stil frustrates me. Being fair about why the business side needs it and then giving a time frame to devs to integrate with premium calls would have been the best option.
There would have been some revolts because of it, but nothing like the last few weeks imo
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Good point! It was not a given, but right now it seems like Reddit’s choices (and related events at Twitter/Meta) have been driving new platforms to emerge. I’m still incredibly suprised by the adoption of Lemmy and Kbin and especially the quaility and diversity of available apps for the platforms. It’s just really cool to see what people can do when they care about communitites of people coming together.
Because that doesn’t kill the competition.
I have been so spoiled by my 3pa I can’t even look at the old.wasit.com I just see
Ad Post Post Ad Post Post Post Ad Next page.
Idk how people put up with that.
That link is extremely dead, what was it
Reddit was it but not anymore
Embrace Ad Ad Extend Ad Extinguish 30 second non skippable ad
This precisely. It wasn’t about charging for the API. It was about charging an exorbitant amount for the API, giving devs a tiny amount of time to come up with a solution, and then belittling the user and moderator communities.
I don’t want to be a part of a website that treats its own community with so much disdain and spite.
Switch to Lemmy! Federated social media is
It oozed bad faith. I’m surprised they didn’t just say “API is dead, here’s a new different product” if they were really eager to charge LLM scrapers the moon for training data, or kill apps.
I suspect someone in legal told them that would be a risk-- if they can’t farm out accessibility issues on third party apps anymore, I could see them having ADA compliance issues.
It looks like they took the “constructive dismissal” model-- make it hostile enough that the “voluntarily” abandon the platform. Then it’s not Reddit’s fault all the apps left, and why they seemed to scramble to find a poster child “accessibility” app and give it a sweetheart deal, so they aren’t completely exposed.
The API change did not affect me personally, I use old reddit anyway, but the reaction showed that he will run this site into the ground since he just does not really get it or is extremely greedy and does not care.
This is the business world in general. Consumers need to say to businesses in no uncertain terms that they cannot just do whatever they want and still remain profitable. Without users, there is no profit. Charging for the API would be completely acceptable and expected, but they decided to go the most cartoonishly villainous route possible. This is what a lot of companies are doing now. They have gotten far too used to the profits being free. We should teach them a lesson, collectively.
I’m 43. I lived a good amount of my life without the Internet and even more of my life without smart phones. Even after gaining reliable Internet access, I remember the times when the Internet was not just a few big companies. I just rediscovered one of the old forums I used to hang out on is still operating. They have an active IRC channel as well. Don’t think we can’t go back, big tech. It would be so easy to go back. Don’t tempt me with a good time.
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The internet should be a utility so I kinda like where you’re going here
Fund it with donations, open source all the technical components
reddit did both of those originally
but when they started taking private VC money they had to start making returns on that investment which spiraled into the current situation
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All they had to do was charge relative to the value reddit is providing to said apps.
Instead they gave the “fuck you” price and now theyre not getting any money for their api.
100%, I was mad about the api changes but realistically I would have stayed
But seeing the interviews he gave was just too much. Especially when he was talking about monetizing people who say things on Reddit they wouldn’t say to their therapist. Like, that group specifically you want to milk? Fuck spez
But seeing the interviews he gave was just too much. Especially when he was talking about monetizing people who say things on Reddit they wouldn’t say to their therapist. Like, that group specifically you want to milk?
Wow, I actually hadn’t heard that 🤯 It seems believable based on his other behavior though. It’s honestly a shame, Reddit is a cool forum, but it’s kind of like a nice restaurant where you know the owners are just awful people… And that really just ruins the experience of being there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html
Paywalled but he talks about the value of the data on Reddit for ai training, basically that he wants to get the money from people saying stuff they’d only say in therapy otherwise
Dude is a creep
It’s so true! I’d still be on Reddit too. Social media is not that big of a deal in my life. I never imagined having my nerve struck so hard. That I’d delete a 11yr old account. Loosing Apollo definitely would have lowered the amount of time I would have spent on Reddit, but I changed comments, burned my accounts, and did a gdpr request, when I saw Spez’s AMA and he doubled down against Christian. And Christian easily provided the call recordings. That was so terrible. I don’t want to be anywhere near that.
I still haven’t fully moved on from it. I’m not sure if I’ll delete my account or wipe my comments or not. I don’t think it really hurts much to actually have an account registered with them(?)
There’s also a fair chance that I’ve answered some useful techal support, programming guidance, or career guidance questions on there that would be lost to the search engine gods if I wipe my account… And that seems not so great.
I don’t think everyone needs to be so drastic. And helpful genuine answers on niche topics is how I found reddit in the first place. In a way, for me, reddit became a google alternative. I liked seeing a qualified discussion about something. Especially discussions about things that never feel trustworthy, from life, relationships or even product purchases. I always feel I can distill a conversation down to gain perspective. Lemmy will accomplish that, but it’s going to take time to build it.
I can’t see myself “using” Reddit again. But it will be inescapable to visit the site when I just need a good answer to things from years ago that were arrived upon in some old thread. To me that’s reddits greatest value. What we all contributed. So I totally understand why you can’t so handedly throw it all away.
This sounds a bit like Google’s murdered project Vark.
I remember when reddit gold was there to pay server costs. There was a little bar on the side to show how much % was covered per day. I had it for quite awhile. But then I hit financial trouble and had to cancel. By the time I could afford to give back they got greedy and I couldn’t in good faith keep giving them money.
Reddit could have been a non-profit like Wikipedia. But they wanted all the money.
Yeah, we all see his extremely punchable face. Simultaneously blond and ginger and rat-like. It’s a big reason I’m off reddit.
Not that you’re wrong, but the rodent comparison, in light of reading this on Lemmy, gave me a chortle.
Not that you’re wrong, but the rodent comparison, in light of reading this on Lemmy, gave me a chortle.
He thought he was invincible . He truly had a loyal following. He unnecessarily fucked it up. He could of had it all; everyone was in support until he decided to do what he did
This is what the API protests revealed as well, as a mod team could decide to go dark without input from its own users
No, just no. Nearly all mod teams had polls about this, and all of those polls with dominating majority selected to shut down. Who is this guy? Is he getting paid by Reddit? If anything the protests revealed that Reddit admins would do anything, including disbanding the moderator teams to bring subreddits back, to suppress protests.
I don’t agree with this at all. I saw maybe 3 polls in total across the dozen subs i was on that blacked out, and they were only up for a few hours max. One got like 60 votes to shut down and then the poll was closed - on a sub with hundreds of thousands of people - and they shut down and said that was conclusive 😆.
Oh well I don’t care anymore, I deleted my 13 year old account with 200k+ karma last night. From now on if I have to go to Reddit it’ll be on a browser with ad block and not signed in.
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You probably would want to link the subreddit vote next time you claim there are extreme disparities between the vote count and user count. The mods may very well have not given enough time for people to vote, or people just plain didn’t vote at all. But we don’t know, except from your claim.
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The users who vote will ALWAYS be much less than the people who lurk on social media, no exceptions. I’m of the opinion that if you don’t vote/engage in the community you’re in, you are complicit to anything the active users decide. Democracy.
Literally any sub with more than a dozen users had an extreme disparity between user count and vote counts 😂
Not to mention the polls were all gone not long after they closed on most subs. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.
I mean, going by the 90/9/1 rule, it’s not unnatural if only 10% of users or less showed up to vote. Hell, if only 1% voted I won’t be surprised either.
The subreddit I moderate has had a poll going for the last 2.5 days.
- 1390 members.
- 75 poll respondents (5% of members)
- 7 commenters (0.5% of members)
It’s a disappointing turnout. Also, I’m one of those poll respondents and commenters. (If you remind me, I’ll post a link to the poll once it closes in 8 hours.)
I’ve had one going for 3 days now, 2k members, 160 votes and 7 comments. I was pretty surprised to see even 160 votes, its a vote for blocking a certain type of post that has been spammed recently and doesn’t contribute much.
Anecdotally, I also experienced this, maybe I just missed the polls, but I only saw a handful.
I am pro-shutdown, but two subreddits that come to mind that revolted against their mods participating in the protest are r/nba and r/eggs_irl.
I’d quit at that point if I were them.
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Came here to say the same, it’s BS, all mods asked their communities, most with polls, other with closely monitoring feedback in the blackout announcement threads, no mod acted on their own, they were all supported by the overwhelming majority of their communities.
I’ve contributed and made more replies on here than I ever did on reddit in a decade. Feels a bit more genuine and accessible. Also trying to close the door on insta, my only other social. Tired of that shit.
Man, me too, I want to leave Instagram so badly. Not that I’m addicted to reels or anything, I just can’t seem to go through with the deletion period. Even as I am typing this, it’s on deletion period, and I’m gonna reactivate it again probably. I hate Instagram because it seems fake, people flaunt their lives like trophies and I hate, hate it. And because I am against Megacorps. Fuck Musk and Zuck, and spez.
Do what we did with reddit and switch to pixelfed. Lemmy doesn’t nearly have everything that I read on reddit, but it’s such a nice habit switch that that is good. It fulfills my desire to read random stuff, laugh and talk to people. I haven’t used pixelfed but perhaps it could fulfill enough of what you get from IG to help you break away.
That’s a great idea. I’ll try Pixelfed. Thanks.
That sounds like it would be harder to keep than delete. I don’t use it, never have, but the way you describe it sounds like a bad addiction.
It’s bad because it can be so subtle. Most of my feed, ads and random reels aside, is just friends being happy and having fun. Thing is, a lot post only when they travel or do fun stuff, and some have the money or the terrible financial skills to make that a habit. The end result is that, very subtly, you start thinking everyone has it better than you. Everyone just skips or skims through the boring or bad parts of their life, while you live every moment of yours as you keep comparing it to what you see on Instagram.
It can be a happy place if you don’t frequent it too much and don’t have very toxic friends (and if you can get past the ads and the random stuff that meta throws at you in the feed), but it tends to not go that way.
Edit: I’m not above this, I only post trips as well, as basic as basic bitches get.
Hey, were you replying to another comment? I don’t understand the first part of your comment. Huge thanks if you explain a little bit more. Also, I want to say that the people I follow on Instagram are my friends, one who post actively. These same friends I meet everyday in my University. It feels tiresome[personally, for me], to follow them online as well since I spend a quarter of my day with them in University. I don’t know If I explained correctly or not, it made sense or not. Also, I am not a huge people person, I keep to myself and would like it if people kept to themselves, too, and not display their lives online.
What’s stopping you?
Tying up a couple loose ends with an ongoing project that requires me to communicate with some folks thru Instagram messages. However once it wraps up in late August I think that’s when I can bounce.
Ah okay, that makes sense; I forget people use these platforms for reasons that are actually important. Hope your projects wraps up smoothly!
