Reddit’s Hoped-For IPO and Pipe Dream of Cashing in on OpenAI’s Hype
Reddit’s Hoped-For IPO and Pipe Dream of Cashing in on OpenAI’s Hype
Link to: https://sixcolors.com/link/2023/06/apollo-to-shut-down-developer-has-receipts/
It seems pretty clear that all of Huffman’s recent decisions are driven by Reddit’s hoped-for IPO. On one front is the ugly fact that Reddit’s valuation is sinking.
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They could probably have turned a great profit if they:
- Scaled down all of the wild "become tiktok" attempts and let the site be as it was (leaving image and video hosting to other sites)
- Focused on incremental performance and quality-of-life improvements for users, moderators and client developers
- Opened up the new GraphQL API.
- Created different services / plans depending on usage. For example:
- For end-user frontends it would be free but with a requirement that they show ads (or the user could pay a monthly fee to avoid ads).
- For people who just want to use the data in bulk the pricing would be similar to what Facebook charges when it sells information (no idea what that is). But that would be a different service, possibly not even an API.
- A bot plan, which should be free at least if it is tied to a subreddit and a moderator is running it, since it's in the service of Reddit.
Can't understand why they don't just pass through the ads, I don't want them, but I could live with them. It's this alone that makes me think they just want to kill third party apps and nothing else.
Eh unless they made the ads indistinguishable from regular posts then 3rd party apps would just filter them out. I guess Reddit could get around that by disallowing it as part of their API TOS but then they would need to make sure the popular 3rd party apps don't do it and also possibly sue them when they do.
It's going to be fairly obvious fairly quickly if the big apps are nixing ads, no need to sue, just block access to the API for violation.
Ah that's true, then really what is the problem? Do they want more analytics that they get from official clients? Or is Steve Huffman actually just an idiot?
Edit: Actually it seems like they do just want the tracking data from the app since they are now blocking people from using the website on mobile https://lemmy.world/post/57306