Reddit insists on being “fairly paid” amid API price protest plans, layoffs
Reddit insists on being “fairly paid” amid API price protest plans, layoffs
Reddit, accused of trying to kill third-party apps, is cutting 5% of workforce.
The real question is how much is Reddit willing to pay third-party app developers for making the Reddit UX tolerable enough for people to stick around?
Reddit is going to get so much money when it goes IPO that it couldn't care less about its users and/or 3rd party devs.
Only if there's a community left there to sell! 😅
You're right though. As many people as there are fleeing, there are many times that who will stick around and endure whatever changes Reddit makes. Reddit will have plenty of eyeballs left to sell ads against. Now, will the people generating content and moderating still be around? What happens long-term if they aren't? That remains to be seen…
I've been begging for them to IP for years, just so I can short the shit out of them. I want to profit from their downfall.
What really stands out from reddit's statements is the conspicuous lack of disagreement about the alleged charges to 3rd party apps. They can keep trying to characterize it as fair but the factual numbers in the conversation make it plainly obvious that they are instituting a model that makes it impossible for existing 3rd party apps to survive.
Per-app API billing also makes very little sense for something like RIF or Apollo. If the usage itself is so expensive then tie billing to the user account itself: want to datamine? Great, pay up. Casual user? Good news, you get ten thousand free calls per month and rate limited beyond that.
But no that would be sane and not lock people into their shitty ecosystem.
100% there is absolutely no reason Reddit needs to be making 3rd party apps be brokers in paying for these API calls. Aside from the ridiculous price for API calls, they're implementing this in the dumbest possible way. And no NSFW is dumb as fuck too and honestly anticompetitive.
I pray they don't change their minds and continue with these plans. It's so stupid of them and I love it.
Yeah, I agree. I'm loving lemmy and haven't spent more than 10-15 min. on Reddit over the past week.
I'm still on Reddit to upvote anything that talks about this shitshow, and recommending Lemmy.
It reall is pretty good, I hope a lot more people can find their way to it. I'm a lurker most of the time, but I want to start engaging more, because I think the Devs have done a good job here.
Yeah I'm out for good.
I have requested the moderation of one familiar community of mine here and intent on putting in the effort here.
I have also contributed to the lemmy github in the form of pull requests.
If reddit doesn't care about the users I won't. I will care for something that offers something back to me and the community.
They can insist on being fairly paid, but the users have to think the transaction is fair as well. Ask Digg how much their platform was worth when all of the users were gone.
I would say the majority of posts on Reddit are admin ran karma bots and scammers. Just a bunch of bots talking to themselves.
I would say the majority of posts on Reddit are admin ran karma bots and scammers. Just a bunch of bots talking to themselves.
Its hard to say and I really wonder about this. Specifically, I think there is a lot of astro turfing, but not in the way most people think it is. I think very specific subreddits like r/marvel, formula one, celebrity news (which only really started making it to the front page in earnest 2 months ago), are some how in cahoots with reddit to sponsor their popularity. The game goes like this: you work with reddit to astroturf organic engagement with the channel, and over time, organic engagement takes over.
I think this is how Reddit makes real money and I wonder if they give two wiffs of piss about the embedded ads. I think you can attribute the success the modern marvel franchises have seen as well as the success that the modern star wars series saw to astroturfed social media campaigns on reddit.
Its pure conspiracy, I have no evidence other than watching the way that reddit has evolved.
At this point I hope they crash & burn. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ
Absolutely. I want it to be a clear consequence of their anti-user policies. And I want Netflix to crash and burn for taking away account sharing. At the moment, the power is fully in the hands of corporations and stakeholders. We need to show that users can organise and have the power to pull the plug on a service or community if they are being treated like cash cows.
Moooooooooooo.....
Reddit still doesn't quite understand where their value is derived from.
I remember when Reddit's FAQ had the question "Is there a mobile app for Reddit?" and the answer was "No, we don't have a mobile app and have no intention to develop one, but you can choose from a list of third-party clients". And what do they mean by "not fairly paid", does Reddit not already have a working monetization system with paid awards and profile customizations? Not enough people paying $80 to put a sticker next to a comment?
$0.24 per 1000 requests is not being "fairly paid". It's an abusive price and it's at least 10000x their actual server cost
Wow. I had not done the math. That's an obscene amount of money. 1000 requests is nothing for a web app like Reddit, even with agreeing over-fetching.
The crazy thing is that they might have gotten away with it if they had structured it right. Set up the infastructure themselves to charge the individual user directly for their API use rather than the App creators. Carve out exceptions for moderation APIs and known moderation bots. I probably would have paid a few bucks a month to keep using Relay. I would have grumbled about it... but I would have done it.
Now I'm just gonna leave, lol.
or enable it only for the dozens of users that have reddit premium
Reddit is lemmy's marketing department
"Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app," the Reddit worker said.
Uhh... Plenty of services charge less than half of that for the same number of API calls, and they are still able to make money. I would imagine that as large as Reddit is, their cost per 1k calls is way less than $0.10, unless their API is poorly engineered and inefficient AF. This is 100% them just trying to drive third parties out so they can get that sweet sweet ad revenue.
So they expect less than 4166 API calls per user per month, or 138 per day? That doesn't sound like much.
I just loaded reddit.org and my browser did 57 XHR requests. I clicked on a post with zero comments and it went up to 84. Clicked on a second one with 430 comments and I'm already at 137 requests...
Exactly what it looks like to me. This is clearly an attempt at driving up revenue for the upcoming IPO, but I think there’s a little more to it.
We all know that Reddit depended on third party apps for years before releasing their own, which is full of ads and all the other features they cram in there that long-term users don’t care for.
To me it looks like they’ve planned for this move to drive out long-term users, who remember old Reddit before the crazy amounts of ads, and will still have the people who will tolerate the official app, and the many people who have only ever used new Reddit and the app, and of course are used to the ads.
I think they’ve underestimated just how many of their mods and content contributors are using/dependent on third party apps.
The entire company is delusional wtf
They're trying to prepare for an IPO but it seems they've chosen the Twitter business plan
Problem is they're not owned by a billionaire.
Exactly, they depend on thousands of people working from free (from people that post stuff to the moderators that don't even get proper tools), and then they try to extort them. And in the middle of this I think people running some social media companies don't understand that active users are both their suppliers and main asset, and that they should do everything in their power to not piss them off.
Exactly, they depend on thousands of people working from free (from people that post stuff to the moderators that don’t even get proper tools), and then they try to extort them. And in the middle of this I think people running some social media companies don’t understand that active users are both their suppliers and main asset, and that they should do everything in their power to not piss them off.
Lemmy is about as good, if not better than reddit afa software experience goes. Maybe embedded videos would be nice, but it doesn't come with the deluge of garbage that reddit does.
They're cutting a lot more than 5% of their free workforce.
Then Reddit should look around its industry and set a competitive, fair price, not 15-20x the industry standard.
Then they should set a reasonable price, not $20 million dollars for allowing access to data in useful volumes. I wonder how long it's gonna take until reddit starts collapsing fully, the first few proverbial chains have broken so the ball is rolling.
They could have easily instituted a "pay for gold and get unlimited API access", and then have Apollo etc show users how to make a devkey and put it in Apollo.
That would have covered costs easily, and show real subscriber. But nope.
I hope they cannibalize themselves in this race to the bottom for their IPO :D
Do you guys think the higher ups will be able to retire to Reddit Island after they sell their shares? 🤣
Okay, that Archer quote in this context made my day. LOL.
They fire 90 employees but plan to hire another 100 before the end of the year?
Typical corporate bullshit? Searching, finding, hiring and training new employees is more expensive than keeping the old ones....
Not if they're outsourced and earning a fraction of the previous salary
They can't fix their app with 90 employees, what they gonna do with 100? My 5 friends from college built a better app than them
It's never been about the API. Third party apps are undercutting Reddit's as revenue. They could never ban the apps outright so they set an obscene cost for API calls to indirectly kill them. They have probably factored in the potential loss of users already and it probably ain't much.
Sounds like they haven't been able to invest dev time on how their API works for years.
So long as they can pocket a few hundred milion from the IPO, Reddit management couldn't give a monkey's about any of their milions of users or the thousands of communities that made Reddit valuable in the first place. They are quite happily flushing all that down the toilet to get their big pay day. Why didn't they just go non-profit like Wikipedia? That's the only business model that makes sense for Reddit and is sustainable. But then nobody gets to become a multi millionaire, and we can all see which would be the bigger tragedy for u/spez.
But has no plans to pay its posters, commenters and mods.
Someone said that if they paid their mods they would lose safe harbor protection and be liable for content that was posted. If that's true makes sense why they can't pay them. But that still doens't justify the insane API increase.
Yeah fair enough, though that's in essence the point. The hypocrisy is that they want the protection of, and only pay for, the role of being a dumb platform, but want to be "fairly paid" as if it's their content (the actually valuable thing here) being delivered through the API.