I hope more that it loses them profit rather than users. I suspect that they will lose users, but only users who weren’t going to drive profits anyway. The IPO is going to go ahead and the investors are going to have a field day while the website becomes terrible for the users.
Well, they're losing one advertiser - me. I was about to start an advertising campaign on Reddit when this all went down. Just pulled the plug on it. At this point, keeping my Reddit ad will be bad for business with my client base.
Not sure where I'll advertise instead, but definitely not there.
Third party app users are likely some of the most engaged users Reddit has, so if or as those users find a new home, the overall content quality on Reddit declines and lurkers shift their attention elsewhere.
And keep in mind, it's not Reddit v. Lemmy. It's Reddit v. Netflix, Instagram, TikTok, etc because Reddit is competing for attention.
This is really it. There are people who create content and then there are casual browsers. I personally browsed reddit casually for years before even commenting and then actually posting. I could look at it on my lunch break or something but I didn't have the time to really get into it, and there are a lot of people who are exactly like I was. It's also just a little intimidating for new people to take that leap because it feels like you're going to be torn apart.
During the time that I was just browsing, I would frequently encounter dips in quality. Like nothing actually worthwhile was happening. Nothing I wanted to click on or engage with, so I'd just bounce after a minute or so. I pulled up Reddit in an incognito browser yesterday and it was exactly like that. Modern day facebook level content was weaved all through the front page.
I honestly cannot think of a dumber move by a company than this. This is Circuit City div-x dvd player level dumb. Not even the debacle with Cricut approaches this.
I think this will be the true litmus test. There's clearly a lot of us concerned and have mostly moved on, but we are probably a minority... The rest of the larger user base, I wonder how much of them will just move back to official apps after Apollo/RIF cuts off service after July 1st, and then observe the outcomes. Part of me really want to see the site go way of the dodo, but part of me thinks they'll linger around like Twitter does, and eventually they'll acquire new users that doesn't know/care for anything beyond what the royal court has to offer.
@chiisana@PBJ I'm surprised none of the 3rd party apps have either tried finding a similar app like Reddit and redesigning their app around that, or try to create their own Reddit alternative, I mean, they DO have the infrastructure to do it, (especially Christian), they would just need to shuffle things around and tweak their apps a bit.
I wish he'd release Apollo with a lemmy backend. I know the dev for RedReader is working on it, though his priority is figuring out Reddits new terms for non-revenue accessibility apps at the moment.
I think I'd say that's consistent with a direction they're trying to send Reddit, for all that it's inconsistent with where Reddit is now.
I think some of the current fire over there is actually aimed at winnowing the hyper-engaged members of the community who are hobbyists and niche interest specialists - and then exchanging them for 'influencers' who are not amateurs, but who have an external financial incentive to maintain spaces, continue engagement, and to toe Reddit's line.
An ongoing remark during the blackouts noted that a whole ton of niche google searches went dull after the reddit portions of the results subsequently bricked. Reddit's niche communities are where people online are going for organic product and service recommendations - people needing advice on products don't search for review sites anymore, they go to reddit discussions. And I think they've realized that the influencer space on IG or similar is exceedingly lucrative.
If they can leverage their own platform's prominence to either boost-for-fees organic influencers or seed dialogue via AI-piloted accounts, that turns into an alternative way of monetizing their placement and niche online.
If they manage to drive off the hyper-engaged community members who might counteract those seeded recommendations, or recapture communities from real organic hobbyists and similar - they can offer key spaces in niche communities with retail importance to both the companies and the influencers ("organic brand evangelists") as a monetization angle down the road.
If you have any way of getting their pitch to prospective partners on record somehow, that would be absolutely fantastic.
While I think you might be onto something - I think this only works for consumer focused goods/products/services. Large language models can seed "what car should I get" type conversations - however they have a tendency to be confidently wrong. And in industry specific communities being confidently wrong (especially when attempting to influence a b2b sale) can lead to all kinds of negative ripple effects.
Being confident whilst caring not one jot for being wrong or right is the essence of selling in modern society, especially when it comes to ideas (especially Politics).
Large language models are great at producing text with all the correct subtle details to trigger the reader's subconscious feeling of "this is somebody who knows what he's talking" with zero of the subtle details that make people suspect the writer is unsure of what he wrote or even deceitful (in a way, LLMs are the perfect sleazy politician).
That said, I do agree with you that amongst expert domain specific communities populated by people who have actual domain knowledge, assured delivery of bullshit doesn't go far. It will, however, very likely go far in the more generic communities which seem to, at least individually, have the most subscribers, so an "influencer" strategy selling to "consumers" (so, B2C not B2B) might make sense if most of the population of Reddit are non-specialists using it as a "Portal to the Internet".
So under this hypothesis, reddit becomes a trove of B2C bots/influencers attempting to pitch outrage/ dopamine (and the occasional consumer good) while letting the professional communities die.
This begs the question - how much of reddits traffic is composed of said technical (as in deep knowledge in a field not tech) communities? Furthermore how much of reddits value prop to large language models is said technical communities (as a source of training).
While I think you might be onto something - I think this only works for consumer focused goods/products/services.
That's not really a huge limitation when you consider what Reddit's primary demographics are.
There are very few B2B deals being worked out on Reddit at the moment, but there's massive amounts of consumer decisions made on any given day, all of which are aided by the discourses taking place on Reddit.
People who are qualified to participate in large-scale B2B aren't getting buying tips from industry communities on Reddit. People who are just entering that grouping, or are in over their head, or are hobbyists looking to go pro ... that's who is taking buying tips from random community discourse or asking for help picking what X to buy. The people who do not have the experience to screen the "confident-sounding but wrong" answers are effectively the only ones who are asking for that sort of help.
I don't think this angle even needs to use language models or AI - just exchange current hobbyist mods and/or key contributors with influencers selected by the campaign relevant to that community. If you have already driven off the hobbyists who might check their inputs, then they have free space to seed responses and sculpt impressions.
The other key factor is that in many cases, you aren't necessarily facing questions about "right" or "wrong" per se - but matters of highly subjective opinion. If your selected influencers are recommending your hardware that's not technically that much better or worse, but isn't a proven brand or is marginally better - the average consumer taken in by the astroturf is never really going to see a cost associated in a meaningful way.
I think Reddit's CEO is making a fool out of himself by how he's managing this situation. I think however that the solution is very simple and straightforward.
Let's start: I can understand that Reddit has costs to operate the platform. I also get that they don't want big companies to abuse the API to train ML models and profit of it. Fair game!
But why not offer a generous free tier for regular users? Say, every user gets 500 free API calls per day. Regular users stay within the free tier, while big companies can't do anything meaningful with only 500 calls per day (so they end up paying money).
Seems pretty straightforward to me. Everyone happy! Many other companies offer generous free-tiers for exactly this reason. Am I missing something?
Valid point. My proposed free-tier would make them no money. However, by charging a reasonable amount of money for the API, they could make way more than they are right now. Christian noted that Reddit makes about $0.12 per user per month. If they would charge say $0.99 for an average user, they'd have to run no ads and make 8 times more money per user than using their own app.
It's not clear why they don't just serve ads in the API and require them to be displayed, or implement profit-sharing with 3rd party devs (as in, they pay reddit a portion of their income from ads/subscriptions). The only clear reasons would be for control and to pump up numbers for the IPO.
Isn’t it possible all of the tracking and telemetry still wouldn’t be included and they want that information too? There’s probably a few things at play, some I can’t think of. Either way none of it seems to be with good intentions.
Good point. They wouldn't be able to see what posts you're looking at and how long. However, they would still see all the posts you interact with (upvote, comment) and build a profile based on that data. Surely that must be enough to serve somewhat relevant ads?
From a silo-based business plan's perspective, that doesn't make sense. Why would you invest time and effort in supporting someone else having direct access to your users? Better to just nuke all the third party apps, and regain full control. The users are just a nuisance, never mind the third party app developers.
I still believe that the ML companies "argument" is just a giant smokescreen. Reason is simple: ML companies can, and probably always have, just scrape the website. Why build an integration for every API under the sun if you can just build a web crawler once and be done? There are even existing, free implementations available so that's an absolute no-brainer.
It's about killing independent clients, nothing else.
Actually when I think about it you are absolutely right. The ML argument is complete bullshit. I mean to train a ML algorithm an API is nice but scraping should do just as fine. I don't know how complicated the Reddit API is but you essentially need just GET so I guess not that much. How much time would a development team need to switch the implementation from API to scrape? A week? We're in corporate world so let's say a month with all the corporate bs around. That's still nothing
My impression is they're being disingenuous, for the reasons you say. They could easily support 3rd party apps but ban large-scale data mining. Saying "supporting these apps costs us money, so we need to charge" is a manipulative half-truth. Like Selig said, they've priced it not just at covering their costs but making a healthy profit.
Reddit could let users access the API like this easily. They could stream ads along with the comments coming from the API. They could let individual users pay a subscription fee for their own api access. They could develop an advertising platform for 3P apps to show reddit ads.
They could even have said: look, we're going to kill off 3P apps because we have another idea now, thanks but you are no longer required. At least that would have been a genuine approach.
Spez evidently has an idea about what he really wants and isn't sharing it yet. I'm sure it will be clear after the IPO.
They looked at the numbers, concluded that 3d party apps were a fringe phenomenon that could threaten their control over the platform, and just killed them.
There are many possible revenue models that include 3d party apps and a more open API, Reddit just isn't interested. They see Twitter as a shining example for some reason.
i wish i could give christian my support but i've completely nuked all my accounts on Reddit and don't even go there if I can help it. poor guy - what the heck did he do to deserve this turn of events?
Not to turn this into an infomercial, but that is a lot of money, and if you appreciate my work I also have a fun separate virtual pets app called Pixel Pals that it would mean a lot to me if you checked out and supported (I’ve got a cool update coming out this week!). If you’re looking for a more direct route, Apollo also has a tip jar at the top of Settings, and if that’s inaccessible, I also have a tipjar@apolloapp.io PayPal. Please only support/tip if you easily have the means, ultimately I’ll be fine.
Christian's words were it would be a "gargantuan" effort. From what he's said in interviews / posts etc. I'm not sure he actually wants to rebuild it for another service. It's a shame as it's a fantastic app, but every endpoint for every action would need to be re-written, tested etc. and of course, Lemmy and Reddit don't always have like for like feature sets anyway, and the APIs could be vastly different. Essentially he'd be re-building the app from scratch.
He also said he’s been pretty burnt out with everything going and he just doesn’t know if he has it in him right now. And I totally get it. Dude deserves a break.
I'm really hoping some of the reddit devs are interested in helping out the people who were most loyal to them. I use Boost on Android personally, but I would be willing to buy another version of the app that is designed for the Fediverse. I'd pay double what I paid for the reddit app, just to support the active developer of my app.
Sync is being rebuilt for lemmy. It's definitely possible but it's less of a conversion and more of a brand new app that looks and acts similarly to the original from what I understand
Depends on the app. For Mastodon, Ivory was quick on the heels of Tweetbot, but I believe it was already in the works and the implementation might've been simpler.
And tbh, in the case of Twitter there was more time between Musk's takeover and killing off the API, whereas Reddit is breaking records in how quickly you can estrange your user base.
There are lots of mistakes Reddit made that shows they aren't trying.
They could have given more advance notice for the API price increase. This would give apps more time to update their code to use fewer API calls. Many apps are subscription-based, so it would give them more time to update their subscription price.
The price should have been based on Reddit's actual costs, actual revenue, and actual profits. I.e., if it costs Reddit $0.10 per user per year and their revenue per user is $0.15 per user per year from ads, then the API price should have been $0.15-$0.25 per user per year. The actual pricing shows they made it artificially high to kill the 3rd party apps. (I don't know what the actual numbers are.)
Even if Reddit really did want to charge $5 per month for API users, the right way to do it is to start from a lower price and increase it 20%-50% per year until they get to their target price.
If a user had Reddit premium, they should have been given extra API call tokens they can give to their 3rd party app.
My girlfriend, who has been somewhat on the fence about the protests (just because she's a more casual user and has never had any issues with the official app), absolutely balked at that number and I think that singlehandedly changed her mind about the API changes.
Typo? This Ars article claims it's $12k per 50M calls and Christian's original post has $0.24 per 1000 calls listed, which adds up.
The price they gave was $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. I quickly inputted this in my app, and saw that it was not far off Twitter's outstandingly high API prices, at $12,000, and with my current usage would cost almost $2 million dollars per month, or over $20 million per year.
Yup, this shows they aren't interested in finding a balance between making the website a good experience for the users and profitability, they're just trying to min-max squeezing every last drop of monetization from the users they can. Even then, they could have been smarter about it.
I think a smol problem here is that Apollo offered a "Lifetime Subscription" for a flat amount. In order to honor that Christian would be obliged to take money from elsewhere to cover those subscriptions, potentially for decades.
I'm a lifetime subscription holder and I would have, without a doubt, been fine with having my flat amount cover a few months of the new model, then switching over to the per month amount needed to keep Apollo running. But that wasn't even offered!
He just decided that he'd had enough and pulled the plug.
I think the writing is on the wall that the days of 3rd party reddit apps are numbered. I ran a moderately successful site from an API one time (Etsy) and we were always waiting for them to somehow screw us over. It happened here and there (sudden feature discontinuation, reliability problems) but they never 100% declared "you have to stop", even when we were doing it before they had an official open API. But We knew they -could- do that at any time and it made it feel shakey. I think he's right to quit now and cut his losses vs. keep working on it and become more dependent upon reddit.
No, he wouldn't. He'd have to start passing on the cost of the new API pricing + his fair share as dev, to the users of Apollo. Nothing about how the app currently functions would have to change, just the amount users pay to use the app under the new pricing.
He never even offered that as an option. (Not that I've seen or been told by him as a subscriber.) He apparently decided that doing so wasn't worth it and pulled the plug. And to be clear, as the app developer that's fully his right and I support his decision.
I'm old enough to know that sometimes in life you've just "had it," and it's time to walk away.
He explained that 30 days was not enough to design and roll out a whole new pricing scheme, and he would have to start paying the increased fee for all his existing lifetime subscribers, in the hopes that enough people would subscribe to the new schemes to offset the cost.
A change like that is not something you undertake lightly.
Besides the pricing, the other big change is that NSFW content will no longer be available via API. It's been kind of overshadowed by everything else, but even if the pricing was reasonable, how the app currently functions would still be changing.
I think one of the big issues for him was monetary liability. Even if he did pass the API costs on to willing users, he still wasn’t going to be making much -if any- more money.
It’s kinda like somebody offering you $1 to get a $20 bill across the street safely - vs - someone offering you $1 to get $20,000 across the street safely.
If something went wrong with the $20, then no big deal. But if something went wrong with the $20,000, then oh shit. A dollar isn’t worth that headache.
Same thing with Apollo going completely sub based at $5 or $10 a month. If something was slightly off about his accounting or API call guesstimates or anything else, he could easily be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars that the subscription fees didn’t cover that month or quarter or year.
The bigger problem is that Selig and other developers have an actual conscience and understood that the pricing for the new model would be way too high (in the ballpark of $20-$25 per month per user) to even cover the costs.
Not only that but he would lose around 2m per month in the rollover while ending life time and long term subscriptions bringing up the costs another 250k. Just to change it to a model that very few would pay for.
Instead he decided to cut losses, terminate the subscriptions and not owe 2m per month.
Could they have differentiated pricing between apps that helped build / give back to the community and API requests which were just harvesting data?
Alternatively they could have milked the community more effectively by slowly boiling the frog as more effective companies and governments do.
Slowly ramp API prices over a period of time so the apps die off and most user’s begrudgingly accept the changes without a cliff edge which leads to protests and a mass exodus
From a personal point of view I am pleased for the nudge I needed to move out of corporate social media.
That's pretty standard licensing. "If you're using the API to train an AI model, the price is $100. If you're making an app for regular users, the price is $0.01."
All these big brain assumptions about Reddits actions, but it's far more simple.
He's taking Musks advice to making a platform profitable, so they're going to drive costs down by chasing off all the pesky users providing value then monetize the rest by catering to terrorists for $8 a pop
Slam dunk. Reddit is purposefully doing this. Given everything I've seen it's obvious they are trying to kill 3rd party apps to generate more ad revenue on their own 1st party app.
spez can fuck himself. If he was on fire, I wouldn't piss on him to extinguish the flames because it's not fair to make the urine exist in proximity to that miserable fucking waste of oxygen.
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