That’s what Huffman was saying BEFORE the blackout. Now that 8476/8838 subreddits are currently dark, I wonder what he would say now? I don’t really see how Reddit recovers from this. It’s sad because I loved it and there’s nothing else like it (yet), but there would need to be some major changes taking place before a lot of people consider venturing back.
Guess I’m sticking with Lemmy, then.
This is the way
This is the way
Cool beans. Thanks spez, for introducing me to lemmy.
Well Steve, it’s not profitable for me to be a moderator for free either. Feel free to let me know how profitable you think you’ll be after hiring enough staff to replace all the mods that’ll be leaving.
Since I don’t see a link to it in the discussion, here’s an internal email from yesterday that has made its way to the Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman
Just migrated here from reddit. Don’t plan on going back. That platform is done.
I mean… the discussion is reddit, isn’t it?
If I wanted to scroll mindlessly through the flea market of the internet, I’d open Mastodon. I often do, but, reddit is, er… was the community. The community is reddit. The memes, the jokes, the little phrases. They don’t own any of that.
This Reddit board thinks they can fence people in but don’t see that al of what they are is build by people that likely just go elsewhere if they’re continually treated like shit
Agreed. Reddit is a burning trainwreck you can’t look away from at this point. I’m not gonna be in the trainwreck, but rather I’ll just watch it from here (aka lemmy)
Why? The entire community is still there. Reverse the greedy API change, allow 3rd party apps continued full access, I’d be back on Apollo in a heartbeat.
It was announced that Apollo is shutting down June 30th regardless of what reddit does. Too much bad blood now after spez’ attempted libel.
I could be tempted but none of that is going to happen. Even though this move will kill the community, it won’t kill it fast enough to cause a problem. There’s just too much money to be made.
The alt-right is having a great time right now on Reddit. Tons of their posts from r/conservative on the front page.
I just want to point out that the article is dated 9 June, so before the actual blackout. Maybe they have changed their mind seeing the actual data
It’s not that you’re charging for API access; it’s that you’re charging US pharmaceutical industry pricing levels ($12,000 for something that should realistically be $200) and then only giving devs such a short time to implement changes. This was designed to kill 3PApps outright and everyone can see it. What an ass.
That part. No one is saying don’t charge but literally no one can afford to fork over that kind of money. Christian crunched the number to run Apollo for a year and it came out to approximately $20M. Twenty million freaking dollars. How is this reasonable?
I’m so tired of unchecked greed. It ruins everything. US Pharma is a great comparison.
Main reason why I’m gonna try and stick it out with Lemmy.
Hard to corporate greed a decentralised system :D
This! I’m happy to pay more for my Apollo Ultra Subscribtion, but their prices aren’t based in reality, they have the only purpose of driving 3rd Party Apps out of business. And then they also wanna limit NSFW content to the official App and nothing else, that’s affecting a lot of Subs I’m in (a ton more if I count my throwaway porn account) It’s just ridiculous.
Pissing on 3PAs and saying “it’s raining only on reddit”
Obligatory fuck /u/spez.
Be careful, you might be blocked by reddit \s
I don’t need reddit. Reddit doesn’t generate content, nor does it prevent contributors from sharing the same content on other platforms.
What is reddit doing to win me back?
I really can’t wait to see what’s the fallout of Reddit going dark. Does the community really wield the power? Or does Reddit have another ace up its sleeve?
The world is ready to fully transition away from that cancerous company.
Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable
It’s their own fault. They didn’t have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn’t have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.
They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.
I’m really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants
There’s this toxic idea in the business world, that in order to be successful you can’t just make money and be profitable, but your profits have to keep increasing year after year. This kind of runaway, cancerous growth is poison to the country and the world.
The founders want to be billionaires, as if being a multimillionaire would not be enough.
and im willing to pay for API access. If Reddit started charging me a buck or two i would be ok with that. I recognize that servers are not free, and their profit has to come from somewhere.
But charging app devs $20,000,000 a year is NOT the solution.
I would have accepted it… Not anymore. They burned this bridge.
And the Apollo dev said there were things they could have done, but the combination of 30 days notice, and the number of subscribers Apollo had who had prepaid for a year, (at a much lower price) the was no way to make that work. Plus Reddit had promised them no API changes just a few months ago.
This is like if a Grocery chain said that they need to stop selling Lemons to little girls because the lemonade stands were profitable and they aren’t. The scale of the two businesses is not the same… none of these apps have millions of dollars in VC funds or thousands of employees.
But Reddit doesn’t need these thousands of employees, they’re already getting the brunt of the workforce for free (the mods). Like the other guy said, one hundred engineers to manage the platform, 100 customer service to help the mods/do admin and off you go, you just need a few unobtrusive ads to finance that. But that’s way too open and won’t turn you into a billion dollar business nor get you any love from advertisers or VCs, let alone going IPO, so we are where we are.
Agreed. What are all their employees doing? Is reddit basically an adult daycare?
As someone who’s 4 weeks into new job with very unclear duties, there’s definitely a point where a company loses a lot of efficiency because there’s too many people who don’t seem to do much for the company, even those who want to do more for the company.
On the upside its a very low stress job with very good pay and benefits, plus I’m getting to do things like leading trainings that I might not otherwise get to do at this stage of my career
They also could have saved money by remaining a link aggregator/discussion board instead of deciding to host media as well. Any surge in costs is their own fault.
They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them.
THIS!
Here’s your API passkey. If we catch your app not displaying ads, your passkey be invalidated.
Bobs your uncle, all the browser apps are now delivering your ads.
This is the big issue with growth investment or whatever the hell its called. Instead of being happy with a steady revenue, big companies have to always grow until they become completely unsustainable.
“We are not profitable”
Says the one who wants the money of 3rd party developers.
Also not a great thing for the CEO to say right before their IPO.
Not at all. Most tech startups (if not all) are unprofitable at IPO. Plus they have to make their finances public, so it’s not something that was a secret before.
