I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language.
About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market.
Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and stealing ad revenue.
Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs launched its own forum reusing the client's name. It exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular message board among the youth.
The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to it.
I hope to see Apollo go down this route.
Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard as reddit going to paid awards and memberships.
One more thought: Keep the Apollo UI or whatever thing the users are most familiar with. Most of them do not care if it is fediverse or open source or backed by web-scale k8s, they only want it to just work (tm) good enough to post things on it. Eat the lunch you prepared yourself.
This is such a good idea even without Reddit's monetization and potentially blocking NSFW content. To me it seems obvious. It's also something that's actually likely to succeed and within the community's control, unlike getting Reddit to change their stance. Like, there's nothing stopping this from developing right now.
- "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users are more than enough, especially considering most of them are power users. I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit.
- "Making a social network is hard." Yes, but it's not too hard. Scaling is hard, but we're not scaling to Reddit's size (100+ million); and Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks). HN runs on 2 servers and uses a LISP dialect (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); even though HN is text-only and Apollo would have images or videos, I'm 100% certain there are enough dedicated Reddit users who can make this a reality.
- Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)
There's absolutely going to be an exodus if Reddit does anything non-negligible, the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care.
>the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care
No, they're just flailing.
The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subreddit would go a long way provided whoever buys that power must go out of their way to plausibly deny that.
And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money- Twitter was fairly valued in the tens of billions for a very good reason- but much like Twitter, that sort of thing sells "at a loss" because having the kind of content which enforcement of ideological conformity upon is meaningful necessarily means major companies won't want to put their products next to that content. Reddit is not a product that can generate a concrete return on investment, which is partially why it can survive operating at a net loss for a long, long time; capital directly funds political power.
Cheap capital drying up means money is tighter- so financiers are getting harder to come by- and if you're in straits that dire and don't want to downsize you have to look for other sources of revenue. In Reddit's case, this will completely kill their main product, but they have a mental block that prevents them from dealing with that honestly so they might be screwed.
>Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks)
Mastodon has the same kind problem that Reddit does but massively amplified- server operators have power over user networks (the same thing happens on Reddit with bots) which is a no-go for honest communication.
I’m sorry, who is buying “ideological conformity” for it to be worth so much? Everything you’ve said sounds great but I’m trying to dig under the surface and I’m honestly confused.
Reddit’s product is ad-supported message boards. It has a high valuation because it gets an incredible number of eyeballs every day and investors want to monetise them. Reddit is flailing because those users aren’t as monetisable as investors hoped. I don’t think it’s a whole lot more complicated than that, not everything has to be a political conspiracy theory.
Again, what does that statement actually mean? What does it mean to “buy conformity”? Who is doing it?
This thread feels full of vague insinuations that some powerful political lobby is paying to use Reddit to manipulate opinions or something but no actual detail.
Why do you believe Reddit (or Twitter) knows less about its users? Users on Reddit literally self select into interest groups by visiting, (and with 100% confidence) subscribing to a subreddit. Someone not interested in surfing is not going to subscribe to r/surfing. But someone who casually browses r/surfing, or subscribes to r/surfing is very likely to have, at least casual, interest in it.
Twitter is similiar in that you’re self selecting who to follow, and who to engage with. Things you engage with have hashtags, have observable topics and categories that they generally post about, etc. If you’ve ever looked at the categories that you’re in after doing a Twitter data dump, you can see they know a _ton_ about you. What I don’t remember seeing in there is “confidence,” but it might just be that those numbers aren’t surfaced to users, or that it’s encoded in the ordering (and I don’t remember it).
The point is, Twitter and Reddit have largely the same types of signal that Facebook does, but certainly way less than Google. Facebook’s user engagement might be higher, but I’m willing to bet that the number of people using Facebook to follow their friends, and not random businesses and other accounts is greater, thus limiting confidence in understanding about someone’s preferences. What I mean is that my friends might never post about politics, and I might not follow political figures, or other talking heads, that suggest my affiliation…
In Google’s case, they drop a “pixel,” for tracking purposes, on 75% of the web (inflated estimate for effect), and analyze every accessible page on the internet with the goal of understanding what it says. As a result, they have far greater reach in what they can and do know about you…
Facebook and Google a real name and some demographic data and encourage people to upload hundreds or thousands of photos of themselves and their friends, making it easier to tie all their Web activity to a real person. Twitter and Reddit make throwaway accounts without personally identifying information was to create. Plus more interactions with people you know in real life.
This seems like a very convoluted way of saying "advertisers like to know what they're going to be displayed next to, unmoderated UGC makes that difficult." A group of people could be talking about sports without sharing any non-sports-related ideologies or rules beyond "keep it PG" and advertisers would have no issue with that. While that same group of people but in the context of sharing porn would be very advertiser-unfriendly.
That's an ancient (in internet terms) problem, framing Reddit as some sort of intentional ideology-spreading-loss-leader-for-powerful-capitalists doesn't correspond with their actions - after all, Reddit has been deeply involved in the spreading of all sorts of ideas on all ends of political spectrums.
They're just running into the same issues all these "give something cool away then hope you can make it profitable later" business do of trying to turn the revenue knobs slowly enough to not drive everyone off.
The porn/memes/5 jokes on reddit are far more valuable than any ideological conformity you might perceive. Sometimes we all need to take a step back from our entrenched political positions - the recent history of the internet clearly shows that misinformation is targeting a particular side of politics and it's proving to be the fast track to 1930s Germany in the US at least.
Rather unfortunately, the position that "my opinion is unpopular, therefore contrarian and correct" is something that is easily manipulated. The demographic that falls for conspiracy theories loves to amplify the idea that they have some secret / esoteric knowledge. Again, a great way to manipulate people, encourage violence etc.
Reddit is a shitty web consolidation play that helped kill the internet. They rolled up a sea of phpbb and somehow made it worse.
Mastodon’s model is fine because there’s no gate to most communities. “Honest communication” is usually a term describing something noxious, but the beauty of mastodon is that if a right wing billionaire with mental problems takes over the server, you can just move.
“Reddit is a shitty web consolidation play that helped kill the internet. They rolled up a sea of phpbb and somehow made it worse.” I don’t know why I never thought of it this way, but that is 100% accurate.
> Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)
You’re describing Reddit ten years ago. There’s not really a “typical Reddit user” at this point it’s so big. All kinds of people are on it and most of them are not techies with a particular ideological bent.
You can still be anonymous on Reddit, unlike facebook, which comes with good and bad.
I think it's true that Reddit leans more towards supporting internet privacy initiatives, net neutrality, etc. whereas facebook users often have no awareness of these issues in the first place.
But at the same time, no requirement to associate with a real-world identity means there are more sockpuppet accounts, more astroturfing, etc.
I've always thought it would be neat if there were loosely affiliated communities that host as an API only with a standard front end for the UI.
So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users.
The API side could moderate their own content and restrict access to UIs that play nice and the UIs could refuse to surface content from API sides that suck.
The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.
> So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users.
Reddit has something like this, but definitely not as intentional,
>The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.
Old reddit had stylesheets and they could be very interesting. I still prefer that over the current thing they built.
You just described the ActivityPub universe. There are quite a few servers that are minimal ux or api only, and there are a ton of clients that allow you to use multiple servers on whatever platform you want, with mobile, desktop, and web clients.
I’m building it with both web and native Mac/iOS, on top of mostly rss for static friendliness. White labeled web and Apple App Store native SwiftUI deployments. Offline friendly
> I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit.
I have to heavily disagree with this. Reddit content is way better in both quality and quantity. The only thing worse is maybe the Signal to noise ratio, and even that is questionable. For example, askHistorians is a gem. Many subreddits are very useful. Moreover, for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. Not once have I needed it to find useful content on hacker news.
>for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google.
I do it more out of necessity than because reddit is a good site. You get into a niche enough subject and your choice is either a small subreddit or delving into the artifacts of the early internet like GameFaqs, Deviant Art, or some new site forums (the ones that still exist). I Still need to take a grain of salt and check if the redditor isn't blowing hot air or isn't on some unhinged rant.
HN is great but focused on very specific, technical contetnt. Not gonna be much oppurtunity to talk about media or craft hobbies here.
Just in case you're not joking: if that were the case, there would be few-to-no questions with no responses, but there are plenty of those. I won't deny it's possible there is some of that, but I doubt it's all that common.
I actually think that Reddit is more "mass market" than tech-savvy. I never associate Reddit with techies in my entire life, unless you mean the people who move into tech for money.
A recent link on HN was the archives of Reddit comments from pushshift.io; of the first year of Reddit (December 2005 to December 2006), the comment counts on subreddits with >100 comments were:
115 ru
129 de
215 tr
380 nsfw
765 ja
932 freeculture
985 request
1487 joel
1784 lipstick.com
2022 features
4208 science
31266 programming
322776 reddit.com
Where "joel" was Joel Spolsky's programming blog. That's quite programmer-heavy. Some of the comments on "reddit.com" in 2005 were:
> "One thing I've noticed is that the bulk of reddit's content is usually IT-related or at least culturally related, while digg is more generalized in its content (perhaps this is a product of time?). My point is that it seems to me that the fact that the "who" uses the site has a greater influence on usability than "how" the site is used." -
> "In the beginning, digg was pretty much all tech-related links, and whenever someone posted anything else you'd get a flurry of "this is a tech news site"-type comments. As the userbase grows and you get a more diverse demographic using the site, it becomes less "elite" and expands into other areas."
I'm dying for this, and would happily throw in some free dev work. HN is the only community I still actually enjoy, social media is a cesspool. I'd love a "Lichess of social media," something centralized but robust and user-respecting, and for communities other than tech.
>prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan
The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.
They are not in English. The old one is HKGolden while the new one is LIHKG. I think a similar pattern of movement happened from PTT to DCard too. I think these all have a Wikipedia page, and I hope translation tools work well enough to make them understandable.
To be honest, the pattern is not quite similar. The main reason for PTT's decline can be boiled down to political issues. The PTT operators were unable to effectively deal with the issue of water armies, resulting in a decision to halt new user registrations for nearly three years.
>We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)
TBH, 4chan these days are nowhere near the days when it was known as the boogieman of the internet. Still stuck with language that wouldn't last 10 seconds on Twitter or even Reddit, but we're not talking about a doxxing/harassment hub anymore. Or at least, no more a hub for that than Twitter/Reddit.
4chan will never "get better" because if that happens it'll cease to be 4chan as we know it. /b/ has always been an open pit sewer that the occasional nugget of gold flows through. /trv/ is where I like to hang out, but /pol/ can't help itself and likes to crap-post in there on the regular. /gif/ and it's blue board, "safe for work," version /wsg/ are fun to browse, but the 4chanX extension and some filters are needed to hide a lot of the trolling and truly awful stuff while browsing.
Yes. On 4chan they're called boards. Some boards are focused on particular content. Other boards are focused on the type of media posted.
/b/ = random
/trv/ = travel
/pol/ = politically incorrect
/gif/ = .gif and .webm files
/wsg/ = the work safe version of /gif/ (its toned down but still not actually safe for work)
It was a good time for the internet, back then. I do miss those days. I've tried to visit 4chan a few times in the last decade, but the community is... different now.
But I'm also much older now. I wondered if the community changed, or if I was the one that changed and can't appreciate it for what it is anymore. Maybe both I and the community changed in different directions.
I probably will never have an answer. But I still remember the old times there fondly.
In a sense, 4chan in the mid-2000's was probably my final experience with the old web, in a time before walled gardens, before social media trying to lock everyone in and tracking the shit out of everything to shove ads down the collective throat. A place still not neutered by contemporary political correctness and value systems. Full of extremely smart people and extremely dumb people in equal measure. It was maybe the ultimate form of the prior iteration of internet forums and irc chat rooms.
Nothing lasts forever, entropy dictates that on a long enough timeline all things become shit. Oh well.
Yup. I'd join Apollo if it was substantially similar. They could not possibly make a worse UI than the current "new" reddit web UI so the bar is pretty low.
I have recently searched for some open source alternative to reddit. Lemmy.ml seems to be a fediverse alternative, and have a nice web UI and apps, though the site is pretty much empty. If popular 3rd party app could join force and migrating to lemmy because of reddit's brain-dead pricing. It will be interesting.
I tried out Lemmy a year or two ago (it seemed nice) but found that they had a hard-coded list of "bad words" that automatically got censored, some of them quite soft (and with dual meaning), like "bitch". So yeah, I quickly uninstalled it once I realized that. How the fuck are you going to run, say, a dog breeding node? Or just have any kind of semi-normal adult discussion where people aren't bothered by cursing? No thanks - as a moderator I (my community) would want to choose what to censor myself.
It might have changed since then but from what I remember of reading through the lead devs reasoning behind the "feature" I want no part of that ecosystem.
Lemmy's devs have a long history of questionable actions and opinions that goes beyond the slur filter. I'm afraid it will forever be condemned to be a low traffic fringe project.
The curse of reddit alternatives. It's always some fringe group that starts it and scares everyone else off. I was an early Lemmy adopter but being from post-soviet country just couldn't handle the ignorant tankie politics being injected into every discussion. There's just no sane leadership.
It's run by the liberal equivalent of Evangelists, with all the moralistic and obsessive baggage that comes with it. Unless you're in the group that runs it, you're not going to be able to use it.
We had a fun incident at a work place, where the Big Corporate US Owners had a Slack with profanity filter on, but our company was Swedish. The word for "end" in Swedish is "slut". So basically you couldn't talk Swedish in that Slack :P
Wow, that thread is insane. Why do these people think they get to play arbiter of morality for everyone their private installations? Are they not aware of other languages than English?
It became a lot more possible this year to start doing AI content moderation. It won't be perfect, of course, but human mods are probably worse.
and yes, I've used content moderation AIs in the past (like Google's Perspective API) and they're not really usable. OpenAI moderation endpoint, embeddings classification, or even just gpt3.5-turbo would work marvelously.
This is a great idea. The first version of this could be a human-assisted AI, where an ai makes moderation choices (with a confidence interval) and the choices it makes can be supervised and overriden by human moderators when it gets things wrong. Over time the AI can be retrained to make better choices. Kind of like a spam filter with more knobs.
The hard thing early on might be getting getting started with good training data. But chatgpt might already be good enough to make reasonable choices today with a good system prompt.
I have a reddit post database with ~6 million unique post titles and through various manual means I've identified ~100,000 of these post titles that _are_ spam.
First, I parsed the posts for the most common phrases at varying lengths, hand identifying 3,730 individual strings that I felt indicated spam within the post title, post body, reddit username, reddit user description or comment bodies.
These strings are then checked against new or updated records and things are flagged as spam as needed.
It's been weeks since I've had to manually intervene and identify more spam strings - that's not to say I won't need to eventually as trends and techniques change (or, as it happens - reddit's api changes), but this was a fantastically successful means for identifying and analyzing obvious spam.
Beyond the above, I used what was a relatively simple approach to identify similar post titles to those that were determined to be spam for a "if you thought that was spam then you'll probably think this is too..." type feature that was very effective.
If reddit's api changes weren't happening I'd have already started training an ML model/NN or whatever chatGPT told me was the best one to use in order to classify these objects from the existing data.
Ironically, all of this was in order to offer moderation bots to subreddits to help handle the spam problem.
I started with scraping the API to play with meilisearch as a search engine but was just awestruck at the amount of _obvious_ spam that was getting through automod/reddit's own spam filtering (if there is any?) before being published/available via the API. I just didn't want to store all the metadata I was generating for all the spam posts and couldn't depend on reddit to police the issues on their end.
Now they're still unable to get a handle on spam - but also cutting off the developers trying to help them.
Several popular reddit clients could team up, launch the site but require a small monthly subscription fee (which these clients already collect).
Even $1 per month is enough to keep a lot of the outrage junkies out and you can use the revenue to pay for moderation of the smaller group of power users that remain.
>The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted.
The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all submissions and comments that conflict with the narrative being pushed by the establishment.
Hacker News is great because many of the comments are substantive, thought-provoking and don't read like State Department press releases or obvious corporate astroturfing.
What happened with reddit is imo the mods affect the site's direction moreso than the administration or the devs. This is what happens when you put profit and cancerous growth above cultivating a community.
this is what happens when you let the patients manage the hospital. similar to what's happening in politics. the left and right extremists dictate the narratives. i can only dream when moderates gain some balls and put each extremes into their place. the moderates should be cultivating the culture.
I really doubt that the entire moderation team of all the subreddits were capable of sweeping the entire right wing and most moderates of Reddit independently, and without pushback from international users who knew the moderation wouldn't be culturally sensitive. It had to have been centrally planned.
Yes, please! We need alternatives to the social media giants that are now obviously bent on monetization and other, shadier motives.
Moves like this are what caused the huge Digg -> Reddit exodus that significantly boosted Reddit's popularity. People need other places to go when their favorite platform takes this seemingly inevitable path.
I was part of the Digg -> Reddit exodus at the time, I loved Digg until they destroyed it, had a Reddit account for long but never really used it.
Now with Reddit trying to shutdown Apollo and other 3rd party clients with this pricing move I can see myself never using Reddit, their official client sucks a lot (it's unfortunate they bought Alien Blue just to kill it, which gave Apollo the chance to rise from those ashes), if Apollo dies... I will simply not use Reddit as much, the only other way I can use Reddit right now is through old.reddit.com, that sucks on mobile browsers without RES.
It seems I will soon experience a repeat of Digg with Reddit, slowly use it less and less because the experience is broken until the moment I forget it exists.
With the Digg exodus, Reddit was already the strong #2 alternative for a decent amount of time so it was a no-brainer and obviously Reddit has grown exponentially beyond what Digg was.
I have no idea what is out there as an alternative at this point, there just seems to be too much chaff everywhere.
I've looked for a long time. Tildes feels like a good #2, but it seems content remaining extremely small. I think it's still invite only after 5 years.
Pretty much all alternatives I looked at lacked community. Not expecting reddit numbers, but even a threshold as simple as "more than 5 posts/20 comments a day" was a huge hurdle here. Social media is just so centralized now.
Building a public chat network / alternative to Reddit/Twitter/Discord at https://sqwok.im
Create post -> share url -> instant chatroom based around the topic -> live chat with anyone on the net in seconds (hopefully have fun). Open to feedback :)
From a comment : >They’re trying to overvalue their services before going public. Execs want to cash out and move to a tropical island. I can’t wait for this cesspool to fail.
This is their real motivation. You can’t fight that honestly. Greed is good for these folks.
I left Digg for Reddit after V4 dropped. It’s kind of surprising what Digg has turned into. I would have expected it would just continue course as it was (still maintaining comment sections & voting etc) but surprised it’s now just staff picked content from other sites.
Is it even that at this point? It looked kinda like Gizmodo now where its a few authors rewriting content from other pages, and then a ton of ads. I will say I scrolled for a little bit and my take away was generic tech blog, nothing too egregious but it doesn't do what it once did.
i feel similarly about reddit, the site is completely unrecognizable from when i first joined in 2013 looking for a way to keep up with the gaming industry without clickbait youtubers.
This was precisely my first thought when I read this. For the price that Reddit will charge, Apollo's author could easily recreate Reddit and take advantage of Apollo's user base to seed that community.
There is also one more story on the other side of it.
Twitter used to have a vibrant ecosystem of clients, most of them working better than the official app both on web and mobile. Twitter was able to kill their third party app ecosystem with their paid API changes and lived to thrive as a company till recently.
The reality is, you need a good cohort of content and users to move who can sustain the content, moderation and discussion. Just moving Apollo users doesn't ensure that. There are other good third party clients like Relay etc as well
This is what everybody thinks, until they grow large enough to care about the amount of money they’re burning and get tired of it. Then they try to not lose so much money, and their loyal users turn out not to be so loyal.
All reddit is doing is storing text and serving it to people.
This not expensive or a hard problem. You grab a bunch of servers, you set them up properly, and then you write your app properly.
No resume-driven bullshit; no hype-driven bullshit; no “we need to be galaxy scale now” bullshit. No email notifications, besides basic “thanks for registering, here is your login” and “here’s a password reset link.” No cloud-based bullshit. Don’t use fucking python. Use a real systems language to eek out as much performance as you can from the hardware. Actually understand databases and how your specific databases work. Use Postgres unless you have a very good reason not to.
Just a few thousand dollars a month, and a brief reprieve from short-term mania to actually think, and you too can literally serve 1 billion pages a day.
Why does everyone run into problems with this? Because they have personal hang-ups and delude themselves (or simply don’t care). This path has been tread numerous times before. The mistakes have been made thousands of times. The people who made those mistakes are available to help you out (for the right price, or if you’re good enough company).
I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material.
"I could build a Reddit clone in a weekend" says person who hasn't taken over from Reddit. "Cost a few thousand a month, it's not hard" they continued, turning down an easy shot at Reddit's $10Bn valuation with admirable restraint. "It's just self delusion" they said, describing "numerous" failed attempts and "thousands and thousands" of previous mistakes they have convinced themselves they wouldn't fall into should they try, which they carefully avoid having to by dismissing it as "not interesting".
"Take my word for it, I'm just superior" the comment, which would be as fitting on r/SneerClub today SlashDot 15 years ago or Usenet 30 years ago as a dismissive geek putdown-cum-status grab, could have been summarised as.
> I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material.
> Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem.
Exactly, tech is full of this weird hubris that everything has to be super complicated and over-engineered.
Heck, while you exclaim disdain for Python, I've seen large web services run on Django and a few servers behind load balancers with very few problems.
Care to show some proof? Create random data, store it somewhere, make sure it's about the size of Reddit. Off-the-cuff let's estimate that read traffic is 100x more than write traffic. Create some load generators that generate this synthetic read and write traffic. The load should follow a Zipf distribution of topics. Make sure it can handle huge traffic surges for events or abuse attacks. Show us your read and write performance. Do a small writeup on the architecture you ended up on, the number and types of servers you allocate, etc. You shouldn't be stopping at an order of magnitude short as scaling challenges change as the magnitude of scale changes.
Unlike Reddit, you'll have the benefit of the hindsight of 2023 instead of managing 20 years of tech debt.
Instagram has used python and django at scale. They have written about it in their engineering blog[0]. Not sure what their current stack is.
They did resort to all kinds of tricks. But your overal point still stands. The performance of python is lacking memory and it's embarrassingly slow. I hope python4 will have scripted for developing and compiled for production, like Dart.
And a great compiler like Rust.
My question isn't about Python. It's about Reddit being trivial to recreate. I work on an API team at a Big Tech company and, funny enough, a lot of our legacy is in Python and we've scaled it using lots of pretty gross tricks. We may or may not be Instagram (:
The keyword here of course is "at scale". At what scale? Any commenter that believes what was written upthread should create a system and demonstrate that it can scale to Reddit levels.
I'm afraid I don't want to dox myself so I can't post publicly stuff from my employer. And I don't really have time to do what ask and write it up in my free time.
I doubt something the size of reddit would run properly on Python, but I think both mine and the commenter I replied to had the point that most sites on the internet WOULD run fine without all the bloatware and overengineering complexity. Very very few sites have the traffic that reddit does. Most websites belong to the long tail, and for those almost any tech stack would work - so why choose a needlessly complex one?
Nope, the forums are not in English. The new forum's app/favicon is a yellow smiley face.
I thought Tapatalk is more like a generic mobile client addon to forum wares than being a forum itself. I remember that nagging banner when I was on XDA years ago...
That was the one that I thought of too. I didn't understand why every Invision forum would pop that up as the client to use. Seemed like they were giving away the keys to the castle for free. Crazy.
browsing any major, big subreddit will reveal that it’s users are no better than the average facebook, twitter, or tiktok user. have you looked at /r/all or /r/popular in the past… 3-4 years? it’s all garbage. i think the reality is that an extremely small percentage of people bother setting up a real home page, unsubbing from all the default subreddits, and having a tailored experience more akin to forums is just not what people want anymore- they want a black box “algorithm” to push rage bait and ads at them.
Unfortunately, the value of Reddit is in all the existing communities and the content. It'd be hard to move it, and while this might be a big news on Hacker News, most Reddit users probably have never heard about alternative clients.
Most forum have gone into demise, unless they focus on some very small niche (so they're small already). People prefer apps, otherwise they forget about things unless they're enormous.
My understanding is that Apollo isn't allowed to show ads based on reddit's new TOS. The only monetization strategy open to Apollo is a premium subscription.
It is (or was) a kind of proprietary addon that forum admins could install which would act as an API that let a the Tapatalk client interacts with the server. It mostly showed up at a time when web forums weren't responsive or a mobile UI and phones weren't as powerful as today and struggled to render complex webpages.
Christian (Apollo’s author, the Reddit app in question) isn’t a paragon of virtue either.
The app has been regularly nagging existing paid users, who paid to remove ads in the app, about “amazing” deals to “upgrade” to a monthly subscription to the app to get some virtual stickers and other silly things of dubious value over and over. People complain about it every time they come up on the Apollo subreddit, directly mention the app’s author, who has yet to ever respond on this matter.
I think Reddit is being greedy, but I’m only sad if Apollo goes away because the Reddit client is so shitty; not because I love Apollo.
I get nags to upgrade to something I couldn't care less about, in an app I paid to avoid these ads and nags, every time I open the app (i.e. multiple times per day) on "promo" days (i.e. any US holiday)
These nags have also been disingenuous, because the price will usually go up on "promo" days so that Apollo advertises a "special deal" that is basically the price it's always been before. It's advertised with a full-screen popup upon opening the app (or while using the app)
If it was no big deal and nobody minded, there wouldn't be a slew of posts complaining about it every time, and the app's author wouldn't consistently ignore these posts and comments as he has done every time while always answering praise and positive comments in the same threads and subreddits.
Selling me something to remove all ads and then showing me your own ads anyway is dishonest. Either mention this at the time of payment, or make it opt-in like virtually every other company I deal with (aka "do you want our marketing material?")
I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase.
Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM clients.
Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be developing its own first-party language model, and any other model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay these much higher rates.
Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are losing.
If you want training data for an LLM and are actively talking to some data providers, you'd just ask for a dump, instead of making a billion small requests.
(You'd make the billion small requests, if you are doing this on the sly.)
You’re right, but I think it’s also pretty clear that
A) there is demand for functionality that depends on semi-real-time data, e.g. a prompt like “explain {recent_trending_topic} to me and describe its evolution” where the return could be useful in various contexts;
B) the degradation of search experience and the explosion of chat interfaces seem to indicate “the future of search is chat” and the number of Google searches prefixed or suffixed with “Reddit” make it obvious that LLM-powered chat models with search functionality will want to query Reddit extensively, and in the example prompt above, the tree of queries generated to fulfill a single prompt could be sizeable;
C) improvements to fine-tuning pipelines make it more and more feasible to use real-time data in the context of LLMs, such as a “trending summary” function that could cache many potentially related queries from Reddit, Twitter, etc and use them to fine-tune a model which would serve a response to my example prompt
Eh can still just automate creating a bunch of accounts and do it manually. Use one of the many captcha completion services where you pay for people to complete captchas for you. ML models can already pretty much do them anyway.
Then rotate between accounts and put a random time between requests. Restrict certain accounts to browse within certain hours/timezones. Load pages as usual and just scrape data from the page rather than via api.
However, I believe in a company's right to charge whatever they want for their services. But I also believe in the right for people to choose not to use that service and for freer alternatives to spring up.
Just like Tumblr, Reddit seem intent on killing themselves, although these days I'm not so sure. When Elon took over Twitter everyone was saying that all the users would leave and it would die. This is not the case, human nature means that people seek familiarity and will cling on, hmm.
> Just like Tumblr, Reddit seem intent on killing themselves, although these days I'm not so sure. When Elon took over Twitter everyone was saying that all the users would leave and it would die. This is not the case, human nature means that people seek familiarity and will cling on, hmm.
Wouldn't network effects be the obvious null hypothesis, before we start speculating about human nature?
But that still makes the original commenters argument moot:
> Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, [...]
That speculation is not how things have been or were.
I think most people who wanted large datasets got their data via pushshift. Pushshift was basically a guy who started out doing small things got so frustrated with the API that he eventually grew to maintaining large mirrors of Reddit content on Google cloud that people could access and query.
I don't know why anyone doing research would have used reddit's API instead of using pushshift.
Pushshift has been shutdown by reddit earlier this year, so probably they are getting hammered by LLM folks trying to get the data now since they killed pushshift without understanding how it fit into the universe.
Reddit is completely stupid if they think people are going to pay for "enterprise API" access... pushshift existed because the API was trash and the only real option is to dump the entire dataset into something usable. The reason reddit's data was used so much is because there was an SQL API via pushshift and you could also download archives of the entire dataset at one go.
LLMs have nothing to do with it. Someone skilled enough and rich enough to develop and train an LLM is absolutely capable of reverse-engineering your private API or scraping your web UI and defeating whatever protections you have.
And open yourself to potential lawsuits. You can fork any public repo in github too, don't need any fancy resverse-engineering or web scraping. But if you use the content illegally then what's the point.
lol you can't get in trouble for datascraping or figuring out ways around their anti scraping measures. Good luck enforcing any user agreements the bot has to click through. If they don't want it scraped then they have to not put it on a public facing webpage.
I heard researchers on public funding can’t violate ToS without invalidating their current and future employment, and therefore cannot engage in social media researches without free API…
Yes it's this. This has nothing to do with 3rd party app operation and everything to do with generally closing the gate to the data garden.
The value of reddit's content to non-reddit entities is rapidly increasing as its monetizable use shifts from a set of signals on which to build first-party ad targeting (which they never really figured out) to generally useful llm training data.
Archive.org is a non-profit without the capacity to serve that many requests. An excellent resource for people to use carefully, but not a treasure trove for bots to scrape down to the last bit.
Would be cool if they introduce some reasonably priced access for mass scrapers. Should make some nice income in addition to donations, and a valuable service to community.
The web is in the process of rapidly filling up with AI regurgitated garbage, eventually there's going to be a handful of sites with real usable content on them left, reddit being one of the biggest.
>The web is in the process of rapidly filling up with AI regurgitated garbage
This is already the case. See the oceans of crap SEO optimized "food recipe sites". It's unbearable.
So sad that, BBC back in 199ps and 2000s, there were so many random sites to visit with interesting things. Search engines were of actual use.
Now, it's basically facebook, reddit, pinterest, instagram, stackoverflow , and a couple of counted others, depending on what you like. And EVERYTHING is monetized.
I don't think the LLM boom caused Twitter's first API lockdown in 2012, nor do I really think it's anything to do with the more recent final nail which seems much more in tune with Elon's twitter trying to increase ARPU/engagement while also dealing with a 90% reduction in headcount.
ah that explains why Twitter led the pack making their APIs insanely expensive. there is value in the data and the LLM companies will be willing to fork it. a whole new business model and monetization of mass data not predicated on ads or user privacy. what could go wrong?
That's unlikely. Elon jacked up the price because he wanted Twitter to make revenue, so get people to use their app and site, and basically to just get rid of anything he doesn't control.
Everyone saying their pricing is absurd had better get ready for the new wave of API pricing.
Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze" where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half the customer base.
Twitter was one of the first to give access to cheap mass data, and now they're one of the first to charge through the nose for that. The move is going to be that if you're not enterprise level you're not getting this data anymore, and I doubt it stops with reddit.
>I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society.
You can see Reddit as a landlord, owning the land (or website) that the value grows on. They don't contribute value themselves, instead they make money by charging rent to everyone who wishes to grow value on their land.
> by charging rent to everyone who wishes to grow value on their land.
That goes beyond rent-seeking into feudalism.
Rent seeking is running an application as a service that could just be a tool you pay once for, and instead have to pay for monthly. Charging people rent for access to a commons in which they provide all of the value is digital serfdom.
We could fight about the actual value of the CPU, HDD, network, etc is. Not literally zero. The manpower to keep it running is a stronger argument, but I still think it's missing the point. The real value is the community generated content, and yeah, that's a commons.
Subtract the fact that at least the serfs got to keep some of the net product of their labor while Reddit users get less than nothing and I think it all evens out.
I was absolutely not using the term in a legal sense. Is "commons" even a legal term? I suppose I should have said "should be a commons" - as in, a publicly generated and maintained 'good thing' (susceptible to tragedy).
Okay, it's certainly an interesting idea to speculate about, maybe some country will recognize it in the future. Though it seems unlikely, unless most of the world agreed, considering WIPO and various other treaties which have been ratified.
How is this relevant to the present issue regarding reddit?
In regards to the idea of reddit rent-seeking - the primary value of reddit is not something they create, it's something they _host_. It could be anywhere, but by dint of network effects, it happens to be there. Reddit is not valuable because it owns a serverfarm, or even because it employs people to maintain the serverfarm. It's valuable because it controls a cultural meetingpoint.
Aggressive control of the meetingpoint (which it is able to do), is rent-seeking because reddit controls _access_ to the value, but does not create the value. You were making a point that reddit doesn't provide literally nothing. That's true, but it's a red herring. Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.
edit: I'm sorry, you were not making that point. I was responding to that point.
> Reddit is not valuable because it owns a serverfarm, or even because it employs people to maintain the serverfarm. It's valuable because it controls a cultural meetingpoint.
How did it come to control a cultural meeting point? Was it because they owned a server farm and employed people to create a website people wanted to use at the right time and the right place?
> Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.
This will be easily proven by people moving from Reddit to an alternative. Or disproven by not moving to an alternative.
> This will be easily proven by people moving from Reddit to an alternative. Or disproven by not moving to an alternative.
This ignores the nature of network effects. The value of the thing is precisely that other people are using it. That's not a value that's created by reddit, it's a value that's _exploited_ by reddit.
"Just go somewhere else" requires either a phenomenal degree of coordination, OR to just bite the bullet that not everyone will move to the same place at the same time, which fragments the community (which was, again, the bulk of the value in the first place).
The difficulty of network effects is that, as the group gets larger, the value goes up faster than linear AND the cost of coordinating a migration ALSO goes up faster than linear. A gathering that's 1/10th the size, isn't worth 1/10th as much. It's _significantly_ weaker. And migrating en-mass is an n^2 coordination problem. It's closer to a hostage situation than it is to a value-add.
> How did it come to control a cultural meeting point? Was it because they owned a server farm and employed people to create a website people wanted to use at the right time and the right place?
Kinda don't care? Maybe they worked hard for it, even. Does that justify indefinite control of an important resource? Legally probably, but you can tell I think it shouldn't.
> Kinda don't care? Maybe they worked hard for it, even
So you could've just lead with the fact that you don't care about private property and have an anti-social outlook on life. It was spelled out to you why there's value in Reddit. You say the commons are the important thing.
If I go to your living room with 3 friends and we start talking about life and philosophy, you'll ask me to leave or pay rent. But I will tell you no, you just host the place where cultural discussion is happening, I don't care if you worked hard to get your home, I'll just be there and it's not up to you to control that home forever. I could've gone into any home, the value is in my discussion, so you should be happy I'm having it there and allow me to have it for free, since there's no value in your home and you shouldn't even own it for the future.
And then they'd call the police and get you kicked out.
If instead you'd been invited in - "come along, bring your club members, you don't need to pay for your own hall anymore, use my house, free signup, moderate your own room, use it without paying, bring your friends" and then when your old meeting place had shutdown and been abandoned and all your leaflets and documentation and inertia had settled on the new location, then stavrianos turned on you and said "now you're all used to coming here, I need to pay off my investors who have been funding this all along, that'll be $10Bn valuation please - and don't bring your friends unless they can pay a few million a month. Or you could just leave, after I've borrowed a lot of money and arranged things to make it so you can't easily do that".
Compare to trademark genericization, where a brand name becomes the word for a whole product category, and loses trademark protection because our use of the word is more important than their use of the brand. That's not something that happens instantly, there are thresholds for it. But it's also not something that never happens at all. Maybe you think that's bad, but I certainly don't. There's a whole lot of room between that, and abolishing private property altogether.
> Private property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy, with socialist perspectives making a hard distinction between the two. As a legal concept, private property is defined and enforced by a country's political system.
> The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy
That is a political statement, whereas what I described is a practical situation of life. Do you support the viewpoint that I replied to that it doesn't matter if someone owns something, even if they worked hard for it, that you should be able to come in and takeover because of discourse that happens there? If so we can disagree on that, there's no need to make it a wider political statement.
Funnily enough the Reddit community originally started on Digg and moved there after Digg shot themselves in the foot in a similar way to what Reddit is currently doing. So while Reddit now is a lot bigger and more entrenched than Digg then, I wouldn't be at all surprised if history repeated.
A field of weeds is home to insects, pollinators, small wildlife, CO2 removing/oxygen producing plants, it can be a nice place to look at, to make a path and walk through, weeds can be beneficial[1] to the soil, or edible or medicinal[2].
A server with nothing on it is worse than taking up space, it's an investment of energy and CO2 release to make it and ship it around the world, and if it's powered on then it's taking electricity probably from fossil fuels and turning it into waste heat.
That's the point, the server is commodity, hacker news or voat or dozens of others can provide the same platform.
The community and the eyeballs are what is valuable, and Reddit holds them captive not due to any incremental value they provide, but due to network effects. Lots of people or companies would immediately replace Reddit if the quality of the server or UX or UI was what mattered -- but cannot because the audience is captive.
Killing the apps represents a unique "digg moment" of pissing off users enough to bother migrating.
For the sake of this metaphor, all of that would be equivalent to the park, custodians, and park rangers. The latter two are paid by the government (the "owners"), but few people would argue a park as a "commons". So, maybe?
main difference ofc is that few pay for a private server, despite contributing to it. Parks are paid for by taxes, and sometimes voted upon by citizens to allocate budgets for. But a park with no visitors is similar to a forum with no visitors.
I don't disagree that it's one point of view, but I hardly believe both examples do not have a simpler explanation: both companies no longer want APIs for third-party clients.
Elon wanted to turn it completely off and was probably convinced to ban the accounts of all the third-party clients and to try and harass the world's many weather services to pay 42,000$ a month.
Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo. He's always been fairly transparent about his money flow, so it's exceedingly easy for Reddit to price him out and put the fear of god into any developer interested in a Reddit client.
On iOS Apollo and Narwhal were both good options last I tried them. Android has a lot more going on. All of Infinity, Joey, Sync (my choice), RiF, Boost and Now are pretty solid. Pretty reductive indeed to say Apollo is the only serious contenter...
Here's the difference. Apollo has arguably more user value than Reddit itself. I wish Apollo worked as a client for HN, for example. It could easily be plugged into any similar platform and still be one of the best mobile apps ever built.
The others are just a-dime-a-dozen Reddit clients.
I've used Apollo when I was on iOS. It's indeed great.
But holy hell, you must have spent exactly 0 time with Android clients, or just don't enjoy Android apps in general, cause I'd easily put Sync and Boost on equal footing as Apollo. Infinity is extremely solid as well.
RiF is probably the only reason I used Reddit for as long as I did. Excellent interface, really solid client. I even paid the premium just to show my appreciation.
My hatred for Reddit the platform only grew as time passed, to a point where I mostly dropped the site from my browsing habits a couple of years ago. I hope the recent changes bring an end to Reddit, the world will be better without it.
But my hatred for Reddit does not extend to RiF, much to the opposite. I hope whatever Reddit replacement spawns in the future has a RiF for it.
I took another look at RIF just in case my memory of it was out of date and the difference in quality between it and Apollo is massive. I’m doubling down on my original comment: Apollo is a truly special app and RIF (and likely others) are very generic clients.
I am an Android user so I don't know Apollo but I too am a huge RIF fan -- it's the only way I consume Reddit. I also agree with GP statement, I wish I could use the RIF app as a HN reader.
What makes Apollo a "truly special app?" in your opinion?
The TL;DR is that it's so good, it increased my time on Reddit by 10x or more versus using the website. I had to delete it because it was such a joy to use, it's all I wanted to spend my free time on.
More specifically, just a few things: 1) lovely UI design with proper adherence to iOS human interface guidelines, 2) useful customization, 3) flawless performance throughout, 4) gesture support which translates into being able to sift through a lot of content and conversations, 5) complex native (performant!) in-app support for many media types hosted on all types of 3rd party sites, 6) and just all around thoughtful and thorough support for the entire Reddit platform and its features.
All of this executed extremely well by just one person. Frankly, an inspiration and should be championed here.
Not to dunk on Apollo since it is excellent on iOS, but Boost on Android has all those things. It also has a tablet UI, moderator support, and a "gallery" masonry view that is a joy to use. Last I checked, Apollo has neither an iPad UI nor a masonry post view.
(I have also deleted Boost many times to control my usage.)
AFAIK, Apollo also has extensive moderator support (I'm not a mod so I can't speak to it but fairly confident it exists) but yeah, no iPad support which really sucks.
I took a look at Boost and it's really nice! Looks extremely similar to Apollo to the point that I think they may have just duplicated the Apollo app on Android and this is not a bad thing at all. I was considering doing the same for HN.
I stopped using narwhal because it doesn't have good "drafts" support. At the time, I was writing a lot of thoughtful, heavily revised comments and posts.
This kinda assumes that people won't leave in mass. Digg migration took like 60 days.
I think especially in a forum where people tend to be semi anon. This isn't staking out a facebook name and keeping up with highschool friends. I know a few user names by sight on reddit but I really don't care if I hear from them again and I don't expect they care about me.
Makes leaving to anywhere that can put together a decent UGC interface pretty simple. It just feels like other than content, which reddit doesn't actually post, there's not much in the way of network affect.
I feel like Reddit sees their userbase as two types of users: casual users that browse /r/pics or something like that on the official app / web and power users that are subbed to niche subreddits, use 3rd party apps and likely still use the old.* subdomain.
For the longest time Reddit was predominantly the latter group of power users but in recent years Reddit has had a mass influx of the former casual group of users. I think the bet that Reddit is making is that the latter group is much smaller than the former and cutting off API access won't make a significant difference. But if they are wrong, this could well be the end of Reddit, going just like Digg went. It will likely still exist, but as a shell of it's former self.
I wonder how pissing off the power users, which produce most of the content, is going to turn out. There is a similar issue with moderators, who heavily rely on third party tools to moderate their subs.
I can’t imagine this killing reddit, not at all, but I think the power users and moderators are important to what makes reddit reddit and that without them the quality will decline quite a lot.
I don't use LH on mobile because there is no decent app. When Reddit 3rd party apps stop working I'll just stop using Reddit on mobile. Also on Desktop, only old reddit makes it worth my time. The moment old reddit is turned off Reddit is over for me.
Good. It's about time for more people to move on to better platforms. Twitter is a cesspool, and Reddit has some good communities that will be better served from a platform that's not ruled by a greedy corporation that couldn't care less about its users.
Why astroturf? I mean, social media networks are naturally cyclical; the only thing they do is connect users, all the content comes from the users themselves, so the only way they can compete is by being free and not having figured out an annoying business model yet. Once they have to start making a profit, they are done for. Reddit and Twitter are about to hit/have hit that point. No astroturf here, plant some all-natural grass seed.
Biasing parent comment with an /s, maybe meant to say “create huge traffic of anime porn and burn down bank as well as hosting accounts of the poor operator”? That kind of happened with Mastodon and is happening on Misskey. :mailus_banknotes_areallscams:
Fair enough. I do enjoy a daily dose of meme though and I’d prefer that that didn’t come from this website. It feels like this is the one place I can go to to find (usually) intelligent conversation about a wide range of topics.
funny enough that daily dose of meme feels like it has infected the entirety of reddit, at least on any sub with more than 100k subs that doesn’t have extremely strict moderation. a few months ago i left any and all subreddits that allowed image/meme posting and my reddit experience became a lot better.
Why is Twitter a cesspool? I interact mainly with WFH tech people who garden and I think it’s absolutely wonderful. There’s no reason to follow or interact with anyone who is negative.
Most people have a range of interests, and most interests have a range of people. If you follow people you'll see stuff you don't like, and if you follow hashtags then as soon as they get popular they get hijacked by entryists. Plus the site is optimised for ragebait - that's the natural result of the emphasis on short posts and the algorithm that optimises for "engagement" - so even if you're following the right people and the right hashtags you'll still see the worst parts of them.
Eh, I think this goes in line with Netflix's recent hardline changes.
Everyone references their Tweet from years ago of like "love is sharing passwords" and bitching about how Netflix has changed & become greedy.
But those people are thinking big enough; Netflix has changed this way because back then, they didn't really have any competition in the space. And now _everyone_ has to have their own fucking streaming platform, so of course Netflix is gonna change policy.
I'm not defending Netflix here, but what I am saying is that people are doing the shortsighted animal thing and bitching about Netflix. Really they should be bitching about all streaming companies and requesting that our democratic governments enact policies that force companies and corporations to be consumer friendly. All of them. Tax the rich. All of them.
The thing is, though, that the value of these APIs is largely driven by the userbase, and the most valuable users tend to use third-party clients.
Now, I'm not surprised to see _Twitter_ doing this, because it's just one of a laundry-list of ideas that Naughty Old Mr Car has to make Twitter worse; it really barely registers. But _Reddit_, I would have thought, would be a lot more conservative in the "massive dangerous change" department, particularly after what happened to Digg (and more generally the history of internet forums). I'd expect that there's a huge danger for them here that the big third party apps will simply endorse a Reddit clone.
But it doesn't make a lot of sense: people will just start to scrape sites again. APIs was there to make the process less painful for servers and control who scraping what and how fast.
If you go into that thread there are people begging Selig to charge them 4x what Apollo Ultra costs. And they're begging him to charge it to everyone all the time.
This can't just be laid on the feet of faceless bean counters or old men in the executive suite.
40% of reddit posts are marked NSFW. All those won't be able to be accessed from the API.
And those NSFW posts are far from just porn. It's frequently news (especially related to war), the "vice" subreddits (cigars, guns), mental health subreddits, ect.
Also, 4x of Apollo Ultra is probably not enough. After the Appstore takes its cut and the dev pays himself, you're not left with enough money to pay for the API access of the power users you're now inevitably left with. Powerusers, who, again, can't access 40% of posts on your app.
> And those NSFW posts are far from just porn. It's frequently news (especially related to war), the "vice" subreddits (cigars, guns), mental health subreddits, ect.
And for the longest time, many subs based their flairs around the NSFW tag combined with some CSS hacks, especially for subs based around TV shows wanting to add spoiler warnings. Some subs never bothered to update to the new system and still use this.
I’m not sure how this will be handled, considering there is only one kind of NSFW tag, but the reddit admins said that only sexually explicit content will be inaccessible from the API.
Lock API access for apps behind reddit gold and now your power users are happy. You wouldn't even need to hold their hand when they set it up. I'd be willing to pay for reddit to some degree.
Because this isn't what they did, I suspect third-party apps are just collateral damage in a policy aimed at gating access to reddit content: from LLM developers, AI researchers, and anybody who can derive value from it.
If you make more money it's hardly BS. There are supply and demand graphs and you can reasonably calculate how many customers you lose/gain from a price increase/decrease.
reddit's users are creating the content for the other users, so a drop in users means less or worse content. Doubt you could model easily with a demand chart.
Those graphs rely on knowing the price elasticity of demand, which is easy to get for commodities like wheat and next to impossible to get for differentiated products, at least without testing various prices on statistically identical cohorts, which is technically difficult and a PR nightmare.
The reality is that Apollo doesn't serve intrusive ads, and thus, every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue. Unfortunately, reddit is in that late stage monetization step where they need to prove they are capable of big revenue to justify a high IPO share price.
One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg. So far, reddit has been very careful raising the temperature so as to not scare the frog before it's dead.
> One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg.
I think a critical part of the Digg exodus was that most people already saw Reddit as a clear #2 in the space. When Digg fucked up, there was an obvious place for everyone to migrate to. I don't see that right now. Facebook isn't cool anymore, Twitter has a large number of people who won't use it because of Elon, Mastodon isn't mature enough to gain casual users.
Bascially, the problem I see is that if people leave reddit, there isn't an obvious place for them to go? TikTok maybe? I just don't see an Pepsi to Reddit's Coke.
Please god no. So much info is already getting dumped to discord and nowhere else making searching or archiving impossible, we don't need more of that.
Discord no doubt keeps every conversation ever typed on their servers. they might toss out something huge like a movie file but text compresses -very- well.
Sending something to discord is like sending it to /dev/null except that it is also diverted into the mailbox of Big Brother, with you having only very limited access to it on their whim.
Reddit is about discovering content. How would you discover anything on Discord? Is there a trending list to see the top messages? Is there a way to list Discord communities so you can discover ones matching your interest?
I'm at a lost to how the two are similar in any way except for the "young generations" use them both.
You can search for public servers in the Discord app by keyword, but not for specific posts across all servers. It's more comparable to Reddit but without the frontpage, or structured posts.
My partner scrolls through the popular section nightly reading interesting things and chuckling at memes. I think you're out of touch with how many people use Reddit in this casual, low investment way.
They still need the content creators to create :) which I think they have done a good job of at least creating FOMO of top posts gathering monitory props.
I use /r/all exclusively. I have an account and subscribe to subreddits, but I never go to the home screen. I do check some subreddits directly. Otherwise just /r/all.
the vast majority of reddit users today do not do anything beyond scroll through default subreddits and the front page, people who curate their own experience to ONLY be what they selected are an extreme minority.
I disagree. A lot of other people are pointing out the discoverability problem (which I agree is an issue), but I think the medium just isn't comparable.
Chat is ephemeral and it there's a certain amount of participation expected, where as Reddit content strikes a nice balance of changing frequently, but not instantaneous and, for most users, it's a passive activity. To put it another way, most people aren't doom-scrolling on a discord server.
This, and also that chat platforms don't really have a crowd voting system. The thing I like about HN is that people can vote on content to have it promoted or demoted. Obviously this has its own issues, but I'm not aware of any big social platforms that do this. Twitter kind of does, but it functions a bit different.
Tbf Discord forums are so catastrophically badly designed in terms of UI that they're pretty much unusable.
Ultimately if you want good discussion you need the same layout that Reddit and HN have, with indented comments and easily branching chains. Otherwise it's just a chat masquerading as a forum thread which is useless.
The best UI would probably be a mixture of a forum and reddit. A fourm is a much superior model because it lacks upvotes/downvotes and is chronologically ordered, but lacks branching and chains that you describe. Reddit currently is being used more similarly to the forum culture than anything else.
I actually brought up this same idea elsewhere in this thread. Apparently, Apollo is a single developer though, so the main problem I see with this is time. Reddit switches over to new pricing July 1st, so this one person would have a single month to build out a new backend that would need to support tens of thousands of users and I just don't see that happening even if we assume they can hire a team of contractors and scaled it down to just core features.
Judging from this thread: I bet the Apollo dev could easily secure enough VC to eat reddit's lunch in short order. There would be no shortage of talent willing to take down goliath.
All the other mobile cliets could switch to a compatible backend API as well. Apollo is only an iOS client. There are a number of Android and ross-platform clients as well. Such as RedditIsFun or Baconreader or Infinity. What would be missing is a web frontend.
Now while that's nice, who's going to pay for that? Certainly not Apollo / other third party reddit users. And so, at most you'd get a honeymoon period out of this, while burning someone else's money, until they get fed up, and monetize or close the service. Similar to what happened to Imgur.
Mh, it feels like there has been little to no innovation and competition between companies about social media that are primarily text-based. Mastodon is in essence a decentralized Twitter. All new social networks seem to be about media other than text. The only text-centric new entry that comes to mind is Substack, but that's not really a social network product. Maybe it's time for a new innovator?
honestly i've been on tiktok/instagram since the pandemic, text forums don't have the same appeal as instantly making a video reply and seeing people react to it.
i don't visit reddit/other forums as much anymore - the bot replies and quality of user are super annoying now.
Single interest web-bbs systems is a definite option. Can always self-host discourse open-source. There's also many other options, including the Lamernews (HN clone) app.
> every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue
That's maybe true as a first-order effect.
But, for the ads that everyone else sees to be worth anything, the site has to be worth visiting at all. If your most dedicated/prolific users mainly post/comment using third party apps, then making their experience worse will reduce the quality of the site overall (even if you start getting revenue on behalf of those dedicated users).
If your most dedicated/prolific users mainly post/comment using third party apps...
Thats really easy for Reddit to measure. Why are you assuming they haven't?
It strikes me as a very shortsighted move.
If you stop assuming that Reddit is run by idiots, and you consider the likely probability that they've modelled this stuff in some depth, it's easy to believe that your initial assumption is wrong, and that the users are on 1st party apps (or will be if others shut down), and that many will stay and continue to post rather than leave or stop posting.
Your premise is based wholly on the belief that you know more about Reddit users than Reddit does. That seems dubious to me.
Historically when a large organisation does something that looks really dumb, it's usually exactly as dumb as it looks. I'd expect most individuals to make better decisions about Reddit than Reddit does, because of the whole "the intelligence of a group is that of its dumbest member divided by the square root of the number of people in it" effect.
Customers knowing more about the effects of decisions than the actual decision makers at a company is fairly normal. There is a reason they send out all those surveys. They're hoping you'll let them know about their mistakes.
I’m not sure how anyone works in the tech industry for any amount of time and comes away with the impression that large company execs regularly make good product decisions. It’s especially funny to claim this for a company like Reddit that has a very public history of awful decisions.
Some evidence to support your decision: The CEO of Reddit hasn't posted or commented on Reddit in almost a year. Same goes with most of the decision-makers. They're not users of their own product.
Sure, but something very important to remember in software is that users will put up with endless bullshit if the app is solving a problem for them. I could point out hundreds of apps that are absolute garbage that I've happily used because no matter how bad they are they're better than not using them. Reddit's apps don't need to be good if users derive enough value (fun, joy, karma, access to porn, whatever) from using Reddit despite the UI.
Something that so many founders get wrong is the belief that something needs to be good to be valuable. It doesn't. It just needs to be better than not having it. That is often a tremendously low bar.
Even if that is the case, it does not say much about their ability to evaluate what category of users (e.g., those coming from Apollo or their first-party clients) is generating more views/interactions and indirectly more "value" on their platform.
Short-sighted is presumably what they want: pump and dump onto the public market so early investors and founders get their payday and ride off into the sunset on bags of money while "the market" eats the losses and the slow (or maybe fast and painful) demise carries on for the next 3-10 years.
This is exactly what we've seen on Twitter. The already low bar for quality took a nosedive once they started ruining blue checkmarks and banning third party apps.
Twitter still maintains a critical mass of users and corporate accounts, but all the most talented creators (at least the ones I followed) have reduced their Twitter usage substantially or moved on completely.
Eventually new readers will stop showing up because there is no worthwhile content.
I haven’t used twitter since they blocked access to 3rd party apps. Twitter, Reddit and HN are sites I really only use on my mobile through 3rd party apps along with Omnivore to save interesting articles to read later.
For me, Reddit and Twitter are simply not worth visiting using mobile web or first party apps because the ratio of crap I don’t want to see (ads and promoted content) is too high vs the content I came to see.
YouTube is going the same way, I use multiple adblock rules to hide “shorts”, “people also searched for”, and “people also watched”. I pay for YouTube premium but feel like a mug for paying for a service which tries to force feed me content I don’t want. I’m on the brink of cancelling the subscription.
in my opinion, a good middle ground would be to make third-party apps only usable if you're subscribed to Reddit Premium.
That way you don't give the data freely, you could make each API keys provided to the user with limits that won't impact normal navigation but would cripple automated data capture, and you'd solve the issue where third-party apps aren't fed ads by sustaining the platform through subscription.
Blue seems to be a "less likely to be a bot" badge.
Considering that I've seen ChatGPT-type comments in various subreddits, I expect paid social media like Twitter Blue, Reddit Premium and Discord Nitro being pushed even more in the future.
Main thing is supporting the platform. Second is the longer posts without having to do split threads. I think the "edit" implementation and the delayed posting is very broken to say the least.
As to making fun of someone willing to pay to support a given system, I'm not sure that's at all productive. At that point, should probably not even be using said system in the first place. That doesn't mean I agree with every decision, or every direction, but do find it's a bit better than before overall.
Longer tweets + edit button seem like decent features for power users though not for the average lurker. Yet it seems like half of the reply guys have the blue badge.
My guess is that keeping API access behind a paywall is a money maker for a few specific client sets; the ones that immediately come to mind are Trading Companies (both traditional and crypto,) marketing companies (analyze trends/etc,) as well as large orgs with some form of reputation to uphold (i.e. large enough where just one person manning the account is not feasible.)
Firehose access has been behind a paid wall for about a decade now (initially via Gnip, which they acquired). You'd have rate limits on Twitter Blue API access intended to support normal single-user activity.
I moved to Apollo a month ago and paid for Pro because the Reddit app kept feeding me the same ad over and over, and it was a really annoying ad at that. Nothing I did including reporting it using various labels / downvoting it would remove it completely from my stream.
I will not be using the Reddit app unless they do something about annoying / intrusive ads on their app.
I'm fine with ads, just stop showing the ones to me I don't want to keep seeing.
Why would they IPO? Just take the money you make now and be happy. They need to pay back the VC money they stupidly took very late, but it's not like they need to fund future dev? Another bad redesign? Many people use these alternative apps because the UI on Reddit is pretty bad. They should force ads into the api stream and just call it a day. These 3rd party developers are doing the work for you that the reddit employees cannot figure out on their own.
Is the math that the dev did broadly accurate? If it is, it seems they could safely charge 10-19x less and get more revenue per-user than they do from ads alone... assuming that even a 10x lower cost would be affordable for third-party clients, which isn't a given.
I think it's more about the fact that the users are paying for the service. The % of reddit's userbase that has enough disposable income to subscribe is a very very very high value slice for advertisers.
a few options for Reddit: 1/ just buy Apollo. show ads 2/ do a special deal with Apollo where they somehow incorporate ads into the app 3/ API access with Reddit Premium. Apollo can now carry on as normal for premium users & charges "free" users 4/ learn to build a freaking app - people didn't end up using Apollo because of the high quality of the Reddit mobile app.
Personally I rarely use Reddit in a browser and if 3rd party apps were to go away that would be the end of Reddit for me.
Yes. I like that idea about API keys like how OpenAI is doing it so the user can plug in their billing account into whatever 3rd Party service you find interesting (and may have a totally separate financial relationship with) so the user is basically paying Reddit. They could possibly implement this already as users connect their accounts to the app when it's setup. At the end of the day its the same thing Reddit is being compensated for off site data access but somehow it feels more organic and under my control as a user vs this kind of rent seeking ransom negotiations for a hostage user base.
> every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue.
This isn't true if they're charging for API access. At best it's a question of whether the lost ad revenue is being compensated for by API revenue.
If you want to attribute an ulterior motive here I'm guessing it's more about control. They want their users to use Reddit as they want them to use Reddit, or at least they'd like to reserve the right to that power.
Of course, the flip side to that is that I would assume TikTok and Instagram or Twitter type content is not as valuable for LLM training. I think it's the big long form posts that you get on Reddit with explanations and tutorials and advice that have value.
And I don't think a lot of that value has much to do with the direction Reddit has been going with its redesign. If they viewed their core product as creating high quality rich textual content for input into LLM, they would do many, many things differently and probably spend more time improving the moderator tools to improve curation.
Even without ads the users that post content (or manage their subreddit) through third-party apps are still valuable for Reddit. Sure they are a smaller percentage, but that small percentage is more valuable than a regular ad watching user.
But given the absolute hostility and hate _users_ of reddit give those two sites for not banning everything they find offensive a site like reddit is just not possible any more.
A slow spiral into irrelevance because of lots of small bad decisions. At one point, Reddit felt like a lone champion of free speech and conversation in a sea of buzzfeeds.
I think they've moderated the website into ruin. They've put a lot of energy into silencing certain kinds of voices/opinions while promoting others. What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of the seemingly worst ideas from the left are stated as fact and voicing a dissenting opinion can quite literally get you banned.
r/antiwork and r/latestagecapitalism are the most egregious examples of this that I can think of. But the attitudes held there have leaked into 99% of the other subreddits to some degree.
For the record, I lean left. But it really sucks to no longer have a town hall where both sides of the aisle can discuss things as adults.
If there's one takeaway, I think it's some flavor of:
Don't overmoderate/show favoritism. You can't have yin without yang, or salt without pepper.
What made Reddit awesome was the discourse. Maybe they never realized that this was the secret sauce. That is, the clashing of ideas. And so they didn't cultivate that. Today, outside of a handful of niche/hobby subreddits, it no longer has anything close to educated discussions.
This is really well stated. Sometimes out of morbid curiosity, I’ll read one of the /r/all posts on a topic where I know the discussion is going to be reductive and generally uninformed (the example that comes immediately to mind is anything involving the energy industry - there’s not much to find beyond “hurrr durr Exxon bad thorium good”), and every single time it’s the same type of self-satisfied navel-gazing commentary totally untethered from the real world.
I still read it most days (through Apollo) but when/if this kicks in, that’s the end of it for me.
Not only that, the posts themselves on /r/popular are mostly Facebook anger bait (/r/LeopardsAtMyFace, /r/IdiotsInCars, /r/whatcouldgowrong) or political anger bait: Reddit leans left so it's all "Look at what the right said." Reddit is one of the largest spreader of US political bullshit unto the rest of the world, turning kids into flag-weaving partisans and fostering a us vs them mentality.
It's a low brow dismissal, I know, but between the posts and the comments, Reddit has gone to total shit. Also to note that the average age has remained the same, so it's really hard to talk about anything serious when the majority are 18 yo US middle class white males.
And the only rebuttal I hear is "oh, I'm on /r/askhistorians and it's good here." The exception that proves the rule.
May it all come crashing down so we can build something anew. They're just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic at this point.
> It's a low brow dismissal, I know, but between the posts and the comments, Reddit has gone to total shit. Also to note that the average age has remained the same, so it's really hard to talk about anything serious when the majority are 18 yo US middle class white males.
I'm probably just showing my age, but one reason I could never get into Reddit is it always felt to me like teenagers rehashing the same old debates I had as a teenager on usenet/IRC/whatever. It was never the platform, or anything wrong with the users themselves. It's just that I aged out of the "spend all day arguing with random people on the internet about things" demographic. (Instead, I spend all day arguing with old friends on the internet about things).
I disagree that the community is middle class (at least now). I often write about common middle class tropes that seemingly go down like a lead balloon as if they had never heard of them, and more importantly there is often a distain for middle class people in favour of working class people on Reddit in political discussions.
Outside the US the subreddits seem to be much older as well, not sure about the situation in the US itself.
That's because the middle class itself has been disappearing post-2008. You need much more money these days to feel you're not rich, but money isn't a major concern either.
Perhaps that's a longer topic not really relevant here.
I chuckle sometimes to recall the popularity of the “forwardsfromgrandma” subreddit many years back, because the top of /r/all often looks almost exactly like it now.
Much of it seems to be people's behavior changing, rather than the company changing.
Reddit has subreddits on the right and left that will ban you for disagreeing, or even for having made a comment in a subreddit they don't like. That was theoretically always possible, but at some point people decided such a policy was a good idea.
I personally think a misstep of reddit's has been relying so much on volunteer moderators. Why are people willing to put in so many unpaid hours of labor? Apparently, the answer is sometimes because they have a political cause they want to promote.
Reddit admins did ban a lot of subreddits on both the far right and left ends of the political spectrum. I don't agree with extremist voices, but I think that silencing and pushing people off the platform is bad for discourse overall.
It's truly depressing. Reddit's usefulness as an aggregator is what's kept me around for so long. But the sheer extremist views I see on a daily basis are so off-putting. My wife jokes about how I say every other month that "I'm going to quit Reddit".
It's so weird to me that they've let the mods go absolutely bonkers. I've gotten banned from so many subreddits simply for having a different opinion.
If you comment any pro-Elon Musk argument on a subreddit, no matter how tame, you will get banned. Happened to me in /r/worldnews. This isn't some conspiracy: mods are actively banning discussion.
nothing is stopping you from starting conservative versions of things on reddit. Reddit has been since it started pretty left leaning, but they don't stop r/conservative from existing as long as they maintain some decorum rather than act like 4chan or r/TheDonald which was riddled with nuts and russian bots. There are a ton of conservative leaning subs on there, just don't expect them to have thousands of visitors like r/pics or r/memes . You can start r/ConservativeMemes and r/ConservativePics if you like!
The isolation of particular viewpoints into their own subreddit is precisely the problem imo.
There are political undertones in nearly every subreddit. But depending on which sub you are visiting, you can be downvoted or even banned for not having the "accepted" viewpoint. There's no place to have balanced discussion anymore, and that's one of the things that used to make reddit enjoyable.
Creating more siloed echo chambers isn't a fix, it's the problem.
The news culture in the US is toxic. It creates division and people react to the news rather than the policy. I believe Reddit has a similar effect by pushing moderates and centre-left people to the right.
> What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of the seemingly worst ideas from the left are stated as fact and voicing a dissenting opinion can quite literally get you banned.
A friend of mine is moving to Canada, another to Germany, both went to Reddit to ask for help, and what they got back was anti-immigration tropes of all kind (from "go away you cheap labour, you are stealing our jobs" to "go away you rich tech worker, you are gentrifying my town").
While social media are generally cesspools of psychological deragement, racism and xenophobia, I keep hearing people complaining about some undefined left wing bias because the occasional weirdo with pink hair complains about capitalism or fascism in r/weirdoswithpinkhair or r/randosthatcomplainaboutcapitalism.
> "go away you cheap labour, you are stealing our jobs" to "go away you rich tech worker, you are gentrifying my town"
It's pretty funny how these two quotes express similar sentiment (NIMBYism, in-group protectionism, deep-seated fear of disruption) yet are often placed on opposite ends of the spectrum (anti-gentrification vs. anti-immigration).
I had the same person tell my girlfriend both things, complaining about our presence in the UK. He started saying that we were living in city center because, as immigrants, we were taking benefits. Then my girlfriend told him how much I was earning (which was 5-6 times what he was making), he stayed quiet for a few days and then came back complaining about foreigners stealing good jobs, gentrifying things and forcing the Brits to work as cleaners.
I think it's a sign of the times, also replicated outside of reddit, for example Mastodon. I enjoyed a solid 20 years of online discourse that was overall reasonable, and most of it not very political.
Now everything is highly politicized with a hard split across two camps where before I barely could detect the very concept of a camp at all.
There's no detectable reasonable right-wing online, it always escalates into 4chan. Hence, the "civil" people clean the place, and you'll have centrists and moderate-left remaining. Give it time and far-left will dominate as moderates silence themselves out of fear.
I feel like for every comment on Reddit that's even slightly controversial, I need to watch my words and add various layers of overtones in order to avoid things being taken out of context or given the worst possible interpretation. People are there to score points, so comments are longer than they need to be or people attack. It's part of why the dreaded "/s" is so popular over there.
I greatly appreciate the rules here that we should read and interpret in good faith - and the fact that it's enforced.
It has happened in most subreddits IMO. Any palatable subreddit is only palatable because the moderation does not ban you, not because it is more centrist.
One thing I want to point out is that political culture, and defines right and left, varies globally. This is key to understanding why Reddit is so unbelievably US centric even in the international subreddits - the moderation has had the effect of creating echochambers that don't make any sense in the local political discourse.
I think moderation on Reddit had the effect of cleaning out centrists as well, since it was a comment that got you banned from reddit and not your political position (e.g. a post which was positive towards a trump policy would get you caught up in the post-2016 moderation sweep).
You can see the effect on Indians. Quora was popular with Indians because it was intellectual and centrist in the western political spectrum, from a culture that has the right-wing as being Hindu-leaning and the left-wing as being Muslim-leaning. Indians are absent from Reddit comparatively.
This is something I have seen from many different sites. Someone from mostly the right wing decides to make an alternative to Reddit or Youtube or whatever, just to avoid the restrictive nature of these larger platforms, It is surprising just how quick the alternative turns into the worst possible version of right wing.
There's also a much more noticeable problem of Reddit being too US-centric. The moderation is the cause, but I think it's also symbolic of US political culture that fails to take into account that politics can work differently across cultural lines. In a way the website has become more racist than the pre-Trump-election moderation Reddit.
The web went in the wrong direction when we abandoned the initial concepts of user agents, which was that the browser has the ultimate choice of what to render and how. That concept, transferred to today's world of apps would simply mean that any client like Apollo is essentially a browser locked on Reddit's website, parsing HTML (which has the role of an API) and rendering the content in a native interface. As long as the user can access the HTML for free, they should be able to use any application (a browser or a special app) and render the content however they wish.
Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly, but with the recent resurgence of server-side rendering we may soon be able to get rendered HTML with one HTTP request. And then the only hurdles will be legal.
> Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly
It works the other way: with today's SPAs the API (that powers the frontend) is exposed for us to use directly, without going through the HTML - just use your browser's devtools to inspect the network/fetch/XHR requests and build your own client.
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On an related-but-unrelated note: I don't know why so many website companies aren't allowing users to pay to use their own client: it's win-win-win: the service operator gets new revenue to make-up for the lack of ads in third-party clients, it doesn't cost the operator anything (because their web-services and APIs are already going to be well-documented, right?), and makes the user/consumer-base happy because they can use a specialized client.
Where would Twitter be today if we could continue to use Tweetbot and other clients with our own single-user API-key or so?
> inspect the network/fetch/XHR requests and build your own client
The purpose of an API is the agreement, more than the access. You can always reverse engineer something, but your users won't be too happy when things randomly stop working, whenever reddit chooses.
Total non-issue. If it breaks, people will fix it. There's people out there maintaining immense ad filter lists and executable countermeasures against ad blocker detection. Someone somewhere will care enough to fix it.
> There's people out there maintaining immense ad filter lists and executable countermeasures against ad blocker detection.
This is not a useful comparison. A failure of an ad blocker means you don't see an ad while using the service. Big deal. A failure of a reverse engineered glorified web scraper is that the app stops working, completely, for all users of the client, at once, until someone fixes it.
Yes, it could be democratized, but most users wouldn't understand any of this, and say "ugh, this app never works". It would be a user experience that reddit could make as terrible as they wanted.
It absolutely is a useful comparison. It's obvious that this software depends on unstable interfaces that will eventually break. I wasn't talking about that, I was talking about the sheer effort it takes to create such things. Such efforts are absolutely in the realm of existence today. Projects like nitter and teddit exist. Teddit is on the frontpage of HN right now no doubt in reaction to this thread. There's probably one for HN too, I just haven't found HN to be hostile enough to search for it.
Honestly I don't really care about "most users". To me they're only relevant as entries in the anonymity set. As long as we have access to such powerful software, I'm happy. I'm not out to save everyone.
> I was talking about the sheer effort it takes to create such things
I understand what you're saying, but I think this is the key to my point:
> It would be a user experience that reddit could make as terrible as they wanted.
It's an unfair cat and mouse game. Yes, effort could be made to fix it each time, but, if reddit chose, they could force everyone into the "most users" group, when the only app works for 5 minutes a day, and people get bored, because they decided to randomize page elements.
There are only so many programmers, who will fix the client, per 1 person. This fraction, when inverted, will be a rough threshold for the client's audience size for continued fixes to be there.
And yet these people somehow maintain immense amounts of ad blocking filters and code, including active counter measures which require reverse engineering web site javascripts. I gotta wonder what would happen if they started making custom clients for each website instead.
Adblockers' audience is huge, much more than any single site's audience, and they probably wouldn't care about most single sites (to care, you have to be in the audience, and most sites have small audiences).
Someone cared enough to defeat annoying blocker blockers of sites. If they care just a little bit more, they could replace the web developer's code with their own minimal version. Chances are the site doesn't actually need most of the code it includes anyway.
What I'm talking about already exists by the way. Stuff like nitter, teddit, youtube downloaders. I once wrote one for my school's shitty website.
CORS ruined this pipe dream. Ideally you’d be able to tell your browser that website X loading content from site Y was a-okay and exactly what you want to happen because site Y is user-hostile and site X addresses all those issues, but alas.
Now the only way to access site Y is by a) routing all your data through some third party server, or b) installing a native application which has way more access to your machine than the web app would.
Some days you gotta wonder if anyone on the web committees has any interest in end-users.
> Now the only way to access site Y is by a) routing all your data through some third party server, or b) installing a native application which has way more access to your machine than the web app would.
Or installing a browser extension that allows rewriting CORS headers.
> Some days you gotta wonder if anyone on the web committees has any interest in end-users.
Oh, they do. The defaults are much safer for end-users than they used to be. Who they mostly leave out is a narrow slice of power users with use cases where bypassing make sense, and the extension facilities available address some of that.
From what I can tell there’s no such extension on iOS. I think it should be part of the standard, not a hole left for extensions to fill in.
The slice is only narrow because it’s practically impossible. If there were an option presented to end users “let X.com read data from Y.com?” there would be a rich ecosystem of alternative UI’s for any website you could think of.
These alt-UI’s would be likely to have better security practices than the original, or at the very least introduce competition to drive privacy/security/accessibility standards up for everyone. Whereas currently if the Origin has the data, they have full ability to impose whatever draconian practices they want on people who desire to access that data.
I understand what you're saying, but plenty of websites resolve this by having an in-browser OAuth flow, and then working off of an API. It's not like APIs are asking for CORS stuff in general, just cookie auth to the third party server requires CORS.
If a third-party webapp wanted to access Reddit, an auth flow that gets API tokens from it and then stories those for usage gets this working (in the universe in which Reddit wants this to happen of course). You still get CORS protection from the general drive-by issues, and you'll need an explicit auth step on a third party site (but that's why OAuth sends you to the data provider's website to then be redirected)
I don’t think you do get what I’m saying. If an Origin wants to be accessed by other Origins there are plenty of ways to do that, that much should be obvious.
I’m talking about the case when the User wants origin A to render data origin B has, but origin B doesn’t want that. You’d expect the User Agent to act on the User’s behalf and hand B’s data to A after confirming with the User that is their intention.
But instead the User Agent totally disregards the User and exclusively listens to origin B. This prevents the User from rendering the data in the more accessible/secure/privacy-preserving/intuitive way that origin A would have provided.
Strange to see all the comments arguing that in fact the browser ought to be an Origin Agent.
> Strange to see all the comments arguing that in fact the browser ought to be an Origin Agent
Funny
One universe I could see is the browser allowing a user to grant cross origin cookies when wanted. Though even then a site B that really doesn’t want this can stick CSRF tokens in the right spots and that just falls apart immediately
I imagine you understand the security questions at play here right? Since a user going to origin A might not know what other origins that origin A wants to reach out to.
CSRF mitigations mean that origins could still block things off even without CORS, but it’s an interesting thought experiment
Can they stick CSRF tokens in the right spot under this model? The typical CSRF mitigations require other origins to not be able to access the HTML of the page (as they just inject a hidden form field or similar). If the cross-origin has full access to the page’s resources they ought to be able to emulate the environment of the page as viewed in-origin quite accurately.
Worth noting this model would introduces no new holes - everything I ask for is already possible when running a native application.
I get what you're saying w/r/t CSRF. While every app could be different, in practice most websites do real bog-standard CSRF tokens, and I could see a user agent be able to get things working with like 95% of websites. Though I could think of many schemes to obfuscate things dynamically if you are motivated enough! But I like the idea of a user agent that is built around making it easier for you to just get "your" data in these ways.
> introduces no new holes - everything I ask for is already possible when running a native application.
A native application involves downloading a binary and installing it on your machine. Those involve a higher degree of trust than, say, clicking on a random URL. "I will read this person's blog" vs "I will download a binary to read this preson's blog" are acts with different trust requirements. At least for most people.
I suppose in a somewhat ironic way the iOS sandbox makes me feel more comfortable downloading random native apps but it probably really shouldn't! The OS is good about isolating cookie access for exactly the sort of things you're talking about (the prompt is like "this app wants to access your data for website.com)), but I should definitely be careful
Technically you can still do that by launching chrome with some special flags or with a chrome extension.
But I do agree that CORS is being hijacked/abused for this purpose. But at the same time it's an important security feature. It prevents the scenario where you visit some website and some malicious javascript starts making calls to some-internal-site/api/... and exfiltrating data.
The chrome flag disables CORS entirely, which presents a major security risk as you point out. What I’m asking for is an option to let specific origins read from specific other origins. Extensions might be able to do this but they aren’t available in all contexts (iOS, for instance)
There's two reasons why they don't want third-party clients as a pro feature:
- It's a very niche thing to charge for, and merely charging for something means having to support it, so you can be underwater on support costs alone
- Users on third-party clients are resistant to enshittification
The business model of any Internet platform is to reintermediate: find a transaction that is being done direct-to-consumer, create a platform for that transaction, and get everyone on both ends of the transaction to use your platform yourself. You get people hooked to your platform by shifting your surpluses around, until everyone's hooked and you can skim 30% for yourself. But you can't really do this if a good chunk of your users have third-party clients.
This is usually phrased as "third-party clients don't show ads", but it extends way broader than that. If it was just ads, you could just charge $x.99/mo and make it profitable. But there's plenty of other ways to make money off users that isn't ads. For example, you might want to open a new vertical on your site to attract new creators. Think like Facebook's "pivot to video", how every social network added Stories, or YouTube Shorts. Those sorts of strategic moves are very unlikely to be properly supported by third-party clients, because nobody actually wants Twitter to become Snapchat. So your most valuable power users would be paying you money in order to... become less valuable users!
If social media businesses worked how they said they worked, then yes, this would actually be a good idea. But it isn't. Platform capitalism is entirely a game of butting yourself in to every transaction and extracting a few pennies off the top of everything.
> Where would Twitter be today if we could continue to use Tweetbot and other clients with our own single-user API-key or so?
So like OAuth? IIRC Twitter used that with all the 3rd party clients. I think the problem is that 3rd party clients filters out ad posts one way or the other. Your other point still stands though, just charge the user API access.
> I don't know why so many website companies aren't allowing users to pay to use their own client...
If you do that, I'm going to make a client that uses a rotating set of accounts and masquerades as a different client. I am then going to make content available through my client for free, and I'm going to put ads on it so that I can make money. With some small number of accounts, I will serve perhaps x1000 users and you can't do anything about it.
In time, perhaps I will lock the users into my platform. They will talk about how the community on Reddit doesn't understand Reneit and how all the memes come from Reneit. If I win, I'll be Reddit over Digg. If I lose I'll be Imgur.
So go ahead. You'll be Invision to Tapatalk and you will die.
They sort of are allowing users to pay to use their own client by charging for API access. It will be interesting to see how Apollo adapts to this new reality.
- pay the client probably a recurring fee (x2 or x3 if you use multiple clients on different platform)
- mix and match the above and manage when it falls out of sync
It's totally possible, but how many users are willing to go that route ? Weather apps could be an example of that with the pluggable data sources, but that's to me a crazy small niche.
The reason there will always be ads: average consumers are never willing to pay as much to keep their eyes clean as others are willing to pay to dirty them.
> the browser has the ultimate choice of what to render and how
Fundamentally you're advocating for a web that doesn't rely on ad money. I'm totally with you, but the discussion should probably expand beyond the web and to why our society generate so much ad money in the first place.
What should we do to free our societies from ad money ?
There was a 15 year period where many websites were only compatible with Internet Explorer. The dream of clients in control is worth fighting for, but it’s never been reality.
There's free API access with a client of your own. You just can't distribute a single client that intermediates the site: thereby not being a user agent so much as its own site. If you use your own client_id and OAuth2, you get 100 req/min which is enough to browse.
Why can't these apps just use the api that reddit.com uses? How could the servers differentiate between reddit.com and apollo app pretending to be reddit.com to the server?
Seems like you could still a meta UI that drives the underlying SPA in a hidden browser but it would be a pain. Maybe a framework for that will be built one day
> As long as the user can access the HTML for free, they should be able to use any application (a browser or a special app) and render the content however they wish.
You can see how the end game of this is HTML no longer being free, right?
The worse case vision I have of the future internet in one in which content and advertising is hosted by the advertising companies and rendered via a web assembly system.
Content and advertising cannot be separated by IP and the site content is basically an application that is difficult to parse.
This feels like it's all priced for AI companies, TBH. This per-request pricing makes a LOT more sense if you assume that one particular piece of content will only be requested once in your company's history, saved on a server somewhere and used for training forever. You're not paying for a request being processed, you're not even paying to offset any advertising cost, you're essentially paying for the ability to use the requested piece of content forever. Maybe that's what Apollo should do, set up a huge cache layer and proxy all requests for the public data through there? I feel like the power law would apply here, so 80% of the requests would be for 20% of the content. Considering how popular the most popular subreddits are, I wouldn't be surprised if the balance was something like 99-to-1. Cache misses would still need to be fetched from the API itself, but that should drive costs down massively.
If the ToS allow this, the cache layer could even be shared across apps from different developers (developers supporting both iOS and Android might have an advantage here), making the costs even lower.
I feel like the better pricing strategy would be something similar to what the geospatial API platforms like Google Maps do, with their explicit no-caching or time-limited-caching clauses. E.g. you're actually prohibited from retaining results from say a geocode beyond 30 days IIRC.
Amazon made this explicit with their Geospatial API pricing ( https://aws.amazon.com/location/pricing/ - "Places" tab) - where the pricing for being able to store a result is 8x higher.
This really doesn't work in the context of AI training though. Sure, it would make reuse between models a lot harder, perhaps, but the general idea still holds, once a model is trained, the model is for forever.
This wouldn't really be an issue for there to still be a massive advantage to even a simple caching layer.
Imagine one has 10 request for thread {X} every second (probably a massive under estimation of the actual traffic). If you cache that single thread with a lifetime of a second you have instantly cut out 90% of your API usage for that thread.
Obviously the final benefit depends on what the actual distribution of {users} per {threads} per {time} -- but if your goal is to shave redundant API requests than it definitely makes sense, especially if the alternative is untenable in terms of cost.
My point is that for caching to be cost-effective, it requires long lifetimes -- especially if your # of users is relatively low.
Especially for an app like Reddit with millions of subreddits. There is no monolithic "reddit"; the experience is tailored to each user based on the subs they've joined. So your % of requests that will be asking for a cached resource is lower than other high-volume websites. I think your 99-to-1 estimate is _way_ off.
He should seriously consider starting his own Reddit alternative. He has a sea of enthusiastic supporters that potentially have enough critical mass to get it started. Unlike attempts to create Reddit alternatives in the past, this group isn't full of racists and others who were kicked off the site for engaging in reprehensible topics.
Agreed. It’s a small but sizable community that, as you said, wouldn’t cause problems like the group that left Reddit for Voat. I realize it’s a much bigger challenge as a one man team to create a full Reddit clone and not just a nice client for it. But I really hope the Apollo dev considers teaming up with others to go for it.
He made a nice frontend for _Reddit_. That's what they paid for and that's what they want. Not some alternative Reddit. And the people that actually install and use a dedicated Reddit app, like this one, is miniscule. It's a self-selecting group and if he actually tried to make an alternative backend then it will just be Voat or worse.
You're right that it's a minuscule part of Reddit, but I'd disagree that most of those who chose Apollo are deeply stuck to Reddit.
I think most people going out their way to pay for an alternative Reddit client have a beef with Reddit in the first place, and it's the client that keeps them on the platform.
Would they be happy with Reddit alternatives ? who knows. But they'd probably give a fair shake at it to see if it fits their needs, and not just dismiss it at first glance. Also would such a service be profitable ? depends if service such a minuscule group is done efficiently enough to keep the running costs low.
IMO Apollo users probably aren't on Reddit for the mainstream stuff, Mastodon or Bluesky could probably take that role. Niche communities could probably move on to smaller services and their users would follow.
PS: Voat was positively horrible, but I'd argue the circumstances that led to its conception where wildly different. This time we hopefully wouldn't have some "free speach" narrative baked into it, except for the NSFW bits perhaps.
Yeah, I’ve paid for Ultra or whatever the top tier is. But I’m not naive enough to think there are enough people like me and you to fund some new Reddit with a tiny fraction of the content.
I've paid for the app, the top tier. I am not on the app to avoid ads. The ads on the Reddit app aren't why I hate it. The entire UX is crap. There are zero features on the official app that are usable to me.
I would happily pay for Apollo on its own backend, and more than happily see ads.
All I am asking for is the Apollo apps front end, this app is the only thing that makes Reddit or a site like Reddit usable for me.
Also all iOS users, who are more valuable, and probably harder to use bots/easier to permaban (compared to Android or web). On the other side, Apple will kill your app, maybe without warning, if you don't moderate strongly enough for their liking.
Because most people don’t want to pay for things they can get for “free” — look at literally every thread on HN about ads or every paywalled article here w/ an “archive” link. They’ll twist themselves into knots justifying to themselves that they’re entitled to something for nothing.
Just because you pay for Apollo (I pay for it as well) isn’t evidence that most of the Apollo user base is ready to open their wallets to the point of starting Reddit 2.0.
I'm sorry, but in the case of ads this is a two way street. Ad companies have made it impossible to revoke consent for them to collect my data so ad blocking is the last refuge I have left. What entitles marketers to ignore the DNT flag and continue collecting info about me?
I used to whitelist The Deck. It didn't stop them from going under. The last refuge I actually have is advocating for public policy to make data collection without explicit consent illegal. Otherwise the shortlist of sites I can use without engaging with tracking behavior is extremely short.
Edit: I think this idea of the ad-blocking user as perpetual freeloader is a nice fiction that helps ad company execs sleep at night. If you ask companies why they don't ask for explicit consent to tracking, the answer is often: "because no one would agree to it". But there's this game being played where ad companies pretend that no "good" user minds what they're doing as they continue to push the envelope of what's acceptable.
Like I said, you can stop visiting the sites you don’t like the business practice of, you can accept that you like some content more than you dislike the business practice of the site, or you can convince yourself you’re right.
You have a point. He has a lot of power users and many don't want to pay. Many others may be willing to, but I don't think paid users alone is enough to sustain a site.
However, of all of the Reddit alternatives that have popped up and failed, this one seems promising because there is a broad base of users that are all angry at once. In the past, it has always been fringe groups that have been banned and sought another site. Because of that, the subject matter of the new site always had challenges getting site hosts and advertisers on board. This is different. Having power users hurts on ad revenue but potentially helps on site quality. I don't know what will happen but this is a uniquely promising opportunity. We'll see how it goes.
I don’t think that is necessarily true. There’s two payed tiers of the app, and they seem to sell at least well enough to support the development of the app.
> Finally, to ensure that all regulatory requirements are met in the handling of mature content, we will be limiting access to sexually explicit content for third-party apps starting on July 5, 2023, except for moderation needs.
Reddit really buried "no nsfw outside official reddit apps" (from the end of your first link). Didn't Tumblr do something similar and lose a significant fraction of its userbase and revenues?
I can only assume Reddit wants to kill NSFW altogether. They require you to authenticate now if you want to see any of it (though of course they promise that somehow this will still be "anonymous"). Once they turn off old.reddit.com, I think that'll be the end of NSFW content on Reddit altogether.
I assume they hope to attract more advertising money this way.
They subject all of their dark patterns to multivariate testing. I suspect this is to elicit feedback like yours, and suppress the ability to respond to it, as they have never in years promoted any of it to general availability.
I’ve been in tests where the entire site is gated, demanding I download the app. I’ve been in tests where SFW content is marked as NSFW, demanding I log in. Etc.
They don’t view you as a user... most companies who are ad supported fundamentally view everything as an impression/page load which is simply a container for ad placements. Click through, conversion rates and revenue per thousand impressions are the only metrics that matter to the health of the business.
Everything else is secondary and most product managers don't view a/b tests as anything other than experiments on ways to increase those stats.
Is that only for not-logged-in users? I don't see how limiting access to the official app does anything special from a regulatory standpoint. If an account is approved/authorized for nsfw content who cares which app the account is using?
> As of July 1, 2023, we will enforce two different rate limits for the free access tier:
> If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id
> If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute
So... doesn't this mean that each logged in Apollo/3rd party client user can make 100 requests per minute for free?
The Apollo developer says his average user makes less than 400 requests per day and it's somehow going to average $2.50 per user per month. I must be missing something.
Technically that could be done. Each user could create a client ID and then input that in the app and then the app could use it to make requests. But I doubt Reddit will be happy about that and will quickly send a cease and desist to the developer and ban those users.
No. That's the limit of how many queries can be made per minute on the free tier, but it doesn't state what the free tier entails or what it can be used for. My guess, based on Christian's post, is that third-party clients would not be eligible for the free tier and that the free tier is for uses like bots.
They would be eligible but they can't be useful if their allocation is just 100 requests per minute. That would be like 10 concurrent users tops. Probably even less.
Someone at Reddit has since restored the linked post[0]. I think the content is unchanged, but it may have been subtly edited while it was "[removed]".
Disappointing. Sad to see such a wonderful app likely
meet its end. This is to be expected when you pin your existence on the good graces of a for-profit company.
Reddit wants IPO. Badly. They want to show potential investors that they're solvent. To this end, as Google did nearly two decades ago, they will monetize every inch of their user base and application -- that includes access to their data.
But Reddit is on thin ice -- as MySpace, Digg, del.icio.us all found out and as Twitter is finding out.
Why? Reddit doesn't have any asset of intrinsic value. Reddit don't have sought after intellectual property. Reddit doesn't produce any goods. Reddit's value is the community and the data they bring. When they antagonize the community, they are antagonizing what is keeping the lights on for them.
And that community voluntarily performs most of the moderation for free. I believe they would have to start paying moderators if the cost to use the platform rises substantially. It would no longer feel like a community and instead feel like working for free for a big corporation. Twitter was barely profitable when Musk bought it partially because of the cost of thousands of moderators.
Reddit is too big for there to be a “Reddit community”… any other online community (like HN) is probably already full of people who also frequent Reddit.
Someone in the thread where the OP linked directly to the Reddit post[0] suggested that perhaps Apollo would just create its own Reddit-like website under the name Apollo, republish it on the app store and then all the users would flock to the new social-media app instead of Reddit. The whole thing is really Reddit's fault: instead of offering to buy-out Apollo and make it official, they are relying on their ultra-shitty interface that nobody wants to use and hoping they can make an extra buck on the few third-party apps that will remain.
I'm not sure what they expect...we've all seen it happen with social-media, it starts out all open and free, and then investors get involved and soon enough people have already moved on to the next open and free alternative. 4chan is the only exception to this rule. But if 4chan somehow got transformed into a for-profit service, then things have already gotten very bad.
The interface is "shitty" for users, not for Reddit. Reddit just wants ads and the inability for users to filter out stuff they don't want to see, such as ads or moderation, in order to market themselves to the highest bidder that needs to spread propaganda. Having any user control of the content distribution is harmful to this goal, and must be destroyed.
In general, all for-profit social media or similar operations will have the same fate. The term for this is "enshittification". While HN is owned by a company, it isn't being used as a profit generating service, even though it technically has some job ads, so it is (so far) immune from this.
We must find a solution to sustain non-profit user-generated content operations to continue enjoying the benefits of an open online community. Forums went of fashion as they required too much technical expertise to operate and to a lesser extent to use, so they got displaced by reddits and discords, both of these are distinctly worse from a data sovereignty and user freedom perspective. In the age of smartphones, density of information (esp. text) seems to be frowned upon.
I'm not sure what's the solution is. "Making your own platform" doesn't work because people's time is limited, and they inevitably gravitate toward the biggest platforms, taking all the attention and mindshare with them. Is federation the answer? Perhaps, as it seems to bring down the operation costs to a reasonable level, but it seems to pose other problems with content curation, which is a hard problem.
Different strokes for different folks for sure, but I personally cannot stand the "official" app. It's popular for sure, but mainly because reddit is popular and most people simply opt for the "official" client by default. The one time I tried it I hated all the ads, the inability to follow comment chains properly, the sluggishness -- really, everything. Apollo was a GODSENT back when it was announced. And I'm not even talking about tasks you would do as a moderator. I do hope that they reverse their decision.
It's more popular because the amount of absolute horseshit people are willing to wade through to get their fix of social media stuff is insane.
Reddit could replace half of the links with gruesome ISIS beheading videos and people would probably just keep scrolling. Only something like a third of all web users even have an ad blocker.
To the extent that whole subreddits are deliberately broken (no comments load, or the "open in app" bar covers the "next page" button) in the mobile web version, and that's when they're not labelling everything that's not Teletubbies as NSFW and denying mobile access except via the app.
I have to think a fairly small slice of users are using 3rd party clients. I know almost nobody uses old.reddit.com anymore.
I don't see any of the moves Reddit is making as unsustainable, they just have a lock on their niche. Sure Apollo could clone Reddit, but why continue to use their app that that point when it would be better to switch to the official app which will see maybe 100x+ more usage?
Or scrape the HTML directly instead of using an API. I'm pretty sure the clients I mentioned in the post scraped the old forum. APIs and SaaS wasnt a big thing a decade ago.
And I recall in my case there is not a big exodus but people slowly moved over with die-hard fans on both sides.
As a comparison, with 20MM the devs can probably build the new thing, serve media over CDNs and out-SEO reddit with some to spare.
I think moot and hiroyuki did try to monetize 4chan but with mixed success. See the 4chan pass and splitting of the SFW boards into a separate domain.
Why would they buy them out? The main value prop for the client is no ads, reddit wants to serve ads or provide a subscription. So while it was great, reddit provided free infra, that Apollo resold to their users, it's fair to expect it to end. 20M is something like 15-20 dollars per year per user for them, seems fair.
Wow, that price is insane. To me, that's pretty clearly a shot at any competitor apps for Reddit. Purely anti-competitive behavior here, which to me is silly. Let other apps pop up to better serve your users. At the end of the day, they are still your users and you might learn things from the other apps.
Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.
Except there’s a first party client for Reddit, so they’re both a client and server. Their client competes with other clients, and they use their control over the server to give their client an advantage.
Now, whether this constitutes “anti competitive” in the legal sense is probably not going to fly in court: it’s unlikely Reddit can be compelled to offer an API at any particular price. It’s their service, they can do what they want with it. Rather, it’s a lesson that third parties should not be developing clients for other company’s services, as it is building a foundation on quicksand.
The idea that it's anti-competitive to do with your platform what you want is in my mind silly. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from building a reddit clone to compete against reddit besides your ability to attract their users.
It comes off as extremely entitled to think that reddit should supply you with the data created by their platform to do what you want with it.
Um, the users create the data, and consume it. Reddit provides a "marketplace" for that, and sells your data in exchange. Now, they want to rent-seek from the very people making it possible to create and consume that content easily.
And it IMO, is anti-competitive - they are intentionally killing all existing competitors, vs. improving their own offering.
Apollo is not a competitor to reddit, it's a consumer of reddit. Those are very distinct things. It literally doesn't even exist without reddit.
If I have a backyard and let you host a couple concerts in it free of charge and then next year I decide "hmm, I think I should be paid for those concerts you're hosting in my backyard" is that anti-competitive?
Reddit didn't create data. I did, you did, random users did. Why did it happen on Reddit? Because Reddit, at least for a while, seemed like it was a relatively open place where data wouldn't be stuck and made inaccessible without an account.
Reddit exists _despite_ Reddit's incompetent management and tech teams, not thanks to them.
On the other hand, I think the price is damn steal. If Apollo's numbers are to be believed, Reddit is willing to sell its traffic at ~$2.50/user/month. That's half the value of a pre-Musk Twitter user and a third of the value of a Facebook or video streaming user.
So, if you already have a sophisticated ad tech and sales team, you'd be able to pull 50%+ profit margin without having to worry about running the infrastructure for content.
That being said, there's maybe only a handful of companies with a more competent ad tech/sales team than Reddit, and Reddit's is pretty damn bad. So while the numbers make sense, the strategy does not given the competencies available in the market they're trying to sell in.
> If Apollo's numbers are to be believed, Reddit is willing to sell its traffic at ~$2.50/user/month.
That's only one side of it though. According to the same post, Reddit's ad revenue is closer to $0.12/user/month. So, they are apparently willing to sell traffic to advertisers for a much much lower price than API users.
You're still allowed to use the API for passion/personal use. They're "passion hobby projects" trying that collect revenue by selling the app to other users. It's disingenuous to pretend they're not also a business.
If you're building your business to be completely reliant on another unsustainable, unprofitable business, don't be too surprised when they ask you to help row or get off the boat before it sinks.
For API restrictions, Reddit has been in a doomed if they do, doomed if they don't situation for a while now. I think there's about a thousand other better decisions they could've made before being forced to make this one about API usage, but I also don't see their numbers and their time simply might've already run out.
Why? A FOSS app can allow the user to just use their own API key. The only reason this is an issue is because the dev of Apollo is profiting off the app; his margins will go away with the new pricing and he's dubious that there's enough demand at the raised rates to sustain development. A FOSS app is under no such pressure.
Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase their revenue, they're doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened.
Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.
Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Which is honestly kind of stunning. Reddit is presumably much less than that, but they might be reasonably gunning for a number better than Pinterest, with an ARPU of ~$1.50[1].
To put the pricing post into the same context, we're talking $7.50 per Apollo user/quarter, which is closer to what Facebook makes per user than Pinterest.
That said, presumably 3rd party client users are especially active and would skew higher ARPU than the average Redditor, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were more likely to live in developed countries.
I dunno. I started running the numbers expecting to be outraged, but the cost doesn't seem crazy far from what Reddit could conceivably hope to earn off these users. I doubt Reddit is monetizing anywhere near that well right now, but if they're pricing the API in a forward-looking way, rather than planning to ratchet it up every quarter inline with monetization efforts, it could make sense.
> Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US.
Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?
My first though was that maybe 1% of users buy something in a given year, but that's $24k to acquire a customer and is so far from reality that my perspective must be way off.
>> Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US.
> Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?
1. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of businesses lose money on their Facebook ads, but either don't realize it or Facebook has enough churn that it doesn't matter if the quit (e.g. a revolving door of unsophisticated local businesses spending money on Facebook because it's the biggest game in town).
2. A lot of advertising is broad "brand awareness," and I imagine it's actually very hard to determine if it's actually working in many cases.
Not quite $240, but Netflix apparently spends about $100 for customer acquisition [1] (data is a few years old). I imagine the other streaming sites have similar unit economics.
In consumer finance, CACs are even higher. For standard credit cards it’s around $200 but can be over $1000 for premium cards.
Our CAC is higher than $240. Lots of services are. When you start thinking about a customer being worth multiples of their revenue (not even profit) it makes a lot of sense.
Also, online advertising can lead to in store sales. When you look at those dollars people spend a couple orders of magnitude more than $240 on stuff every year.
Meta's reach is gigantic, their data is detailed and expansive. You're actually paying less on average when spending on Meta platforms than you are elsewhere, and likely getting more back. This is why companies are comfortable with throwing an ad campaign on Meta platforms just to get email signups, there was a blog on Shopify where a smaller company talked about spending $5000 for a newsletter ad, and per new subscriber they only spent $1.50 on the ad campaign. Even though technically they've really lost money on such a situation, they feel comfortable doing it again on calculations for future revenue.
The most successful marketing campaign of all time is the marketing team convincing everyone that marketing works.
Of course the money is all being spaffed for nothing. It doesn’t take a degree in applied ecosystem analysis from Aberyswyth Technical College to figure out that Coke spending 50m on a christmas campaign doesn’t sell anymore Coke.
A another way to estimate how many conversions is looking at the average price, at average conversion rates. Right now average cost for 1000 impressions is about $10 based on revealbot, for the US. If the conversion rate was 0.1%, $240 a year revenue per user means 24 conversions per year, that the average US facebook user is buying two products per month. 0.1% is on the low end
I would doubt it. There aren't going to be many companies publicly discussing their CACs, and if it did exist what would someone do with the information?
My thoughts exactly. People ask for paid options in lieu of ads and tracking, but when sites like YouTube and Reddit offer paid plans at reasonable prices ($3-$10/mo) there is an equal amount of outrage. You will never be able to please users who simply want to pay nothing.
Reddit doesn't supply a valuable service. They basically just ran and squatted on the concept of "internet forum" and used VC/network effects to bully almost all the normal forums into (temporary) nonexistence.
Anyone reading this can make their own Reddit-esque forum on a VPS and serve a few thousand people for a few bucks a month. And if Reddit ever kicks out all the polished app users/old.reddit users, you'll see that start happening a hell of a lot more
Which is funny because Internet forums used to be a software package you acquire and run on your own servers. No one really asked for a centralized system where you didn't have any control. It seems pretty straight-forward to go back to that original idea.
They don't really offer a service, though. They just built a toll gate and tricked people into needing to cross through it. An ever-increasingly annoying, crappy toll gate at that.
Presumably that's why they haven't booted old.* users yet. They realize that a really substantial amount of their network effects and their moat stem from quality posts by people using computers.
Reddit is about to fuck around and find out, and unfortunately I think they're going to find out that people will just dump everything into even more annoyingly gated-off Discord communities
I think youre right. People are always trying to imagine the next reddit and its not going to be some clone like voat or whatever. Hackernews is actually a lot like reddit used to be but its not going to scale to reddits size without subreddits, or the like.
I dont know if anything will overtake Reddit for a very long time because of network effects. But discord is probably the best guess. Although I actually think people do want centralization. They want 1 login to 1 website that has everything.
Yes, true. I'm not a defender or proponent of discord by any measure, but I do see them as the most serious competitor for the same kind of communities that hang out on the more focused subreddits.
I had the same thoughts, that Reddit's reasons must stem from opportunity cost.
The Apollo developer does however address this in his post and he claims that Reddit's ARPU is only $0.36/quarter. Reddit has likely been doubling down their efforts on Ad Targeting, etc and perhaps forecasts much higher.
Christian's reddit post only addresses ads though, but Reddit has been trying to diversify and create multiple products and revenue streams. They have gold for purchase and if I recall they were trying to launch some Clubhouse-esque product. Point is, it's hard to push any of these things if so many users are on 3rd party clients that don't support such features.
Cool, that assumes those users will continue to use Reddit after the third party apps have been killed.
For me, I don’t think that will be the case. I almost exclusively use Reddit on mobile though Apollo and Reddit’s own app is absolutely garbage (unpleasant to use and heating up my phone burning through the battery).
I used to pay for Reddit premium, but I stopped after realising that Reddit wasn’t providing me a better experience for it.
> If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.
Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them.
If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features.
Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party clients, but to appease advertisers Reddit has to make guarantees around visibility. It's not enough to check if third parties are calling the correct API, they will actually need to regularly audit all third party clients.
It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.
you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views
Except that's not what Reddit is doing here. They're charging 3rd party clients ~21X what they lose in ad views, pricing them completely out of the market.
This is a story practically as old as the internet at this point. Grow with open API and third party client ecosystem, but ultimately shut the hatches and revert to single in-house client stacks to maximize control of the user experience and advertising opportunities. Mainly the 2nd part.
To look to the Twitter example, even when I used a third party Twitter client before Elon came onboard, old Twitter were regularly playing silly games with issuing auth tokens to third party clients, for all of the same reasons.
At this stage I view third party clients as nice to have for major free web service APIs, with the expectation one day it will probably stop working. Reddit doesn't owe anyone a public API, as much as I will miss third party clients (big Narwhal user here).
Maybe, but I'd still take the other side of this bet sadly. Is there any data on usage rates for third party Reddit clients? Anecdotally, I don't know anyone outside of tech who would even notice this change, really.
Reddit was the only thing that resembles social media I ever used. Was a long time RiF user, as I absolutely hated the default interface. Even moderated a couple of subreddits back in the day (although I sort of dropped Reddit in the past couple of years, so I may be out of the loop).
My fellow mods and all prominent users I interacted with (the vast majority of them not from tech as it was not a tech focused community) were all well aware of 3rd party clients, and many used them.
This is very anecdotal, but amongst Reddit more "intense" user base, I would be surprised if 3rd party client usage was low.
On Google Play I see 100M+ downloads of the official Reddit app. 5M+ downloads of Reddit is Fun, 1M+ each for Boost, Bacon, Sync, and Relay. Many more in the 100K+ range. Thats maybe 10% at most.
I wonder how many power users, heavy users, or content generating users use unofficial apps. The passive lurkers are great for ad revenue, but the people who comment make the site worth browsing.
Debatable - supporting a small number of users on the public API may be a legitimate technical debt issue, and a running cost as the API can't change without a lot of documentation, release planning to support all those third party stakeholders etc. Your future internal work has to remain compatible with legacy design choices if you don't want to shutdown/change the existing public end points - the list of issues has potential to be pretty big. Public APIs by their nature can't introduce major change too often without upsetting existing communities.
If the API is solely for your own consumption, this can be simpler, and of course third party clients are harder to monetize as the kinds of ads you can serve are going to be restricted to what you can force a third party client to receive and render.
If the number of users on third party clients is really low, all of the above can carry more weight in internal business case style discussions too.
Seems to me just better to entirely stop supporting the public api than to make the costs so ridiculously high. I mean then you're _still_ supporting it, yet you've basically scared almost all customers away. Charging a ridiculously high amount seems maybe like the worst approach of all.
I think you've probably described exactly whats happening - they do want to stop supporting the public API, but only for third party clients. There are other API access use cases they want to support. If the pricing kills third party clients but not the new use cases, that seems like a design choice to me.
They would instead rather charge far more money for data access for things like AI training etc, Twitter have also made similar changes to their own API to prioritize high bills for AI training use cases, not third party clients. That's at least how I see this change. The high pricing for these customers also removes the need to worry about the ad tech situation as is the case in the third party clients - you can just offer them an ad free feed at these prices for the training requirements.
I suspect the internal at Reddit desire to have less third party clients may well predate the AI discussion too, given almost all companies in this position eventually want to wind down those clients as history has shown again and again, for all of the reasons discussed in this thread.
A big claim like this requires a source and not handwavy estimates from the person who is impacted by this change (and upset for good reason!).
Otherwise I will ignore this claim because we simply don't know what ad revenue per user is, and we don't know what Reddit's projected future revenue per user is, which I would also expect to be covered by this pricing.
> It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.
I really want to be the fly in the room looking at their grafana for monthly active users and see what happens to it in the coming months.
I’m someone with ADHD and obsessive behavior is kinda one of the main symptoms of it. I think with this change, it’s not going to be hard for someone like me to drop it.
I suspect that because of these changes, Reddit is also going to make it harder for search engines to index them - which is going to further reduce how useful Reddit is for information discovery.
This is going to hurt reddit, and I personally don’t think the growth is going to be as strong as it has been once they take these actions. Social media sites depend on their users, and arguably only a small portion of their users create content. And a smaller portion that than create useful content. Once you’ve pissed off and pushed away that small %, you’re not recovering.
I’m guessing this is some decisions made by MBAs who have learned some theoretical stuff, but don’t realize their courses haven’t really covered businesses like Reddit, Twitter, StackOverflow etc. They’re in for a rude awakening.
Remember that Tumblr effectively died once they made some decisions.
I feel like there's a major difference here. Services you mentioned never really had any third party clients, while Reddit has pretty much built itself upon them.
Yes. I don't see how this is a problem. It is their service which is subject to change at anytime. Either make money and pay for access to the API or shutdown.
Realistically, it was only a matter of time. Also predicted here: [0]
> Either make money and pay for access to the API or shutdown.
I agree. And I think people should also keep in mind that OSes also have APIs as well, and should be wary of systems that try to prevent user freedom.
Then again, I've been running Linux for ages now. And I don't have to worry about anti-user garbageware on a forced update coming my way, or updates that de-feature my system.
Why not let users bring their own keys? I wouldn't mind paying $2-3 to use Apollo. Apollo has to also pay 30% of their revenue to Apple so their subscription fee will be way higher and not feasible for most users.
This also seems like the most reasonable solution to me, the guy who is generally supportive of Reddit trying to make money.
But having worked on platforms like this, this solution opens up yet another support vector. A cost that works for the most potential buyers may not be high enough to actually pay for support requests.
That's a good point. Apollo does charge a one-time fee to create posts. They also have a subreddit so the community offers support. I think Apollo should pivot into a feed app that connects to Reddit, Twitter, RSS feeds, Substack, etc. and lets users bring their own keys.
There's an obvious solution here, which is to stop participating on platforms that are ad-funded. Charging user subscriptions and fees to businesses should be sufficient to cover costs. If it's not, maybe it shouldn't exist.
An obvious way to fund ad-free platforms is as a public good / utility.
Nowadays with the brain damage that has been inflicted by adtech social media over decades it is hard to imaging mass adoption of such a publicly funded outlet. People have become literally social media junkies. Unless you do a tiktok like race to the bottom you can't disrupt the incumbents.
But establishing the principle is important even if its a small audience. 2% of billions is still a large population. Just like public TV being typically of higher quality (where it exists) such platforms could be really interesting, worthwhile places.
If the experiment succeeds one can start thinking of introducing user fees and other funding mechanisms and eventually maybe restoring sanity and delegating the targeted adtech industry in the darkest corner of hell where it belongs.
I feel like this is Conway's Law at play. People would create high quality paid apps if the users that want to pay for them could find them, but if somebody makes something that's perfect for you, how do you discover that it even exists? The organizational structure of the web is the problem.
Google and social media platforms have shaped the web to be entirely advertisement driven. If they were capable of showing you things you wanted to buy, without the creators paying to be seen, they'd never make any money.
Almost anything you ever want to do, someone else has already done well, but despite that, it's hard to find snippets of code you can include in your projects. It's easier to just write it all yourself. If the usefulness of ChatGPT is an indicator of anything, it should be an indicator of how much is out there that you never get to see. The sad part is realizing that that's intentional.
Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all.
Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.
> Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.
I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy, and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting a 3 day ban.
I used to have a (long) list of posts/comments that they refused to remove after I reported them. Most of these were (at least to me) _very_ obvious cases of being against the TOS (and the law).
I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered my email.
Whereas I had 3 accounts permanently suspended for calling someone an idiot on /r/idiotsincars for "harassing speech". I have other accounts, but they took out 1 old account and a squatted account. Like, really? For using the term "idiot" on a subreddit with that very word?
I have here, Masto, and a few other places that at least have mostly sane policies. All I know is that reddit is definitely on the decline. And this whole API debacle is going to be their own Digg V4 moment.
There is no sane middle ground on most of reddit. There are subs where you'll get reprimanded far quicker for "annoying mods" by bothering to report anything, and then there are the other subs that are so uptight and intense that your comments can only be fluff anything else gets slapped down for one of the vague rules it has. Good luck debating subreddit mods for their vague rules, you'll just annoy them and admins do not care in the slightest to resolve these petty things.
They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for everyone involved.
Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling absolutely dead.
Lol I had the sane thing happen, then when I asked the mods what happened in got reported to the admins for harrasment. There's no way tho discuss, just a brick wall. Wild been on that site an embarrassingly long time without issue
I got permabanned for having an alt account with auto generated name...that contained 88 in it because "hate group symbolsim".
Literally a name reddit generated for me and I paid no mind to it.
Fun fact, reddit uses browser fingerprinting to ban all your accounts afterwards.
Also fun fact, there is a way to get innocent users banned as a result too.
You can't report to the moderators, they're just anonymous users that for some reason wants to work for free for Reddit. Often times they have their own agendas, I've used third party sites to show deleted comments that makes it clear some mods support calls for violence against certain groups, depending on which subreddit it is.
I've reported threats of violence similar to what you describes over at https://www.reddit.com/report and they removed it after a day or two, even comments that were highly upvoted.
I got banned from a sports related subreddit for spreading misinformation by saying, "Helmets do not and cannot prevent concussions." The mod's justification was, "That is the entire point of helmets."
Perhaps the mod has taken too many to the ol'noggin.
I mean for Reddit that is "abuse of the report button". It's a very tame comment compared to a lot of what's posted and considered acceptable. What did you expect or think should have been the outcome of reporting that?
Far from it. They have great recent user growth and everybody is appending “Reddit” to the end of their google searches in the quest for non-gamed search results
It's not a sustainable position though. Advertisers aren't idiots, the market will adjust as it makes sense to adjust. You already have bot accounts flooding certain keywords on reddit with product placement. If everyone ends up on reddit, that's where the SEO spam crap you see today will follow them. If everyones on twitter, it goes there. If everyone goes to mastodon, so be it, there be the bots. It almost doesn't matter what the service is exactly, once it hits a critical mass it gets enshittified just because of the business opportunity it presents.
Primarily because google has become completely useless. I get more accurate search results with Yandex, Brave, and bing, in that order. That’s how bad it is. And I hate Yandex. They’re always making me do captcha challenges.
Reddit Admin itself will blanket ban accounts in entire sub-threads with no recourse or explanation.
Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy, but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant?
Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.
Yeah they track quite a lot of bits of data for users. It's the very reason why most new users are found bemoaning how annoying it is to start posting on reddit.
It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser fingerprint info, search terms, information from their partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit, what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes and so on.
Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots, people harassing you, completely unrelated comments, report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much data.
This is has always been an interesting aspect of Reddit.
On the one hand, this is fine: Reddit is supposed to be a collection of independently moderated sub-communities with their own rules and administration. On the other hand, you have a unified identity and content history across those communities, so it's a lot easier for one community to take action based on your history in another, which is a strange dynamic.
I actually think Facebook Groups are onto something with the way post history and profiles work: each Facebook Group a user posts in creates a separate sub-profile for that user which is specific to the Group. Users in that Group can see a user's post history in that Group, and that user's "main" profile depending on their privacy settings, but a user can't walk "across" to see a user's post history in other Groups unless they search from that other Group.
I feel like per-subreddit post histories along with a global user profile would help move Reddit more towards the "sub-community" vision if that's the direction they want to go.
The issues Reddit have are:
* Cross-stalking, as discussed above.
* Content discovery. This is the same problem every user-generated content platform has. What sub-communities get surfaced on the logged-out front page? Cross-pollinated to existing users? Every type of content will be objectionable to someone, so deciding what to show is always going to be a lightning-rod issue with advertiser dollars at stake.
* Global moderation. What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? What happens when that user is completely banned (do all of their old posts disappear?) Should large-scale content moderation like spam be handled at a platform or a community level?
Not to victim-blame, but which subreddits? I pop into new subreddits from time to time, and I don't know that I've ever been banned from a subreddit in my accounts 14+ year history. I'm also less sympathetic if the bans were because you posted somewhere like the_donald (I can't think of a more timely controversial sub) vs somewhere innocuous like r/gaming or r/technology.
Ikr. I feel like there's lots of problematic folks? doing a lot of heckin wrongthink out there in the current climate? and its making me feel like so unsafe?
A moderator's job is to keep their subreddit a functioning community. It seems entirely reasonable to me that they might notice a pattern and cast a wide net to save themselves a lot of hassle.
None of those social media are rudderless, just that, money’s circulating in hyperspace and the lower dimension slice of those just has to be mostly consistent on time axis. We are looking at a cross section at ballast deck of a ship.
You cannot just "change the APIs" to inject ads—ads require a lot of external verifiable measurement and have specific requirements over display and placement that third-party apps can't provide. Injecting ads into existing third-party apps would mean putting specific requirements for measurement SDKs (binary third-party code from trusted adstech vendors) and developing a lot of new APIs for reporting that that third-party developers would have to implement
Reddit wants to make money on the backs of their unpaid mods. I really don’t like them, but: Reddit has a ton of infrastructure costs they need to cover due to the centralization of these communities.
I do not like telegram or discord communities due to history issues. Same with Facebook. Reddit posts popping up on Google searches is really great.
I really wish we could go back to forums. The thing Reddit gave us was a central place to find communities as well as a unified login and feed. I feel like an aggregator of forums could help with finding communities. Forums that support oauth and rss would help bridge the gap of unified login and a central feed. The nice thing about forums is that their infra costs only need to scale with their community.
Think like someone who wants to run a business to make money and has no interest in the site as a community for a moment. Why would you ever elect to have no control over the site's presentation?
It's not "their" data in the same way that last mile network access isn't "their" (telco's) pipes.
If value in a platform comes from third parties choosing to use the service, and those third parties are free to use alternatives, then platforms should be very careful about how greedy they get in exploiting their users.
Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use.
> Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use.
OpenAI should start a clone, make it nice, and train their LLMs off of it. If discussion boards have immense future value from hosting humans interacting, clearly the cost of hosting them is worth it.
Seems to me this is more them trying to push ads on people; apps like Apollo do not serve ads (or, as a long time user of Apollo, I've never seen them). I think this has been a long time in the works, before all of the LLM buzz.
If that's the real issue, then offer two licenses. One that allows you to use the data to train an AI. Another that doesn't and says that if you do they will permaban your API access and sue your pants off.
Third-party client apps can keep doing what they do, knowing that attempting to use the data to train an AI would destroy their business forever. Companies that want to train an AI can use the other license and pay big stacks of money.
But I wonder if they really fulfil this goal. How do they solve the unsolved problem of allowing scraping / SEO (Google, Bing etc.) but not teaching their LLMs?
It's obvious or an open secret that Alphabet/Google and Microsoft will use their web copy for teaching their AI.
I think reddit is being naive by charging per API request. Do that, and application developers will try to reduce them - for example, caching popular subreddits or posts (ie. "this is /r/technology as it looked when we last crawled 15 minutes ago").
If Christian added a cache layer on his own server he could easily make the finances work.
But... Thats in nobodies interest - Users end up with stale content, Reddit looses users due to stale content and loses revenue due to Christian extending caching times to save money. Also, Christian will make uncachable requests, like for example voting, hard to do, which again hurts reddit as a platform.
Either Reddit is happy about the caching as you cost them less, or they're not happy about it and they just block your app if you do that.
Now, people could scrape the website or allow users to bring their own API keys, but then it becomes a cat and mouse game. And if you're trying to sell your app on any of the app stores, Reddit could likely get it taken down/take legal actions.
Does the API work that way now? The part on your own server used to only be for authentication and clients would then interact with reddit's servers directly. (Haven't done anything recently but used to maintain a moderation bot).
Currently clients talk direct to reddit's servers. But if reddit started billing for API requests, you can bet every appmaker would run a caching server to reduce the number of API requests.
Or they'd do some kind of peer-to-peer caching between clients.
This is soley how i access reddit now. I closed my account a few years ago (time sink and don't agree with their censorship), but it's nice to hop on occasionally as a lurker.
Oh well, like you said, probably better.
I've never worked on a web platform like Reddit, nor with any per-request priced APIs. Reddit's charge of $0.00024 per request still looks like it is _significantly_ above what their own costs are.
Wasn't Reddit's pay-for-API-access announcement originally phrased as a desire to claw back some of the value that LLMs have found in Reddit data? I don't understand how per-request API pricing actually accomplishes that. (I was vaguely anticipating Reddit's API pricing to have some sort of expensive "firehose" endpoint for OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc to pull from.)
It looks like they're instead going to squeeze out all third-party apps instead. I don't think this bodes well for Reddit's future.
Their pricing likely includes the cost of potential ad revenue that an API call is displacing. There's no easy way to integrate ads into an API, so they just offload the advertising/monetization problem to whoever buys the content.
The tricky bit with ads is that someone is paying for a user to see it, so if the user never scrolls to it, or perhaps scrolls past too fast, you probably need to know so you don't bill for it. If the user taps on it you definitely need to know that, regardless of whether the ad link is working, but you can't redirect and slow down the ad link.
You need highly accurate data about user behaviour around the ads, and highly optimised display and linking.
I've built a similar system, albeit not for ads, for recommendations, based on viewing items in a feed. With a simple model, across web and app, all developed in-house, it was still hard and required a lot of care to get good ML signals and signals that people really understood.
Doing this across third party clients may be prohibitively difficult. I'd like to see attempts, but so far I've not seen any.
> Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month.
I just don't understand why developers underprice their apps so much. You're talking about an app that people are constantly raving about, and that people use for multiple hours per day. Charge $5/month, that's half the price of Netflix or Disney+.
I'm guessing that you work in the tech industry in the US and makes $100k+ per year?
$5 is not an insignificant amount to a lot of people all over the world, including Europe and maybe the US. Especially when every single app and service wants you to subscribe to them now, I've heard plenty of people saying they're going to cancel their Netflix subscription when password sharing stops working.
344 requests per day is not worth $5 per month for the average user.
My comment was mostly about the comment about developers underpricing their apps. If all apps would charge a minimum of $5 there would be a lot fewer app users.
According to Apollo's developer 80% of the users make less than 500 requests per day, so I'm guessing the proportion of power users making a lot of requests are in the single digits. I doubt enough of them want's to pay enough to subsidize the others.
There's also the point that using Reddit is a two way street. Reddit is made up of user created (or user stolen) content, and moderators are working for free. Reddit's whole value is made up of user interactions, allowing users to make those interactions is not just a cost.
Why should the app developer pay anything at all? The users are also Reddit's users, they authenticate and can use Reddit's resources in a number of ways, why not charge them directly? Will Reddit be sending a bill to Mozilla for my page loads?
> My comment was mostly about the comment about developers underpricing their apps. If all apps would charge a minimum of $5 there would be a lot fewer app users.
Not all apps are worth $5/month, but this particular one that people apparently love enough to spend hours per day on certainly seems like it should be. A slightly nicer calculator app that you use twice a month? $0.99 is fine. A professional productivity app that saves a high-value worker hours of time? Way more than $5/month.
It's ok if not everyone can afford an app.
> Why should the app developer pay anything at all?
The app developer is just a proxy for the users, who are using Reddit without seeing any of Reddit's ads.
It’s a Reddit client. It’s marginally better than the official one but there is absolutely no way that it’s 5$ a month better to most user. I did purchase it and thought it was too expensive for what it is (it’s noticeably worse than most free Android client for exemple) and always refused to pay the subscription because, well, it’s a bloody Reddit client.
That’s fine, it’s not worth it to me either. But if it’s not worth $5 to anyone, then why is anyone even talking about it? If it’s not $5 of value, why would anyone care if it disappeared?
You can’t arbitrarily decide that being ready to pay $5 a month is magically an appropriate filter under which people are not allowed to care. This argument has no substance.
If the user is already paying reddit directly, it's even less likely they are using a third party client. All the benefits are in the first party app.
And then Reddit would have to audit third party apps to ensure paying users are getting what they pay for. Sounds more onerous than just making third parties pay up.
I can log in with my Spotify premium account to a number of third party clients without expecting them to contain the same thing as the official one, no auditing by Spotify needed.
> There’s no reason for $5/month to be what the average user pays. It’s for power users who spend way more time on the app.
According to the Apollo dev, the average user would cost $2.50/month in API fees. I imagine power users would be substantially more costly, so $5/month would not cover the API + apple tax for just themselves, let alone supporting the regular users.
That's fine. If you can't or don't want to pay, you can look at Reddit's ads. I do not use Reddit very much, so it's not worth $5/month to me. But why would I expect to get a third-party ad-free client for free?
I would wager the majority of HN users can point to several dumb >=$5 expenses in any given month. If you don’t value Apollo enough to pay for it, fine. Just don’t pretend that $60 a year is a morally outrageous amount for software.
Who cares? It doesn't matter one bit. OP built a profitable business off free API access. That is the mistake here... assuming it would always be free.
It wasn't a bad bet, the API was free for well over a decade. I'm sure he made a ton of money as the sole developer of the most popular reddit app (next to the official one) on Iphone. I bet he has zero regrets.
> Complaining you don't get free stuff anymore is really unbecoming of an entrepreneur.
He wasn't complaining about that. He was led to believe that the price would be reasonable, and he was willing to pay a reasonable price, as he already pays Imgur.
How does the Apollo maintainer get to decide what's a reasonable price? It certainly can't be through hand-wavy and supposedly "generous" estimations of how much money Reddit makes.
Only Reddit knows how much money it loses per user who doesn't see ads.
> This is why the developer himself can't just raise his own prices by any arbitrary amount. Buyers have some say in the price.
Indeed, but this is the risk in selling a middleware product. The Apollo developer doesn't own the platform, and was lucky he hadn't yet been asked to pay for the share of maintenance costs his app created.
I suspect that a fraction of users would convert and many others would trash the developer/app for the switch to subscription. Users of free apps like this have a seriously warped view of software costs.
It seems like Reddit is pushing these changes because that's exactly what they want to happen. They want all users to be using the free first-party Reddit app.
The reddit ones won't be though, unless they scrape instead of use the api. I doubt that's viable for a consumer app though, Reddit will probably break your app constantly.
I doubt that people would be paying for Disney+ or Netflix if there was an free alternative that had slightly worse UX, that was officially sanctioned and available at the top of the app store if you searched for them. The appeal of those two is access to the content - Reddit has an official website and app where the content can be accessed for free.
LMAO can you imagine paying monthly to use Reddit? That'd be like paying monthly to browse this site or 4chan. I think I'd reevaluate my life if I considered paying monthly to access that cesspool.
Reddit is already nearly entirely astroturfed advertisements, and you pay for the site by reading the shill posts that fill its pages. The fact that anyone pays Apollo or Reddit for a subscription is already just sad. Like paying for cable.
I agree. The OP makes the case that it will cost him on average $2.50 per month per user - so... charge $3 per month - no blog post needed.
Same with Twitter. So many businesses were built upon basically free API access and are now shocked the company responsible for their app's customer appeal wants some of that action.
It's not Reddit's responsibility to float OP's business and make it profitable. OP's billions of monthly requests have a real cost for Reddit - and now that Reddit's API is so coveted, they can charge whatever they want for it's access.
Honestly, reddit is the only one irritated me enough that I get a third party app. The ass behavior of popping sub I didn't subscribe and pretend it is a notification of reply to me just drives me insane.
They are just truly shitty at make a working app. It's really not a business or what, just the official one truly don't work.
Popup ad to notification is already bad, pretend it to be user message? How the fxxk do they think it is going to encourage the engagement?
While I very much agree with what you're saying in this thread: Reddit is not a public service, it's a business, and the owners want to make money off it.
I wouldn't call that Apollo app's author a fool. My understanding is they were turning a profit from the app up to now. So, apparently, it was a nice business. It's just that their business model is about to stop working.
Well, that happens to other business too sometimes. They'll have to adapt somehow or come up with another business. Life as usual.
Seeing how all the numbers are private, I don't know how anyone can reasonably estimate it's value. Seeing how unaffected Twitter has been in public discourse, and media, it seems these estimates are grossly underinflated.
Lastly - Twitter's market price has nothing to do with it's profitability. That seems obvious, but apparently needs to be said here.
> You forget how unprofitable Twitter has been over the past decade.
I haven't forgotten anything.
> It's crazy this stuff needs to be said on HN folks.
This shouldn't need to be said, but "Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The argument you are putting forth boils down to folks like Apollo should receive free API access because they increase the usefulness of Reddit for end-users.
That would be a fair argument, except for the fact that nothing is really free and Apollo currently makes millions in profit at Reddit's expense.
That is not sustainable... any business should have realized this right from the beginning. Apollo's own business model requires income to continue to run... so Reddit's doesn't?
This is just a silly discussion to be having. Of course Apollo and businesses like Apollo were going to be required to pay for API access at some point. The business owner complaining "it's not fair", or that it's not priced like API's that nobody cares about is just staggering.
Reddit is getting destroyed by tiktok for casual news/random videos etc.
I was a huge reddit user over the years, but now I only go there for a handful of very specific subreddits. That's really it's only use anymore. It's great for that, but they are probably seeing massive decline in usage.
And the moment they basically kill 3rd party reddit apps is the day I barely touch it again.
My experience is the opposite. TikTok curation is incredibly efficient at honing in on the content niches that appeal to you. My TikTok feed feels very personal, I regularly interact in the comments and find some truly insightful discussions there. Reddit is a totally random mess of crap that I used to like. The manual curation of subreddits feels outdated and a pain compared to TikTok's ability to "organically" bring me to content that I am interested in at the moment.
Tiktok and Reddit give completely different experiences. Tiktok has good video content but I love Reddit for its extensive comment sections where people can write paragraphs upon paragraphs on various topics with links and explanations. There are so many posts with long discussions and opinions on every topic imaginable.
My attempts at commenting on Tiktok with anything informative have failed as the super short comment limit makes explaining anything very frustrating. Tiktok just doesn't have a commenting culture and most people stick to emojis and a few word comments which aren't conductive to interesting discussions.
The front page and discovery parts of Reddit are being replaced by TikTok.
The major subreddits of Reddit are being destroyed by the moderation and are basically echo chambers.
The remaining users are barricading themselves into a handful of subreddit which offers no real advantage over forums (except for how the branching layout of Reddit threads mimics pre-forum chat rooms).
How do you initially train the tiktok algo? I don't have the willpower to wade through videos of children crying or dancing, acapella singers, people having small accidents, and so on.
And I swipe next as soon as I realize it's this kind of content.
It's far more efficient to search and subscribe to accounts that produce content you're interested in. Consider disliking things to help the algorithm figure out your interests. Long hold on any video, tap "Not Interested".
first i followed content creators i knew i'd like(legacy from other platforms), then the algo catches up really quickly.
also you have to be REALLY strict about the stuff you watch - if something comes up that you don't like the look of you can instantly swipe away. that trains the algo more accurately than saying you don't like something using built in tools but you can do that too if you really object to something.
for me it usually takes less than a week to train a new account to specific content, less than a day if it isn't niche("gaming" is easier to train than "gym exercises focused on strength over hypertrophy")
>The curation on reddit just far, far better outside of the super generic frontpage subreddits.
Even smaller subreddits can be pretty terrible with bad mods.
A lot of smaller hobby subreddits are basically treated as facebook groups, with people treating it as a group for people with an interest and not a focused discussion about that interest,
Sure, bad mods are a problem sometimes. But you also run into a lot of extremely knowledgeable users in your particular area of interest and can actually have great back and forth discussion.
Be it cars, bikes, coffee, firearms, you name it.
For hobbies I've found Tiktok is riddled with low quality content.
I suppose it really depends what you're looking for.
Oh, no arguments there. When it's good, it's great. It's just frustrating to be used to that level of quality and end up with a bunch of garbage content you have to wade through to get to the good stuff.
The other side of the argument is that, when Reddit is actually doing a good job for these niche communities, is it different to the old forum culture or a discord server?
Culturally, I'd argue no. In terms of UX and permanence, I'd argue yes. Reddit is a lot easier for someone to search after the fact and find good info, and it's a lot easier to follow individual comments on a big Reddit thread than it is to try to follow the chain-of-quotes on an old-style forum.
Discord is good but it's a chat app first and foremost and it's a pain to search for esoteric information, especially since you have to be in the server in question to even search.
I wonder if the solution is to develop a forum with better UX? And also with a better way to find said communities through search engines (Quora for example does a good job of getting on Google)?
Though I would also argue that one of the biggest negatives about Reddit is that you can't come back to a thread later that day or another day, if you want to get your reply head then you need to respond immediately and attain a lot of upvotes. With a forum you could respond whenever you wanted and get a discussion going. And similarly forums would allow you to avoid the echochamber effect by avoiding upvotes/downvotes as everything was chronologically ordered, so it was a much more civil affair.
But I agree that the chain-of-quotes is a positive about Reddit, which I think might be possible to implement/merge into a new forum design.
But that's what I mean- for the few specific places to go, sure it's great. However I only need to go to something like an /r/nfl or /r/valheim for a few minutes each day to catch up on some specific news like that I want to see.
For checking out completely random things, or funny things, or just to brwose around... that's where tiktok destroys them now.
The main problem with Reddit is the moderation. It all hit the wall when Trump was elected and the Reddit directors decided to run around like chickens and clamp down on half the community. The website has become a far-left US-centric mass market echochamber.
For political subreddits, sure. But I'd argue there aren't really any great places on the internet to actually have nuanced political discussion anyways. It's dominated by folks with too much time on their hands... either radically far left or radically far right. And each group ostracizes members that don't subscribe to their brand or level of extremism.
Bottom line is it depends what kind of content you're looking for. For niche interests/hobbies, Reddit is very hard to beat.
I think you are looking for the old forum culture that used to exist before Reddit came along. Reddit is weak because it is either segregating people into subreddits and echo-chambers (making it just an over-moderated monopolistic forum killer), or it is a tool to force you to read political stuff that you don't want to get into, or it is an over-moderated amphitheater for far-left chauvinism. What exactly is the point of the "Reddit system" if you're basically trying to mimic what used to exist in the forum culture pre-reddit?
there are plenty of political groups on there, just don't expect to not get downvoted to oblivion in popular groups like r/politics if you are a conservative. That's just the way democracy works and I would guess 75-85% of reddit is far to moderate left on the political spectrum. I also think that like 60% of the users are from the US and Canada so it's definitely going to be US centric. Again there are groups for specific countries and topics there, just don't expect them to make it to the front page.
Many people are pointing out that they're going to lose a huge number of users over this, but that seems to be the point of the "cutting" phase of bulking and cutting.
(By bulking and cutting I mean eating a calorie surplus to gain muscle and fat followed by a calorie deficit to reduce fat while hanging on to as much muscle as possible.)
Reddit, Netflix, YouTube... they bulked their user base by subsidizing products. Now they're in the cutting phase and raising prices, restricting features, and/or increasing ads. They know they're going to end up with a significantly smaller user base, but if the cutting manages to maintain a large enough number of profitable users (muscle) while shedding unprofitable users (fat) then the business will end up in better shape.
Alternately one can keep calories stable and slowly increase muscle without gaining fat, but that's much slower and harder than a bulk/cut cycle, and most people and public companies don't have that kind of patience.
Reddit relies on user-generated content so cutting the "unprofitable" users makes the product less useful for the "profitable" users.
This could lead to some initially profitable users into leaving the site and as a result make it less useful for the remaining users. This could lead to a negative spiral until Reddit is left with a fraction of its' user base.
A lot of user generated content is recycled though. Take a look at the top twitter subs /r/whitepeopletwitter etc. notice the dates on the screenshots of tweets. Notice how they are 3-6 months old or longer.
Then notice how many posts in /rAskReddit are recycled from 6-12 months ago.
It’s gross, but honestly I kind of respect it. Reddit has recreated modern day TV for mobile phones. And it works because people can’t be bothered to retain what they’re consuming, so waiting 6 weeks for the news cycle to restart makes it all feel like a whole new thing.
It's certainly a risk that these cuts might be going too deep.
Personally I would have made the process more gradual but who knows, maybe they're running out of runway, or their research gives them confidence that a sufficient number of (profitable) users will stick around.
This is all just armchair conjecture but I suspect that either they'll be fine or that they're screwed regardless -- either way I doubt this decision will sink them.
They say that the free tier API for users will be 100 queries per minute.
Why can't a third party app use each user's individual API queries for that user's app usage? Like you have the user OAuth with the app, and then the app uses that user's own user API access to query the API. 100 queries a minutes seems like it should be enough for most people.
Is client_id something you have to register with reddit?
So you can't, for example have a client_id per user?
What if you as the app maker forced all your users who want to use your app to go register for their free personal client_id for their own personal API use, and then you have them give that client_id to the app along with their OAuth with they log in?
I am just trying to understand why a third party app can't just be a "software shell" that individual users can use to access reddit through their own personal free API limits as if they were just some individual accessing reddit through the API.
Keep in mind that Reddit has said they're going to stop serving NSFW content via API too. So if you enjoy that stuff you won't get it in Apollo even if you pay them.
Reddit seems to want NSFW content gone altogether. At this point you can only see it anonymously if you go to old.reddit.com, if you go to the regular UI it requires you to authenticate before you can see any kind of questionable content.
It looks like it's currently blocked on "new Reddit" only for mobile user agents. If I try opening https://www.reddit.com/r/boobs/ in a desktop browser (or with a desktop agent on mobile) I get an option to just click on an "I'm over 18" button to see the content.
Browse a little farther. Last time I found myself in that position, I could say I was over 18 and it let me go. For another click or too, then it interrupted again and insisted I sign in.
Maybe they are A/B testing further restrictions. Just now I tried scrolling continuously through r/boobs on desktop Firefox in a private window. I was able to load hundreds of posts after clicking the "I'm over 18" button. I also clicked on a dozen posts to open them in a separate tab. I never saw additional interruptions.
I agree, but I find it funny that it seems to be backfiring. I've noticed a pretty large increase in the number of posts that are people getting maimed or killed on subs that show up on the front page. Subs like publicfeakout that used to be stuff like people yelling at each other in mall now regularly have gore voted to the top.
$12k for 50M requests, wow. It seems Reddit has taken the twitter way out.
If they just wanted to ban third party apps, they should have the balls to do it rather than pull all this stuff.
Not to go all “I told you so” but I do recall Christian talking about how Reddit would never do anything like this and how much trust he had in their developer relations team now, oh, sometime earlier this year. Hope he took the suggestion to have a backup plan seriously…relying on the whims of a single company is a hard way to make your income. Doesn’t mean you can’t try it but it is fundamentally pretty risky.
I feel like it's the same thing with people who have a youtube channel.
If you're in a situation where all of your income comes from a company, but you don't have an employer/employee contract with that company. It seems like such a precarious position to me.
Everything in life is risky. Show me the 100% reliable path to financial prosperity and happiness. You could get laid off tomorrow by your current employer. The stock market could crash, and any investments you made could amount to nothing.
Nope, you don’t understand. You make apps for macOS. I understand that there is risk there. I’m not one of those people who go around telling you it’s your fault when Apple pulls the plug on you, because you understand the risk you operate in and I think it’s fine for people to do this.
Now, if you paraded around telling people you trust Apple and that they would never hurt you in any way, and that you had conversations with their management and they want you to succeed, now we have a problem.
> Now, if you paraded around telling people you trust Apple and that they would never hurt you in any way
This feels like exaggeration. Unless there's something I missed?
"My thoughts: I think if done well and done reasonably, this could be a positive change (but that's a big if). If Reddit provides a means for third party apps to have a stable, consistent, and future-looking relationship with Reddit that certainly has its advantages, and does not sound unreasonable, provided the pricing is reasonable." https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
> you had conversations with their management and they want you to succeed, now we have a problem.
If this did happen, but later management double-crossed me, would you then rip on me?
Sent you a copy, it's a bit stronger than this (although from several months ago).
For your question, though: I don't think it's "your fault" that anything bad happens to you. It's obvious that the problem lies with the company you're working with–it's just that this kind of bad behavior is unlikely to change, so you unfortunately need to take it into account when dealing with them. If you had asked me earlier I probably would have said something like "be wary: the management of today might not be the management of tomorrow, or they may shift priorities, or they might just straight up being lying to you". If all goes well, that's awesome, but I still think it's important to consider these things.
By way of example, one of the apps I work on has effectively gotten approval from senior management–essentially, what it does is "legitimate" and "within the rules". What this means we have reduced our investments in thinking about scenarios where it gets removed from sale, but continue to maintain our ability to deploy elsewhere even if it is little-used right now.
And in the replies to the thread, the admin is now publicly back-and-forthing with Christian about the number of requests made by his app and how "other bots and apps" are more efficient.
Honestly a dumb conversation from the admin if you ask me. Let's say Christian is using 3x the requests for whatever reason. That just means he's on the hook for a $6 million bill at the end of the year if he optimizes things. There's not really a big difference here.
What's the granularity of a Reddit API call? Is e.g. loading a submission with all the comments, or loading the top 20 submissions to a subreddit a single request? Or do you actually end up doing tens of requests for what's effectively a single page load (one for the submission and a few comments, one for the each image, one for each additional batch of comments)?
$0.24 for 1000 full page loads wouldn't actually sound insane (if you compare to typical CPMs of sites with ads), but it seems hard to believe that the average user is doing that 350 times / day.
There are a large portion of moderators who will quit if they cannot use RedditIsFun because the official app is complete crap for moderators.
I really don't know why it has to be API use based anyway. We all log in to our individual accounts through the API. For clients they should be able to determine requests/account or let users pay for their own usage or something. They're in full batshit MBA mode.
I'm more surprised that reddit has maintained features like old.reddit.com and their API for this long. To me, this is textbook enshittification. Either die unprofitable or live long enough to see yourself rip features from TikTok.
I'm looking forward to this outcome. Reddit and Apollo both need to get paid, on a recurring basis, for their recurring services that require recurring maintenance and updates.
Reddit gets paid either through ad revenue displayed to non-paying visitors to the website, or through API calls for access to their dataset. Apps that enable user access via the API will need to pass along this charge to their users.
Apollo must become a paid-subscriptions-only app, as Reddit now charges for usage. This is fine. Apollo needs to constantly be updated to keep up with Reddit API changes over time anyways, so neither 'free' nor 'one-time purchase' are acceptable ways to provide a continuous living wage for keeping up with reddit API (and mobile OS) updates.
There's a third (paid) option, which is that Apollo sells the app to Brave or Firefox, where it's integrated into a paid "Reader Mode" subscription — because a team of developers will need recurring revenue for living wages in order to maintain the website rendering overlay and overcome Reddit's attempts to block or break it, and will need a team of lawyers to defend against the eventual lawsuit Reddit will bring against them (even if they'll lose due to the LinkedIn precedent from a few months ago — but, I am not their lawyer, this is not legal advice).
There are no good free outcomes that are not advertising-supported, and the API is incompatible with advertising, which is why so many people use it. I'm glad to see that Reddit has realized this, and I'm glad they are still offering the free ad-supported website rather than a paywall. I hope that Apollo is willing to charge me for their app, and isn't demoralized by their users complaining about this. We'll see.
Believe it or not it’s actually totally feasible to come up with a one-time number, paid upfront, that represents adequate compensation for future services. Obviously it’s going to be a multiple of periodic pricing, but equalizing a one-time payment versus a series of cash flows isn’t rocket science.
And though it’s easier to price a subscription, those also tend to be more user-hostile and occasionally not that great for the developer either (just look at the recent Twitter client debacle, where for-profit enterprises were begging their users not to ask for a refund for prepaid services that could not be rendered). I can’t imagine anyone came away from that with a good taste in their mouth.
I don’t begrudge anyone the right to earn a living, but in my mind the vast majority of subscription models on the market don’t imo represent a very compelling value proposition.
Apollo will be charged $2.50 per user per month to access the Reddit API, for a total of $1.7 million dollars the first month the bill is due; so, Apollo has 0.68 million users.
If we estimate that 30% of Apollo users will still be using the app after a period of time, then:
If users average one year of usage, Apollo must charge a fixed purchase price at least $2.50 * 12 = $30 plus overhead, in order to stay afloat without a subscription.
If users average three years of usage, Apollo must charge $90.
I have been using Apollo for five years, so I would expect to see Apollo charge $150 under your pricing model.
I consider Apollo to be worth $150, but only because I’ve been using it for five years. Their app would not be viable in the marketplace if it charged up front for two or more years of API usage.
Finally, I’ve been using Reddit for fourteen years, so if I continue using Apollo past my fifth year, the developer will lose $30/year on me. So, the developer will need to implement a shell game scheme, where new signups are charged an extra overhead on their $30/year flat fee to cover the usage costs of the users who are beyond their fifth year, which means that prices will be adjusted upwards each year for new users.
Flat app pricing is not a viable pricing model for Reddit’s usage-based API billing of Apollo users, resembles a pyramid scheme when modeled to include long-term existing users, and drives annual price increases leading to a collapse in user signups and the death of Apollo.
If your math shows otherwise, in some way that demonstrates how an Apollo flat fee model can pay for usage-based billing for as many years as the app continues operating, please share your work.
The pricing seems to be aimed at killing 3rd party apps, rather than making them partners. Reddit seems to be entering it's late-stage period. I wonder what will replace it.
Certainly, this will kill free usage of 3rd party Reddit apps. How much revenue will be lost for Apollo when non-paying users cease using it? Will the Apollo developer be affected in any significant way when those non-paying users go away?
$2.50/user/month for Apollo usage is considerably less than the $6/user/month charged by Reddit to users directly for an ad-free website experience.
Is $2.50/month an unreasonable price for an ad-free Reddit experience? If that’s how much Reddit is being paid for advertising per Reddit user, then how many Reddit users will voluntarily pay that to use ad-free third-party apps?
This is more likely to kill Reddit Premium, than to kill paid third-party apps. Apollo is a better experience than Reddit Premium, and at a theoretical $2.50/month versus the known $6/month, would save me $42/year over Reddit premium. Sign me up.
If you or anyone can identify a free outcome for users that I haven’t considered, that pays the bills at both Reddit and Apollo, then please do share it!
Reddit did not choose to compel ad display in their agreement update. I expect this is because it conflicts with getting paid by search engines and AI training corporations.
Fully agreed. Reddit without Apollo, Narwhal, RIF, Sync, etc is just plain unusable. The official site and app are so blatantly built around pumping "engagement" without regard to user experience and are engineered badly to boot.
I just wish one of the countless Reddit alternatives in the past ten years had gained any significant amount of traction (outside of very niche groups or groups far on the political fringe).
It doesn't matter. It is their service and the API terms are subject to change at any time. So either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase access for a high price.
Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse and TikTok have decided to ban third-party apps. Twitter and Reddit decided to charge for it.
In this case with the developer of the third party Reddit client, unless he is making enough to cover the API costs, then it make no sense to build on someone else's API with little to no revenue. That is the risk.
It is no different to TapBots (creators of TweetBot) doing the same mistake.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse, and TikTok all launched with first party apps.
Twitter and Reddit both allowed a thriving third party ecosystem to develop before they made apps. (And in both cases they just bought the most popular apps.) Hell, the word tweet was invented by Twitterific, a third party twitter app.
While it certainly is completely up to the platform to allow whatever they want, it's shitty to make a change that big and alienate many of your original most dedicated users.
It is not at all accidental. Elon Musk has given cover for other social media sites to imitate many of his moves, such as Facebook introducing a subscription tier.
It's not about being rational, instead it is a kind of "vice signalling" between billionaires.
It would be a better question to ask "Why did Mark Zuckerberg buy successful VR game companies and shut their games down?" (if you were having fun you wouldn't visit Horizon Worlds) or "Why did Zuckerberg damage a successful brand by renaming it?"
It's not about money, it's about power. The primary currency of power is deference and if one powerful person demonstrates they can take an action and get deference that action is appealing to other powerful people who want to prove they can to do the same.
RIF (android) / apollo (iphone) are the only reasons reddit is usable on mobile since the official apps and new web view are absolutely terrible lol. If reddit kills the viewing experience, i can finally get off that site.
The reddit api is also essential because reddit offers so little functionality. I have used my own bots before to search my own comments and delete my own content en masse.
Sadly, the RIF team has been silent on this issue for a long time. I would be very interested to hear what their plans are in the transparent way the Apollo developer has been.
I don't disagree with either party here. $12k for 50 million requests is not egregious, but $2.50 per user for something that is probably cheap/free to users is a non starter.
Reddit has failed to adequately monetize their userbase, they've run into the same "politics and porn" issue that every social media platform has, and they've raised way, way too much money.
The worst part? I couldn't tell you the last legitimate ad that I saw on reddit. Facebook shows semi-relevant ads, sometimes location based. Reddit ads are visual flotsam.
I might have too much privacy stuff enabled but Facebook could not be further from what I am interested in.
I'm pretty sure FB thinks I'm a republican country hunter with a big beard who loves driving his huge truck to crossfit. Because of where I live possibly?
I'll never forget a couple years ago when facebook showed me an add for asian american christians. If facebook doesn't know I'm not asian or christian then what does it know about me?
I don't know how many employees Apollo App has, but I wonder if a viable solution is just to build their own Reddit? I realize that's a massive task, but if the only other option is shut the company down, it might be worth exploring. They've already got the interface built and if you remove a lot of the bells and whistles, Reddit is a pretty simple app other than the scale at which they operate (which is obviously a massive challenge).
Honestly not a bad idea. Apollo has such a dedicated fanbase that if you get them to adopt a new community, then the quality of posts will start out pretty high. So much of Reddit is crap anyway so drop in quantity from lack of network effect wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Focus on Apollo’s strengths: great UX and bring it to the web.
Ofc the major issue is how to avoid enshittification. Having a good monetization strategy from the start is key. Hardest part besides attracting large user count is to attack some of Reddit’s failings: terrible arbitrary moderation. That’s the tricky part.
Something like this at first feels like bad news, but may later turn out to be good. If something hooks me off Reddit and I use my time better, it is a net positive, for me. Unfortunately, Reddit has good parts to which I don't know alternatives. For example, right now I am studying for a certification and there is a subreddit for that. I recently bought an e-bike and there was a subreddit for that. It is useful.
The positives that the majority of people seem to bring up about Reddit could be replicated with the pre-reddit forum culture that had the UX of a pre-forum threaded chat. In fact one would argue that the internet was more diverse during the pre-reddit forum era, and that reddit has capitalised on the growing number of internet users instead. Virtually all of the other aspects of Reddit have been increasingly detested (major subreddits) or are being replaced by other services such as TikTok.
I agree, it could be replicated, but is it? I feel that there are much fewer independent forums than there used to. And if instead the conversation steps into Facebook, then I am not following.
Third party Reddit apps should just start letting users bring their own API credentials as each user gets access to a free tier of API access of 100 queries a minute which is plenty.
I blocked the reddit.com domain from all of my devices a few weeks ago, because until recently I didn't feel like I could keep my finger on the pulse of "The Internet" without Reddit.
That's no longer the case. Google's "For You" gets me my niche subject-specific content, Google News/Memeorandum (and its sibling sites)/Apple News gives me the mainstream media perspectives, HN (and maybe Bluesky occasionally) my urge to discuss and engage with others, and YouTube Shorts (I refuse to install TikTok) helps me understand Internet culture.
I don't think any one company came for Reddit on their own, but what they've left Reddit with as a differentiator are the communities. Unfortunately, those end up existing as little fiefdoms for the moderators who run them, and if that's all you're going to offer, you're not going to be able to justify that $10-$15bn (probably lower now) valuation to investors.
> but what they've left Reddit with as a differentiator are the communities
And I'm honestly not very fond of how the communities on reddit work.
Sure, there is some overlap between the peoples on different subreddits, but there is little 'community' across subreddits and it feels very different to the 'good old' discussion boards that cover a very general topic and then have many more specific subsections.
I'm especially missing the more off-topic aspects, which just doesn't fit well with the separation in subreddits.
The "hive mind" effect is also much more pronounced than on traditional forums, sometimes bordering on being creepy.
Not sure if it's caused by power-hungry mods, the upvote/downvote dynamics or political polarisation, but you can often quickly make out specific "opinions" that are somehow magically shared by everyone posting in a particular subreddit.
The UX also actively supports this by de-emphasizing individual users and emphasizing subreddits as the primary "personalities" of the platform. This goes so far that on r/all, the names of the individual users who posted the threads aren't even shown anymore. All you see is subreddits.
That together with some "supermods" moderating large fractions of the popular subreddits and a recent post on HN of another redditor who experienced shadowbanning makes me seriously wonder how authentic the discussions you see on r/all really are.
I check the fantasy football sub from time to time and the hive mind is definitely a factor there. If you post an opinion that goes against the grain, you're likely to get aggressively dogpiled with downvotes and called a moron in the replies. Reddit really isn't an enjoyable place to post.
Ye the same-thinking is creepy. Many subs are like sects. I believe there is a huge manipulation ongoing on the popular subs. In a natural forum posters don't agree to the extent they do on Reddit.
Nah, the supermods intentionally go after popular-enough subreddits that contradict their ideological lean, or are just not ideological enough, either taking over moderation of subreddits that aren't breaking rules, or banning subreddits that are (while never banning subreddits that break the rules but are ideologically align).
I think it's almost entirely emergent based on how the incentives and pressures of self-selecting subreddit membership intersects with the upvote/downvote system.
An interesting and notable thing in this context is how for any given interest represented on reddit there is actually an entire ecosystem of subs. There's the main one, the decade-old mod schism one, the "circlejerk" parody one, the "True" one that takes itself more seriously, the more recent schism that allows slurs, the one for memes about the interest, a few to many for various subdivisions or specializations within the interest, various vestigial zombie schisms and misspellings that may or may not just redirect to one of the others.
Each of these will have elements of its own culture and history and jargon and in-jokes, but drawn from the same pool of subject matter and all in some way referencing or revolving around the biggest one, even if only in opposition to it. All will share some mods with at least some others and most users will frequent more than one of them.
What you end up coming up against is identity. Each sub needs a reason for itself to exist and so members create that meaning by enforcing the norms, referencing the jokes, and socializing new members into the history and protocol. HN works exactly like this too btw; it is culturally a subreddit, even if hosted elsewhere with slightly different game mechanics.
Sure, your analysis is probably correct for moderate sized subs to smaller. But the bigger ones can't have such a narrow field of view to sect like ingroup thinking without manipulation.
I guess it is a combo of additive fake grassroots and bans.
It feels like, at some point, a point of view becomes law and all dissent disappears.
I mean three close friends in some anarchist 100-voters-in-total party don't agree as much as reddit users seems to do.
> But the bigger ones can't have such a narrow field of view to sect like ingroup thinking without manipulation.
Why not? If billions of people can be in a religion then surely millions can be in a subreddit with some religion-like properties.
I think there is probably not a clear and useful line between manipulation and moderation. There's no neutral moderation, all mod policies and actions are towards a certain goal & vision for how the community should be. I'm not sure what fake grassroots would be but I think the upvotes and awards account for that: people know what will be rewarded and the rewards turn posting into a performance.
Anyway I'm going to point this out again because it's useful and interesting: HN behaves in these same ways to about the same degree as any large sub does. The alignment on etiquette, culture, accepted belief and punishment for deviation from it is very strong here. This indicates to me that this is somehow an emergent characteristic of large self-selecting online communities.
I still find that there is no advantage to Reddit over the old forum culture now that the moderation has gone full steam off the cliff into the ocean. If all you are doing on Reddit is barricading yourself into niche subreddits then what is the point of Reddit over forums? On forums you do not have to deal with upvotes/downvotes and the posts are chronologically ordered so you don't have to worry about responding to comments immediately - and discussion can be for as long as you want them to be.
> but what they've left Reddit with as a differentiator are the communities.
Yeah, I pretty much only use reddit for a few game communities, unfortunately with this change I suspect more and more people will move to discord. It's pretty annoying, but I suspect I'll have to eventually cave and join them when they finally kill old.reddit.com.
>Yeah, I pretty much only use reddit for a few game communities, unfortunately with this change I suspect more and more people will move to discord
Oh boy, I can't wait to have to join a specific game discord for every game I want to play or else be locked out of any community information!
Discords are easily killing a lot of hobbies by sequestering away information. And even when you're told "Oh that answer is on XYZ discord" you have to go in and find the conversation using Discords ever-shittier search function
Discord reuses the IRC "aesthetic" with "servers", channels and slash commands, but the actual structure of the conversations is much more like a forum.
You can turn any top-level message in a room into a Thread. I don't ever really see that used though, and I don't believe it bumps the thread when there's a new message (then again neither does Reddit).
I just checked "For You" for the first time and the top story was about one celebrity commenting on another's ass. And then a bunch of clickbait headlines designed to make people share them on social media and get mad. Think I'll pass.
What do you do isntead of appending 'reddit' to google search? I could imagine dropping everything else but search is terrible for a lot of things without it.
For what it's worth, you should append "site:reddit.com" instead of just "reddit", to avoid being tricked by sites which simply include the word reddit.
I know I can do this, but FWIW my searches with just "reddit" nearly always get dozens of responses from reddit before they get anything from anywhere else.
Reddit is rarely the best source for anything except maybe a discussion on a news event around 2015. Quora was always a little better but has gone down the drain as well. But never I have added "reddit" to my searches.
I mostly use Reddit for city subreddits. Despite the overall political bias of Reddit these days, they have a habit of uncovering and bringing to widespread attention a lot of stories that I wouldn't hear about otherwise. Nextdoor and Facebook generally don't cover a wide enough range of topics and are almost impossible to use to read a lot of stories. For everything else, I feel that Discord, Twitter, and forums can replace Reddit pretty handily now.
Correct; I'm not sure what to call the mobile home page, but it's different from just the News "For you" offering (which I also use), though I'm not sure how.
I find a lot of the google customization features to be hard to find,or trust/count on, because they no longer reside at a URI. Things like travel details pulled from emails… I still use tripit just because Google doesn’t seem to want to commit. So perplexing.
I'm surprised they didn't take the approach of "API access for paid accounts only, and with limits to restrict LLM scraping". If they'd added that to Premium, plus a lower-tier "API" pricing at $1-2/month they'd likely have cleaned up.
I'm curious what percentage of Reddit Premium subscribers are also users of third-party apps - seems to me that if you're a power user you're more likely to be in both camps. Also moderators - apparently lots of mods do so through the apps instead of the website, so there may be plenty of subs that have issues as well.
Has anyone stopped using old.reddit.com that uses it and LIKEs using new reddit? I don't know what it is but when I get popped over to new reddit it's absolutely jarring.
It looks ridiculous on my 49" monitor because it's middle aligned and horribly padded horizontally.
Also it doesn't seem to be doing it right now, or maybe it only does it on mobile but that thing where they only show you a couple of comments then have a DIFFERENT post/comment section right under it drives me crazy.
Maybe I'm just a luddite unwilling to learn new things.
No, it's actually one of the worst sites on the internet that actually has active users. This is the work of the bottom 10% of the industry. Most of the company is clueless.
My understanding is that LLMs use Reddit comments as training data. These LLMs are often well funded and Reddit is using this to their advantage. Suddenly, a decade or so of this kind of data has turned to gold and damned if a company soon to travel down an IPO pathway is passing this cash cow up.
My long time reddit account got permabanned because I argued with the mod of a popular subreddit (I disagreed with him about the localization of a Japanese game, really trivial stuff). It was a veteran, seasoned account with lots of awards, karma, and "reddit coins" ($hundreds of dollars worth). The permaban message said I could use my other reddit accounts as long as I followed the rules on them. As soon as I tried using my other veteran Reddit accounts, *all* my accounts were immediately banned for "ban evasion". Poof.
I tried to appeal but when you're permabanned you are limited to only using a small appeal form with 250 characters maximum. I tried to bypass this by linking to a google doc. Nobody visited my google doc and yet reddit said they "reviewed my appeal" and "will not be lifting the permaban".
I'm not a troll, I never harassed anyone, used slurs, called for violence, etc. My only offense was arguing with a powercrazed mod (hated by most of his own subreddit), and my Reddit accounts are all wiped. When I try to create a new account, they get permabanned too after a day or so, so I gotta give reddit's "platform integrity" team some credit, merely using a VPN isn't sufficient. I just wish they'd treat customers who've given them hundreds of dollars the courtesy of a phone call or a human review. I really hate how some big tech companies feel they're totally above providing any level of customer support. Reddit isn't alone here. I can't even get refunded by my CC company because the coins were purchased over 6 months ago.
Without a doubt, this is another step in Reddit's demise. It will really go into freefall when they go public later this year, after which I'm certain you'll start seeing more intrusive monetization. The window just opened for someone to develop the replacement. It will rip itself apart over the next few years and all 52 million users will be looking for a new home.
Reddit's product is authenticity. Monetization is the antithesis of authenticity. The two cannot coexist, as they're about to find out.
It's a tragedy, because reddit is the last source of publicly available truth on the internet. I can search for anything with site:reddit.com and see actual human beings' opinions on the matter.
All other truth is locked down in unindexed chats, and all other search results are SEO'd AI written articles shilling referral links.
All I can say is, don’t take any product advice from Reddit, since it’s fairly mainstream now. Basically every company does astroturfing and marketing in every possible way over there without disclosure. From what I was told, the most common ones are “try x, y, z” and “y” is the advertised product, but since it’s between other two, it looks like an organic comment.
Source: a friend working in marketing, so it’s not really reliable data point.
Reddit stopped being the "truth" when the moderation became too extreme. It created echochamber that were mass market and strongly biased to the far-left, and with that the echochamber also resulted in a very strong bias towards American users - most international subreddits are utterly stupid because they are dominated by American interests.
Quora used to be more centrist. And it had a major boarder appeal globally. But it too has been turning towards a Reddit style moderation within the past few years.
Hah. Reddit "truth" is sold and bought at every level for anything popular enough. It's just the illusion of truth. Your site:reddit.com strategy stopped making sense 2-3 years ago.
I will not be sad when reddit essentially dies in a few years from now. Good riddance.
It's hilariously easy to spot astroturfing comments and posts on reddit vs. actual opinions. Real posters don't spend years frequenting the same niche subs writing multiple paragraph comments about the same topic. Sure those opinions may be influenced and biased in their own way, but if you read enough of them you can form a pretty good summary.
There is still a ton of value in the more niche Reddit communities. I don’t spend much time in the default subs, but the smaller interest-based subs are great and most of them are too small for the karma farmers to really care about.
Might as well get off the entire internet because all of the popular sites are sold and bought at every level.
Honestly: HN - until it also jumps the shark, at least in this regard.
I've seen an influx of political redditors making their way here to fight e.g. nuclear power (because why not) over the past few years. I can't imagine the professionals working on protecting/pushing brands are very far behind.
Reddit has never been good for "truth". It was good for discussions for the period between the end of forum culture and the 2016 presidential election, but since 2016 the website has been increasingly moderated to the point that right-wingers, moderates and most non-US users aren't represented more than a tiny percentage, and it is a mass market appeal website.
Quora was good for more centrist and international comments, but it too has been destroyed by poor development combined with politically motivated moderation.
> It will really go into freefall when they go public later this year, after which I'm certain you'll start seeing more intrusive monetization.
Yep, and with more intrusive monetization comes stricter content controls. Once Reddit bans NSFW content -- which is "when" not "if" at this point -- it's going to lose its relevance as a platform.
Apollo needs to go open-source and pivot into a feeder app that connects to Reddit, Twitter, Substack, RSS feeds, etc. Allow users to connect their keys and pay the API themselves. Think of that as the subscription. The Apollo UI is killer and can make other social apps better.
Once the new app is being used by power users paying for their own usage, Apollo builds a Reddit alternative. It will fit into the feeder app just like the rest.
I don't think that will work because there will not be enough paid users to build critical mass. Enough of the never paying users provide sufficient value that I don't think there is a viable alternative without them. If there is going to be a reddit alternative, it is going to have to happen now or very soon after the paid Reddit API goes live.
Note you can’t just make a New Digg and move people over - it will be something next-gen compared to what it is. And 100m babies are born each year, that’s double what’s their userbase.
> It will really go into freefall when they go public later this year,
I mean the only thing the founders/investors want is to cash out, nothing more. they don't care about what reddit becomes after they IPO.
> Reddit's product is authenticity.
It has not been authentic since Trump's election. It has become a PAC, tangentially something else, but mainly a way to push partisan politics on every single subreddits including the subs that have nothing to do with partisanship.
If the primary complaint from Reddit is that they are losing revenue (no ad impressions/lack of user data and metrics gathering) why don't they just keep the API free/affordable but require developers to show ads and send usage metrics back to reddit?
I feel like it's incredibly short sighted for these companies to limit their APIs.
Doesn’t thins kind of do that while putting all the work and risk on to the third parties? Apollo will either find revenue to support the cost, or someone else will, or no one will and then Reddit can maybe lower the price.
They already did that once. They bought Alien Blue which was the top iOS client for reddit.
Proceeded to shut it down and basically fire the developer.
They don't want anything but their reddit mobile app they have had top minds figuring out how to data mine you harder and show you ads. That's it. That's their goal.
It is insane how absolutely shit the Reddit app is and how great Apollo is. It's bizarre as hell that reddit doesn't just offer to acquihire him for like $10M cash and $1M/yr salary and be done with it.
They bought Alien Blue and its dev, then fired him and shut down the app.
I think the key problem with all the theorycrafting in this thread about how Reddit could approach this in a better way is that these better strategies are fundamentally incompatible with whatever is broken in Reddit's management.
Reddit doesn't make money directly from providing a good clean user experience, they make money by putting ads in front of retinas, and they can drive up the value of said ads by mining user data (which can also be sold).
People gravitate towards third party apps because they have less ads, and because since they don't mine for data as much as the official app the user experience is more like "classic" Reddit and less like an algorithmic content pipe alla TikTok.
Most of the things that make the official app shit are the things that make it profitable - it just needs to avoid being so shitty as to alienate too many users.
They've worked really hard on making sure their official app is an actual piece of garbage. I am truly impressed at the amount of work it takes to make something that is that bad. People being paid for the existence of that app make me feel good in that no matter how bad I can get, no matter how senile and incompetent I'll become, there'll be a job for me somewhere. Paid absurdly well, too.
The downside is the developer has pride and cares about building a good product. Not about whatever insanity the Reddit "leadership" wants done to their platform.
The downside is what makes Apollo great, is the time to content for the consumer. It is in Reddit's best interest in their current business model to have the user spend as much time on a page as possible, in a format that has advertising. Apollo does not have advertising. The official Reddit app does.
I'm having trouble remembering right now but I think that's how they got a prior app. Or maybe Twitter. Or Gmail getting an iOS app with amazing search...
These firms hirebuy (like acquihire but more money) a single dev with an amazing tool, and not long after the tool is terrible and the dev is out of there.
Yes, loved it. They destroyed it. Each of these firms took something and destroyed it, or if not destroyed it, replatformed onto a different ethos (see Brian Acton and WhatsApp, and him walking away from a final billion dollar check).
I think it's fair for the authors of these tools to do well. I encourage creators to monetize when they can. Just get the check up front so you can go create the next thing, because no matter what the acquirer says, you are unlikely to remain aligned.
After I hit the add comment button to post the question, this was one of my thoughts. Giving an API price like that is an instant devaluation of every 3rd party Reddit app.
I wouldn't call it "devaluation" because what Reddit is basically saying is that Apollo is worth $20 million at least. Won't be surprised if they first squeeze the third party apps out of business, then buy them for super cheap.
The downside is that the reason Apollo is great is reddit employees have little control over it. Were they to acquire it I'm sure the enshittification would start shortly after.
This means the end of a lot of my reddit use. Sure, I'll use it on my computer in a browser, but no more on my phone. This is probably a good thing, but I have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of some communities. And I pay for Apollo premium and just reupped. The app is a complete joy to use. The app developer is first rate. For how complex the app is, it is both easy to use and surprisingly bug free. (I know there are bugs, from the release notes for new versions, but I've never seen one.)
These prices are being set by an industry-wide bottleneck around online human verification. The cost just shot up because of LLMs.
This is only a temporary reprieve for Reddit, Twitter, et.al. The LLMs are going to start simulating user agents and work around this. Well-intentioned alternative user agents like Apollo are collateral damage.
The root fix is a solution to online human verification. All these web products are just trying to hang a "Humans Only" sign on the door.
I think the devs of Apollo, RIF and the other major 3rd party clients should spin up an alternative reddit backend. They can let their users chose whether they want to connect to reddit proper (and purchase API tokens) or to the new custom one.
I imagine that with the userbase these apps have they could succeed and perhaps do some less greedy/intrusive monetization.
I think it has all to do with AI accessing sites for "training", you can't blame reddit for wanting a piece of the action. Is the price high ? To me it is, but for a large company doing AI, probably not.
It's all about keeping reddit safe for dark patterns.
There is some good content on reddit still, if you look hard to find it, but one thing that makes it hard is that reddit blends ads into the content and I think also blends in non-sequitur content that further confuses the reader into looking at and clicking on the ads.
They just can't let reddit clients provide a good, never mind better, experience.
> No redditor wanted them to selfhost photos and videos
Honestly, this was probably one of the more reasonable features they've added. Having to upload images on an external site added a lot of friction for users, and put Imgur in an awkward spot as well when problematic content was removed from Reddit, but not from Imgur.
Their video player still sucks, though. I'm not sure how they managed to make it so bad.
I like reddit, I really do. So it's sad to see them taking a page out of the twitter playbook and are taking active measures to destroy their thriving ecosystem.
The official reddit app is an absolute nightmare and essentially unusable. Their "new" website also completely sucks and is even worse on mobile than it is on desktop. If this actually gets implemented as is, I'll definitely have a very productive rest of my year. I have no data to back this up, but I feel like with reddit, even more users only rely on third party clients than it was on twitter.
I don’t see the issue. Apollo should charge a subscription fee that equals (cost of “reasonable API access + desired profit)/.70 and cap the number of request per user so it remains profitable.
Users should understand and I would gladly pay for Apollo per month.
The current subscription price is $1.50 a month or $10 a year, so presuming the same profit the cost would have to jump to a bit more than $5 a month or $53 a year. Apollo also had a lifetime tier that would have to go away, because it was priced without knowing that future costs would be so much higher.
This also entails getting rid of the free tier and imposing usage limits on the remaining subscribers since a few people could easily blow out the average and drive up costs.
There are definitely people willing to pay those costs (I count myself as one of them, as well), but the lack of apps like Apollo being successful at that price point probably means that it is not a sustainable business.
This only works in countries where $5-10 is not much. Also this does not account for power users who can easily rack up enough API calls to put Christian in the red.
From a business perspective, it never made sense for Reddit to support free API access for third party apps for as long as they did. Now, they are effectively killing those apps. The thing "not based in reality" was expecting it to go on as long as it did.
In the case of Twitter, power users who posted the best content almost exclusively use third-party apps for the extra features and usability they provide, and the ban on those amplified Twitter's quality issues.
You have many people in this very submission saying they will quit Reddit if Apollo becomes defunct.
Consuming an API is a tough business. Between Twitter arbitrarily blocking API access, and now both Twitter and Reddit now charging obscene rates. It's a death sentence for some really useful projects and reduces the total value of the ecosystem.
Losing my free/ad-free client got me to delete a Twitter account (and habit) I'd had for 12 years, didn't really want anymore, but would likely not have ditched proactively.
If the same thing happens with Reddit I'll be ecstatic.
That API pricing, for what is mostly static content, is just insane. I've created pricing models for write heavy APIs that come out at a fraction of that, while still maintaining a margin. If that's a genuinely "fair" price then Reddit have some serious technical debt. It feels like this is intentionally overpriced to discourage any serious use.
$2.50 / month / user does not seem that insane when it's put into that sort of perspective, but certainly more than I think most of the current users of the app would be happy paying. Hopefully they can compromise somewhere around $5 / user / year which I think most users would happily pay for for a third party app.
Why have no platforms launched an ad supported API?
I realise that it's ripe for mis-use as clients could always just not display ads, and analytics would be hard as even if the client isn't actively malicious, it may fail to display an ad that it records as visible which is effectively ad-fraud.
Nevertheless I feel like there are unexplored options here, including SDKs rather than web APIs, select partnerships, and maybe more. I would imagine if it could be done it would work well for Twitter, Reddit, and potentially even Facebook and Instagram.
I guess it probably comes down to it being a hard problem with little perceived benefit over owning the customer interface, but the backlash to these things always feels significant (in my bubble at least), and I'd be surprised if these companies didn't feel it was an unqualified positive change.
There is a middle ground where they only audit the ads on the big clients. If you are say a top 10 Reddit client by usage it is going to be hard to get away with not showing the ads.
Great point. Also there's a range of auditing – from code level audits or the inclusion of first-party analytics, to spot checks, to self certification.
I've undergone audits for "Sign in with Facebook" usage in the past on a small app (~50k FB auth'd users), and it was enough of a spot-check that they probably catch egregious mis-use with not a lot of effort.
Question, is there a reddit data archive we can legally download before this API pricing goes in effect? I really wouldn't wanna lose all the data in reddit when inevitable reddit becomes obscure unknown internet history. It has tons of (imho) extremely important information.
> So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. ... With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue.
This is 20x higher than what each user currently brings Reddit in revenue, but I'm betting that Reddit is going to be cranking up the monetization hard in the next few months.
Reddit Premium is currently $5.99/mo, so the bean counters probably see $2.50/mo for API access for a competing app as long overdue rent. I'd be very surprised if we didn't also see a big push to drive up the ad revenue on free accounts (more pushes to get on the app, ad-blocker-blockers, etc.)
I suspect API users are the much more valuable users to Reddit, the users that generate or moderate content, can afford to pay for apps, or tend to be ad adverse. Those are valuable to Reddit or advertisers.
All part of the process of TVifying the internet. It is considered dangerous for people to be able to communicate, to speak their minds about products and politicians, and the power of commercial interests combined with government is speeding this degradation along.
I'm gonna go ahead and say everything. It's faster, no ads, beautifully designed so that it really shines on iOS, you can customize it to no end, ... the list goes on. Check it out on the AppStore if you like (or wait and see how this all turns out beforehand).
A big thing for me is no mystery meat algorithmic feeds… just the subreddits you’ve subscribed to or /all or /popular if you want to look at those. The official Reddit app is bad about doing things like showing you posts from washing machine subreddits because you looked at a post about washing machines once months ago while doing purchase research and it’s really annoying.
Oh there's none of that. You only see the subreddits you visit or any conglomeration thereof, such as multireddits or simply the frontpage. Unless you're subscribed to r/washingmachines, you'll never see a post from there. I didn't even know that was a thing in the official app, that turns me off even more.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a legitimate use for Reddit chat… the only time I’ve ever been messaged is by spambots and any redditor I care to message is also on some other platform that does messaging better.
I buy/sell physical goods on several large subreddits and I’ve found that chats are the fastest way to get a response and close a deal. The old private message system is clunky by comparison.
I have seen a lot of "wow, Reddit is over" comments here and on reddit. There will absolutely not be any meaningful exodus from Reddit. Unfortunately, we as a society are pretty bad at organizing and of course prone to overestimating outrage.
In any event, this is clearly absurd pricing. Its tough to tell if this is deliberate to simply kill appollo and cater to a usecase that makes them some money at the same time, or simply a dumb idea.
Finally, I really don't want to sound like a shill for big companies like OpenAI/Google etc, but where do companies like Quora and Reddit get off selling their APIs at big numbers? Like screen scraping is legal and this data was contributed directly by users. In reddits case, literally the entire idea, community, subreddit and moderation are all handled by unpaid users. I get that capitalism exists, but its kind of fucking bullshit they think they can sell this. Like everything, if the price is out of whack, I hope people spin up scrapers and build their own API
Personally, if Apollo goes, I will stop visiting Reddit. Especially if old.reddit.com goes too, which is likely.
To be honest, I'll be happy to cut Reddit out of my digital habits. There's a few things I'll miss but HN, Slashdot and e-books will easily replace that gap.
I’ve been on Reddit since the early days, and I think the thing that keeps me going back is habit more than enjoyment these days.
Comment threads for any even moderately larger sub have turned into cesspools of sniping ad hominem attacks and every form of fallacious argument under the sun.
And that same mindset is slowly creeping into the smaller niches that are the primary reasons I go there. This growing ooze invariably puts me in a worse state of mind, and I tried deleting the Apollo app just a few days ago to see how it impacts my mental health.
This API nonsense will easily make this a permanent experiment at this point.
>Comment threads for any even moderately larger sub have turned into cesspools of sniping ad hominem attacks and every form of fallacious argument under the sun.
>And that same mindset is slowly creeping into the smaller niches that are the primary reasons I go there. This growing ooze invariably puts me in a worse state of mind
These and other glaring flaws of Reddit, tracing the degradation of the site's user experience in recent years is the premise of the book "You Should Quit Reddit." It's a self-published book that's been discussed several times on Reddit's /r/NoSurf community. I found it intelligently written and sourced, as the author described his same experience of addiction to Reddit, going back to the site out of habit despite not enjoying it.
I was a daily Redditor since the early days and haven't been on the site in a month. I blocked all DNS requests to Reddit from resolving to break the habit of going on the site. Been lurking here instead and find this place more pleasant and reminiscent of Reddit's early days.
Reddit Permabanned me (13 year old 450k karma account) after I went after crypto scammers, calling out the scam with details etc. I got tons of coins or whatever gifted to me and even more thanks and way to go from users. Evidently reddit considered it harassment (of the plain as day scammers) and won't budge after an appeal. So, f reddit.
The appeals aren't monitored by humans in a meaningful way. You expect some human to look into it for 10 minutes, see that your comments aren't abusive and that there is some merit...
But they have someone once or twice a week look at a list of 200 appeals at a time, dismiss all 200 after glancing at the subject line of all of them together for 15 seconds, and then move on to the next page.
There is nothing they want from a 13 year old account. You're a liability. You still use old.reddit.com, they want to get rid of that without backlash. You want 2007's reddit back where you could have amazingly intelligent discussions on just about anything with dozens of other people who are essentially anonymous to you. They want to be Facebook, with ijits clicking on tiktok videos.
It's quite possibly they're just banning old accounts so they can re-invent themselves as a spammy Facebook/Instagram/whatever clone. You're in the way.
It'd be a mistake to assume that they're pro-bitcoin-scammer, when mostly they're just generically evil and want what you liked about Reddit to be long dead.
I’ve had an old account which I deleted since there was no easy way to clean up the post history. Created a new one and couldn’t do shit. Can’t post. No Karma. Account got closed due to “suspicious activity” a week later.
Combine that with the obviously hostile user interface. It’s a terrible terrible website and nowadays I don’t really miss it that much.
Yep, creating a new reddit account nowadays is pretty tough, and forget participating in the current conversation as your stuff won't show up until a moderator approves it, which can take days.
Funny, something very similar happened to me. 15 year old account, 500k comment karma, called out crypto scam - I was temp banned for 3 days for harassment, and multiple accounts reported my posts for "risk of suicide". Then like 2 days after my ban ended, I made a fairly innocuous comment on a video of a man falling down a mountain after immediately failing his mountainbike stunt - and was perma banned. My comment was in response to someone who said something about how brave he was, and I said "It's not brave to throw yourself down a mountain. It's stupid". Anyways, that was enough to get my account permanently banned for "Hate". If that was the standard, I'm not sure how my account made it that long considering I've probably posted worse things than "That was stupid" over the years.
I know I'm by far not the only person to be banned for calling out crypto scams. At this point I wouldn't doubt a good deal of the scams are run from inside Reddit. Comments calling out scams often get downvoted 100x or more within seconds. Only a bot farm can do that. Any reasonable admin could see this and ban all the down voting accounts and the ones that upvote the post 100x as well but no, they ban the people getting downvoted for calling out the filthy scammer scum.
I'm not using Reddit on its own app nor the browser.
The app is huge and clunky.
The browser is turtle slow.
Neither gives me the granularity that Apollo gives me. The swipe controls are slick and so are the filters.
If I can't consume it with Apollo then it ain't worth it to me. And I already paid for the app. I refuse to pay more for something that is not a necessity.
Apollo would have to become a subscription to be sustainable and in a time where everybody wants to make a subscription out of everything I, on the other hand, am in a shut down everything that is not essential mode.
This is not essential. Neither is Netflix. Neither is Disney Plus. I'm looking for more to cut. And while, i can currently afford all this, that might not always be the case and I'm sick of subscriptions that just are just leeching out of our $$$ our bank accounts month to month and that eventually add up.
Also, I've been considering cutting back on toxic social media and maybe this is just the right push I need.
Just because one can afford it doesn't mean they should. Consumers must send a clear message to these companies that continue to price gouge with nonsense policies, and deciding not to spend money on their services sends the loudest message.
I'm of the exact same opinion as you. Too many services trying to leech too much $$$ from the consumer right now. With inflation and other essential living expenses as high as they are, cutting these other "nice-to-have" services is a no-brainer.
To each their own of course, but I hope more people (even folks with the financial means) will choose to vote with their wallets, because some of these policies are quite frankly getting out of hand.
They’ve recently killed i.Reddit and /.compact (the mobile versions of old.reddit) and have also gimped old.reddit immensely over the last year, with things like images being force-embedded into the new layout even if you access the raw image path (!!), among other things. There’s absolutely no way old.reddit lasts much longer.
I use the old.reddit desktop mode on my phone. I can see 20 stories at once compared to 4 on the normal mobile layout (The text is small but still pretty readable). The minute they get rid of old reddit I'll probably just stop using the site.
Mobile reddit takes minimum 5 seconds to load on the latest Android using a fork of Firefox called Mull. I suspect the slow load is retaliation for preventing analytics, under the guise of "this script is waiting for a response, won't time out immediately". I'm always confronted with a "this experience is better in the app!" pop up. Signed in on old reddit.
My prediction as a former i.reddit.com user is: don't get too attached.
old.reddit is showing the same issues that i.reddit had, such as redirecting you to "regular" reddit if you click on a title instead of the comments. I think old.reddit will keep accumulating small papercuts like these until enough users give up, at which point it will be shut down without recourse. Reddit can't do this right now because some moderation features don't work well outside of old.reddit, but the fact that everything outside the "official" website is being degraded or shut down should give you pause.
I would wager most people who are serious about using old.reddit are doing it via extensions, since that approach works even when signed out - so many don't notice e.g that title bug.
> redirecting you to "regular" reddit if you click on a title instead of the comments
Old reddit has been working exactly the same for quite a few years now and I can't remember it ever redirecting me to the new version. Perhaps this happens if you're logged in and have the new version set as default or something?
I can reproduce it when clicking in the posts of some "best of" subreddits (/r/bestof, /r/bestoflegaladvice, and so on) when logged out - even though you never leave Reddit, clicking on a link will take you to the "regular" Reddit version while the comments remain in "old" Reddit.
Yeah. Can nowadays also be toggled in the settings so you don't have to setup any redirect extension. Which makes me hopeful that it might not be going away but I'm not holding my breath.
Without old Reddit (and third-party apps on mobile) I'd stop using Reddit completely, I have zero doubts about that.
You still want a redirect extension since that forces it even if you're in, say, an incognito tab. The settings piece will only work if you're signed in.
As someone replied to in the comments there, Apollo adding a mandatory subscription -- which doesn't sound like what the dev wants to do, anyhow -- is basically just doing a passthru subscription to Reddit. It's the same sort of thing with certain fees in US companies that get passed to broadcasters/regional sports networks.
But what no one thinks about is how much the productivity we lose from wasting time on Reddit is costing us. If I cut out my Reddit use (while just at work), and replaced that with actual work.... I could easily make $3,000 to $4,000 dollars more a year.
And I am not particularly well paid. I don't make 6 figures, so that amount of money is a pretty huge deal for me.
But still our brains think in terms more like.... well I'd pay $25 for this one time, but I won't pay $5 per month because that's just TOO MUCH.
I have paid for Apollo, and Apollo is the only way I am using reddit. Should they go ahead, i will message Christian, send him my regards and gratitude, and nope the f out of reddit forever.
I too am sick of subscriptions, and may find myself in the same seas I found myself at 14.
If the average users app is doing 10K requests a month I'd wager it's a good thing they're over it but $5/month probably isn't much for the addicts. Avg HN latte for a day.
Building your business on the back of somebody else's API is always gonna be a risky endeavor. Luckily, Apollo is a great client with loyal users, so hopefully Christian can spin off his own backend forum and build from there. Reddit's been making some dubious moves (crypto avatar-things, hostile dark patterns steering mobile web users to their app, more ads, etc) that I wouldn't be surprised if more and more users went looking for an alternative with a similar flavor.
I guess these clients just need to scrape the websites and make post request via website with fake user agents etc.
It's a lot of work but for a small fraction of 20m a year you can hire a team who only work on that.
Didn't Digg primarily die from a redesign? Why has the web become so forgiving these days? People don't seem to give a shit anymore. "Oh OK, I'll use the official reddit app filled with ads, OK I will watch your 30 second pre-roll. OK I will give you may data for free". /s
>It's a lot of work but for a small fraction of 20m a year you can hire a team who only work on that.
I tried doing something like this for scraping corporate profiles. It's a lot harder than it seems. Most websites try to block bots that do this kind of scraping (unless you're Google/Facebook/etc...), so you end up having to setup a boatload of VPNs to make it seem like the bot is coming from multiple sources, but the VPNs end up being very unreliable and they too get banned as well.
For my own small scale it did manage to work but it was very challenging. I'd imagine doing it at the scale of Apollo would be all but impossible to get away with.
What you have to do is have the app do it directly. This is more work if you have to do it in the app but it makes life for reddit a living hell as they can not just filter high requests nunbers as the traffic is coming from individuals.
"We don’t allow apps that interfere with […] or access in an unauthorized manner […] other […] servers, networks, application programming interfaces (APIs), or services, including but not limited to other apps on the device, any Google service, or an authorized carrier’s network."
"Examples of common violations: […] Apps that access or use a service or API in a manner that violates its terms of service."
Doesn't matter, those policies won't mean much as soon as the EU forces Apple and Google to allow 3rd party app stores.
I would also argue that accessing a website is not an API or an undocumented feature but a public entity. Who decides how a browser is supposed to display a website? It's up to the browser maker not some app store review process. That is why we have moz- CSS and apple meta tags.
Someone else in this thread mentioned the "boiling frog" effect. Personally, I'll keep using Reddit until they remove support for old.reddit.com. Then this frog is out of the pot!
Looking at one of the subs I run though - old.reddit.com accounts for 5% of total traffic. Whilst 5% is not nothing, it's also not really all that much. I doubt they'd notice much impact even if half of the old.reddit.com users left.
Wow, I wonder if the 95% of reddit users for your sub that use the new format are net new to the site, or if there actually are a lot of old-reddit users that happily converted to the new UI.
Don't get me wrong, the old UI was awful, but it was much more information-dense, so I prefer it. I think it's unlikely that anyone that's not already a turbo-nerd would come as a completely new Reddit user, compare the two, and pick the old UI.
The data is all fully public and easily scraped from APIs (both reddit and twitter). Who is the audience for these paid plans? Is this for oauth enabled access on behalf of users?
In Reddit's case data scraping is soon to be against the Terms of Service (which is already the case for Twitter), which will earn you a Cease and Desist if you try to make a business off the data.
So the AI companies secretly scraping the data and without producing a direct attribution or affiliation are precisely the ones unaffected by this, meanwhile devs trying to make
complementary tooling (and thus fully public who they are and thus targets of C&D’s) are negatively impacted.
Reddit has a long history of making truly brain-dead decisions and following them up with something slightly more reasonable. I can only hope this is another case.
This is a tool to purge your reddit comments. It first edits them to something else, then deletes them. Reddit admins have claimed that this is a true delete, as opposed to setting a delete flag.
Every few years we rediscover centralization even if they start off as open-source community driven yada yada and the eventually lead to walled gardens.
I love reddit but recently they are starting to make it harder to use their services. Eventually its going to turn in to a cesspool just like facebook. Something new is gonna come open to all we promise its always free and then repeat.
Well, looks like this is the end of any social media use for me. Reddit was already hanging by a thread for me. Not being able to use Apollo for this will be the last nail in the coffin.
Same. I only find Reddit tolerable because of Apollo. The official Reddit app pales in comparison.
I hope they can come to some sort of agreement or find a way to acquihire the Apollo developer (though that might kill the app with crappy features as well).
I've always just used the web, is there some reason to use an app for it? I liked it as a place to look for people talking about things I might want to buy. I'm sure it is full of fake comments, but the ones that make verifiable claims for or against are useful.
Yes, the obstructive popup when you visit reddit on a mobile browser to force you into installing the app. Other than that only if you want to do more than read.
It makes me laugh that reddit's mobile site will let you view NSFW content but wont let you go to the contents of a NSFW post without downloading the app or signing in.
Reddits main function as a porn facilitator will really hamper its desire to make lots of money as a publicly-traded business.
The NSFW content feels like its just ads for OnlyFans accounts at this point. The NSFW subs suffer from the fate that all the other subs do, Reddit is too large at this point to cultivate any real, organic community.
My experience is that subs subdivide themselves at some size to become fractaly specialized. Like dnd 5 optimizers, dnd5 powergamers, dnd5 roleplayers, and when those get too big, dnd5 players that like to optimize wizards in the ravenloft setting while listening to lo-fi. There is an obligatory xkcd but I can't be bothered.
It’s funny they’re still pushing it after Tumblr, and also considering 5ch.net always had the NSFW part in a different domain(not subdomain). It’s as if everyone knows and some always knew…
Serious question and I don't mean anything negative - Do you consider HN to be social media?
Using it as just a news source seems really valid.
And it feels different from other social media platforms because of the focus on full discussions. But surely this still counts as social media?
Genuinely asking because I see you made your account just to post this comment - why did you do that? It's not a bad thing (I'm here too), I'm just curious why you felt it was important to do?
Probably any media aggregator where you can submit content and vote on it qualifies as social media. So yes, HN is social media, and has some of the negatives that social media engenders (e.g. outrage-driven comments, low-quality discussion, people optimizing their lives around accruing pointless karma).
But, without a social graph, I wouldn't call it a social network, so it does not suffer a lot of the problems social networks have (e.g. echo chambers, ostracizing members, showing off, influencers, and many others).
Social media has problems, social networks have problems, and social media which leverages a social graph has a whole different class of problems. Ironically, the relative primitiveness of HN protects it from at least some of the worst elements of the internet.
I think social media is a vague term that has lost its original meaning, whatever that was. [0]
Especially with modern tech, very few pieces of technology act as a single purpose; my phone can be just a phone, just a camera, just a chat application, or any combination of the above. Whether it's a toy or a work tool or a social media device changes depending on how its being used.
HackerNews is the same, in that you can just use it as a link aggregator, maybe you like it as a "classic" forum, maybe you use it for advertising. (HN-ready articles that are basically advertisements are quite common and popular even)
I think before anyone can really answer if something is social media or not, it needs to be better defined what it actually encompasses now as oppose to when the term was coined. Like, is a Glade AirFreshner a social media device just because you can tweet from it?
Leaving comments on a website is what I was referring to. The GGP commented that news sites allow comments, which I stated was a web2.0 feature that does not make the site using it a social media site which supports the original comment's sentiment as well. hopefully that clears up your confusion
I've noticed that everything that allows interaction between users is social media for the younger generation. They have no notion of forum, chat app or... social media organized like facebook or tiktok.
I don't think so, this site is extremely slow compared to any other social media (slow as in not much content). I honestly wouldn't be shocked if hn had a slightly larger audience compared to fark.
No. It is not social media. Neither is Reddit. Social media is any platform that can be used to track you down to send you an invite to your high school reunion. That is, it is not anonymous. Social media is social - real people interacting with each other in a non anonymous manner. I have no proof that anyone on here, or Reddit, is not a bot except for me.
Social media usually let you subscribe to specific users/groups, whether via friend requests or something else. The result is a network of users who follow each other. HN on the other hand doesn't feel more "social" to me than any oldschool forum. The focus is on content and usernames only exist to tell them apart.
Yes I would, but not in the most common sense. Basically, I would categorize any internet forum or bulletin board a social media. At least if you go by some kind of identity and that identity persists. As opposed to traditional media, which was broadcast only (through airwaves or paper).
I think the proper contrast isn’t “airwaves or paper” vs “internet” but “one-to-many” vs “many-to-many”. The internet is a key enabling technology for many-to-many mass media, but a top-down one-way editorial-content website is as much traditional media as a newspaper.
I think the main argument is to avoid Social Media that comes along with the baggage of the big platforms. I think the downsides to HN are so much smaller and few, that it's easy for me to consider "forum-like" social activity completely separate from typical Social Media.
Just out of curiosity, what do you plan to use for news/entertainment instead? I don't use Facebook, and generally alternate between HN and Reddit whenever I need a break from work and don't know any other good options.
That is going to be a factor in getting people to migrate. Convenience matters more than outrage. Lemmy's decentralization makes it a bother for most people. If they can't get instant gratification, they'll just go back to reddit.
So is Reddit. And also neolib propaganda, capitalist propaganda, libsoc propaganda, ... should I go on?
Also, it's federated. You don't have to get even close to a server with the kind of propaganda you dislike the most and just keep to your favourite propaganda bubble.
You can also just run your own server and forbid the "wrong" kind of propaganda, whilst allowing the "right" kind.
Reddits mobile app, and website are one of the worst UX experiences I've encountered on a UGC site. Terribly bad. I they should be working with people who can make products people want to use to consume their content, not killing them off with absurd pricing.
Im genuinely curious, how much value should reddit be extracting per user via third-party-clients for their services given they can't serve them ads and what not themselves?
Facebook's ARPU is $58.77 in the US/Canada so $5/month. According to them, Apollo's Pro clients would earn reddit $2.50/month. Is the right number $1? I imagine that would still kill Apollo.
It seems like the problem more generally is that third-party clients cannot extract the same value from users that first-party clients can.
Has anyone tried to solve this differently? What if Reddit gave you a libAds to add in your application where you build and control the other 90% of the interface and do a profit sharing system with them.
The reddit UI has gotten so hostile that I stopped using reddit a few years ago. Third party apps are nice and all, but I think a site that's so hostile to its users isn't worth me wasting my time on. I have several friends who are active reddit users but exclusively use third party apps, if those apps stop working I'm confident they'll just stop using reddit all together too.
I remember when Digg.com launched v4 and everyone hated it so much that they planned a "quit Digg day" and then collectively moved to Reddit. Maybe some day reddit users will do the same thing and move to something else.
For individual users (not voracious LLM and data mining and surveillance), is there any reason an app can't just be a "specialized Web browser", scraping subreddit memberships/posts/comments just-in-time, as a user browses interactively, with that access pattern and pacing?
Or a plugin of improvements for a general-purpose Web browser?
(It could even preserve ads.)
The reason for such an app would be that a lot of people like parts of Reddit community content, but much fewer people like many of the UI attempts that Reddit has made of the years (for desktop, mobile Web, and apps).
This is directly related to going public and is completely predictable what will happen next.
Investors want to get paid for the last 15 years of waiting… and they want as big of a paycheck as possible and nothing matters but that. All the free labor mods did? I’m sure the board and investors all agreed that moderator labor can’t legally demand anything, meaning they don’t matter.
So, I expect Reddit, one of the best forums on the internet, will deteriorate after all the trust gets squeezed out via increasingly intrusive ads shutting down of the (old.) subdomain, an increase in user profiling and user acquisition.
Reddit is going public this year and needs to pump revenue numbers up while they are preparing the filing so that the equity holders get a good multiple from the underwriter.
After that, the activist investors which will certainly look for more margins will demand reddit reduce services and increase revenue irrespective of what that does to the services, so long as the relative cost/benefit is beneficial to quarterly returns.
We had a great "forum" solution back in the day - Usenet.
You picked the server you joined but the benefit of this over something like Lemmy is that you don't get the split community/discoverability issues that impact the average user as everyone was reading and posting to the same newsgroups but from their chosen NNTP server.
Let's have something like NNTP implemented in ActivityPub (is this possible? I'm not familiar enough...) where the news servers are decentralised and users pick whatever one they want but the newsgroups themselves are the same across all the servers.
Apollo is such a quality app that I had to delete it because it was so addicting.
Good riddance to Reddit. The only sad part is there is no clear successor ready to take its place for the minority of subreddits that host real communities and serve as a useful distribution point for information.
Personally I think the developers of the top Reddit apps should get together and develop their own backend that clones the Reddit API endpoints but hosts the content on federated instances. Just cut out Reddit corporate - what value are they providing when the bulk of content creators are using third party apps to browse and create content?
Ah yes, the site that refers to its users as "Daily Active Shitheads," and promotes vigilante armchair detectives to ignore the FBI and accuse random innocent civilians of being world class terrorists.
APIs should not be revenue generators! I don't mind companies charging for an API, either to cover the costs of service or to encourage efficient behavior. But Twitter and now Reddit seem more like they are rent seeking with their APIs and it's just not going to work out well. Particularly galling since they're effectively charging to access all this content that users generated for free.
The other explanation is these charges are intended to kill third party uses of the API. I'm pretty sure that's what is mostly motivating Twitter (down to the weed joke price).
This is where Apollo builds their own reddit clone, implements reddit's API, and starts their own competing social network. Use the ~$5/month to pay for server costs, or run an ad supported variant.
I primarily use the regular web interface. That's because I barely use Reddit anymore after using it a ton before. More and more, I found that things that shouldn't be nsfw were marked so, the interesting people have mostly already left, and the site optimizes for "engagement" like everything else, meaning it's full of catchy junk.
I joke that if this guy (pointing at myself) is doing your thing, it's probably jumped the shark. What does it mean when this guy has already grown tired of your platform?
Probably a dumb question, but wouldn't Reddit be very easy to scrape instead of using an API at these prices? I assume the various LLMs' datasets are based on web scraping similar to Google for content that doesn't have a public API.
Also, it seems to me that Reddit could gain some goodwill here by supporting the flagship competing client apps with a lower rate while still charging a higher price for those trying to leverage its data for ML, similar to how Google provides much of the funding for Mozilla despite being a competing browser.
I'll be using Teddit until they decide to cut RSS feeds too and then maybe I'll be able to cut out this black hole from my life. It's eaten so many hours of my life...
Sites should publish their data with Signed Http Exchange (sxg) data. So other sites can share the raw data among themselves freely.
This current cruel control over all user data is amoral. It has no effect on bad people, & only hurts those trying to do right & to improve situations.
If sites want to make money, it should be for doing more than being the site of record for user content. SXG is a viable path forward to let the internet be authentically better connected.
Unsurprising as that was inevitable and Reddit needs to make money. Unless you can afford the high prices, don't build your whole business solely on someone else's API. Twitter made that clear and now so did Reddit.
Like I said before in [0]
"Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase a high price for it."
Please Reddit, just let us use a web browser to access your web site.
Users shouldn’t be forced so aggressively into using an ‘app’ - whether the official one or a 3rd-party app - when mobile web browsers are so very capable.
Ever since learning the phrase "enshittification" [1] from Cory Doctorow it becomes more apparent when it happens around you.
I wonder if there is a "fediverse" for something like forums? I can never get into mastodon because it's not like forums and conversations between people are quite hard if you don't follow them.
> I wonder if there is a "fediverse" for something like forums? I can never get into mastodon because it's not like forums and conversations between people are quite hard if you don't follow them.
Usenet. But it fell out of fashion around the turn of the millenium.
> Ever since learning the phrase "enshittification" [1] from Cory Doctorow it becomes more apparent when it happens around you.
This is just the natural lifecycle of all things involving humans. Why people want the same stuff to remain dominant forever is baffling to me. I can imagine nothing worse. Reddit dying off to leave space for something new and fresh is a good thing.
Social media sites do seem to go through the cycle even faster though--probably because they're essentially digital nightclubs. We all know of that one hip club that everybody waited in line for in our 20s, and then suddenly the drinks get too expensive and the crowd gets older and uncool...and then suddenly there's no line out front anymore. And there's a new spot in town where the young people cluster.
Before Reddit there was Digg. After Reddit, I'm confident there will be something else.
I highly disagree. There are many aspects of human life that don't devolve into the enshittification lifecycle. Public parks are one, eating with friends another, debating with people about various topics.
It's more about the business side than the human side, the social need will always be there but the business aspect taints it. At least the modern corpo "let's IPO and become billionaires, fuck the people, and chase endless growth" taint it more so.
>I wonder if there is a "fediverse" for something like forums?
Closest thing I can think of is the .win communities which are very reddit-like in interface, but unfortunately mostly uh.... radical.
Reddit itself was open-source until 2018. I wonder if someone could easily spin up a docker container that allows one to self-host a local instance (e.g. one subreddit)
enshittification might be more like the ship of theseus. The original reddit was started by an interesting group of people with different ideas and ideals than who is there now.
The people making up reddit might have been replaced with completely different people - with different motivations, behaviors, and expectations.
Not in my view. Enshittification is more about the business cycle of sucking everything dry for the pursuit of money. Users be damned. At least that's how I read it, ship of theseus is more of an interesting thought experiment but not exactly related.
https://www.discourse.org/ with a discovery mechanism? Would be cool to get Keybase out of Zoom to use for pki identity across various communities. Seems like all the primitives are there, just a lot of grind to do it.
Users->Discovery Mechanism->Topics->Threads with all of the trimmings.
Have you tried using the 'old' reddit? Replacing 'www.' with 'old.' will move you over to the old style of reddit and will keep you there when clicking through links.
People keep bringing this up and I feel like there's a fundamental misunderstanding going on. The internet of 2010 is not the internet of today, not even close.
The average reddit user of today isn't going to stop using reddit due to problems like this because they just don't care, at all. They don't care about the new web design being a massive downgrade over the old one because they're used to every website looking like that, they have no complaints, many of them probably don't even know the old design still exists. They don't care that the app sucks and is full of ads because, again, most official apps for most websites are like that, it's the new normal. They just want to scroll through funny meme videos on their phone for a while and don't think about it beyond that, the age of the average user having standards is long, long gone.
Exactly right and saddening as well. Their growth strategy is clearly working because based on MAU graphs it seems like most Reddit users joined in the past 2-3 years which is when all this stuff started. I wouldn't be surprised if the average comment length is half of what it was even 5 years ago. A lot of the growth seems to have come from mobile users but mobile users are terrible from a comment quality perspective so I hope this ultimately backfires in some way though I'm not hopeful.
If the digg exodus taught C level's anything, it's that digg's target market isn't worth marketing to. They're too picky. Reddit and everyone else has used that market to get the ball off the ground and then pivot AWAY from them ever since. The last thing you want is a userbase that has opinions when there's so many out there who will put up with anything.
I wonder if the official smartphone app uses the same API as the one exposed and documented for third-party apps. It's my understanding that it does not because the unofficial app I use (reddit is fun) lacks some features, so just borrowing the official app's key and putting it in RiF is out, but surely it would be possible to adapt a FOSS app like Slide to quack like the Blessed Official App and let the arms race begin, no?
Can’t really say I would continue to use and post on reddit without Apollo. Their own mobile experience is absolutely garbage, even when paying for premium.
I don't know how Apollo works and that's why I lifted it more as an open question.
But my HN client cache the frontpage when you go through the articles so you have to manually press a button to refresh it once you want to see something new. Does the latest scoring from this minute actually matter? Similarly, there's little need to automatically refresh the comments if you go away from a thread and click back within one minute. Maybe you can implement another method for dealing with upvotes/downvotes so they don't require API requests.
It just seems crazy that the average person uses multiple hundreds of API requests per day.
A Reddit engineer commented that Apollo uses 3x more API requests per user compared to other Reddit clients. There’s definitely room for optimization and I find Christian’s attitude off putting that his users just naturally “use more” API calls:
Yes. Apollo has 1.5M users according to Christian, so you’re looking at a nominal cost of $4/yr/user. Keep in mind that 3.5x is just the lower bound; until now, Reddit apps haven’t really needed to be cognizant about how often they hit the API.
Not everyone is going to pay, and that’s perfectly fine too. But the pricing is not as onerous as people are making it out to be.
Do you know what Reddit is or what kinda of site it is? People post content and send and receive messages. How would that be cached? I don’t think the average person uses multiple hundred per day, that is skewed by the highest power users (moderators performing thousands of actions.)
People lurk. For every sent message I'm sure you have a significant factor of more cacheable pages fetched. If they have a few people using the app as a moderation tool and managing thousands of requests, maybe deal with that separately.
Lurkers are always the silent majority, and their patterns likely create opportunities to cache. I wonder, though, whether lurkers are likely to choose an app like Apollo. That user base might largely be a self-selected dopamine-hit-chasing subset.
Seems to me like they priced the API to cash in on the LLM training data gold rush, and as a side-effect it makes third-party user apps infeasible. Oops.
They priced the API for LLM training and killing third-party apps is just a great bonus. If they wanted to retain third-party apps while protecting their revenue stream they could have simply created a new free API including all the ads. They deliberately chose to kill these apps.
An LLM only has to download text once. You could easily coordinate a scrape across various IPs and accounts over the course of a couple of months and it would be really hard to detect. Especially if you target alternate GUI api based versions of the site.
Ballpark: depends how you want to depreciate servers but under a penny.
They're not charging for cost; they're charging ad revenue replacement for users using apps. It's pretty clear in the way the Apollo costs would be about $2.50 per month, which isn't that far from the $7/mo for reddit premium.
Transparent attempt at shutting down clients that don’t show their ads. When Apollo stops working, I stop using Reddit. Their official app is garbage. Their website is garbage. Good riddance probably, I spend way too much time on it anyway. I even use the iOS Apollo app on my Mac because I like it so much, even if the experience isn’t perfect it’s still loads better than the official one.
I don't understand the outrage at all. So he is saying that the average user will cost him $2.50 in API fees/month. Since Apollo users are probably significantly more active than the average reddit user I can only assume that the same user is worth significantly in add revenue per month to Reddit. Apollo could easily be a $5/month app as a premium experience and make money.
Ah, yes! Of course! How couldn't anyone think of just increasing the price, no, double it and make it a subscription just to be sure we're making tons of money!
Surely people will flock to our app now, a 60$/Y subscription to browse a social media platform where people tell each other off and meme.
This isn't the problem, if you're willing to just shed 95+% of you userbase, then sure, make everyone pay and have a first seat view of your app slowly dying.
Reddit has to make money in order to exist, and Apollo is undercutting them by providing an ad-free experience for less money than Reddit would be making from ads. You don't see the problem?
The problem is that many, many 3P app users are some of the most active and engaged on the platform. For example, mods of literally thousand of the top subreddits use 3P apps for moderation.
Any new user would just use the official client, but the fact that so many alternative ones exist and so many people use them is telling of the unusable state of their app.
I use reddit every day, only because I don't use the official app, because of that it's become my go-to site to look for things, even on a computer.
If I lose access to my 3P client, which is tens of times faster, not clunky, customized to my liking, has all the shit sub filtering set-up and is generally a joy to use ( mind you, it has ads too) I will simply not bother anymore.
So, people that use 3P apps usually engage more because otherwise they wouldn't bother, this change is going to royally piss off every single one of them. In the short term maybe some users are going to switch, but in the long run I think the platform is going to lose lots of people that actually engage in the community.
You have assume both that leap, and also that killing off the free version doesn't stagnate and eventually kill the paid one. Those existing paid users probably started as free users. The API is also not his only cost. For example, he doesn't actually get $5/month, but something like 70% of it...$3.50.
Hopefully this accelerates the death of reddit ... I think once they nuke the Google SEO fu they have on questions (they'll screw it up, like Quora did), get rid of NSFW content and kill old.reddit, they're done. That should reduce traffic by a good chunk, and less eyes on their site, less ad money. Ironic, because they think these changes will increase ad money.
This is basically a long con. The free and open access to an API was a selling point for reddit and they benefited greatly from it -- especially in the early days of the smart phone revolution before they had an official mobile client. The presence of many, high quality third party reddit mobile applications helped them ward off would be mobile first competitors.
How can companies not be liable for data that they are now “selling access to”?
I mean I could never get my head around how they could circumvent liabilities by simply saying oh this is user generated content but still copyright it and now sell it? Seems like the greatest scam social networks have been able to pull off.
Also if this data is public, what stops people from scraping it?
I think companies don't understand that APIs are not only a way to make money, but a way as well to control bot and scrapper. If Reddit APIs are too pricey, some people will run crazy expensive GET on entire pages to retrieve the content dynamically, and this will cost them more money than by letting clients use well designed APIs.
Unfortunately, that turns your app from "load consistent data" to "parse HTML that could change daily and try to keep up with a perpetually moving shit pie".
Not the greatest of experience, both for devs and users.
Alternatively (and I know many folks won't like this idea), Reddit can offer to buy out Apollo and the other 2-3 top iOS and Android apps with a generous Discounted Cash Flow market value; These Apps have put a lot of effort in development over the years and they have helped make Reddit better and more accessible.
Does anyone know if other Apps (like BaconReader for Android) have similar volumes and so have similar pricing issues ? There are a good number of options on Android for reddit clients - though I would assume the user base is more fragmented across multiple clients and would not have the volumes of Apollo..
Another subscription. Great. The reddit client I use is brilliant (relay for reddit pro), not sure what they're doing about this but I'm not using the official client and I only use reddit on my phone. I'm really sick of subscriptions though, I'd rather just pay up front and not have another subscription
If Reddit wants to Digg itself, so be it. If I can't use my favorite 3rd party app my usage will drop like a rock. Its current usefulness probably means my usage won't disappear completely like twitter but it will be severely reduced. I can't imagine I'm the only reddit user who feels this way.
Sites like reddit and discord will have trouble surviving eventually I think. The communities that rely on it may as well just host their own alternative at this point. It will allow them to have more control. However, I do admit that maybe doing such a thing is a bit much for many non technical communities.
Seems like a straight attempt to kill 3rd party apps. Just like their ever more aggressive attempts to force browser users to use their app.
Ever since new reddit it's all be user hostile steaming garbage. But they have the user base and their content so the value and network effects are there even with shit UX.
What prevents people (and Apollo) from simply using the same open APIs the the official reddit site/app?
The requests would be all made from a client, so how would they even know it's not their client? Is it illegal? Because I can make any reddit request with a curl, no?
I kind of wonder if it is possible for an app like Apollo or RIF to use Teddit API as a backend instead of reddit, then the user becomes responsible for funding the API access of their teddit server.
An average Apollo user is causing 344 API requests per day? That's a lot! I wonder if Apollo should prioritise reducing that number. I'd bet anything there is a lot of low hanging fruit to be had with aggressive caching and general tidying up.
That is exactly a Reddit admins response, and I can't even begin to process how irresponsible, unprofessional and downright moronic of a take that is.
Other apps are around that ballpark, and that's every before considering that Apollo users tend to be heavily power users. Over 7000 moderators of 20k+ users subs for starters, means a lot of requests.
Sorry if you think this take is "moronic" but I've gone through the exercise of cutting back usage on chatty APIs several times and it's real, meaningful work that makes a difference.
I'm not a reddit admin. Please try to engage in good faith on this website. I'd suggest reading the "In Comments" section of the hacker news guidelines if you're unsure.
You implied that no work had already gone into optimizing it with no basis for the assertion. Then you misinterpreted him saying that a Reddit admin made the same response on the thread in question and accused him of bad faith. Maybe you should also take a minute to review the guidelines that you also included in your post.
Lots of 3rd party Reddit apps are going down as well. RIF is a great android app for example. It is Reddit for me and I'm not going to install the official app. I'll go away rather than be stuffed in their Clockwork Orange media chair.
I saw the original thread on Reddit and I don’t get what the problem is really.
Make Apollo a paid-only app. Change the price for Apollo to $10 per month. That’s still a drop in the bucket for anyone that cares enough to really want Apollo in the first place.
I am the sole developer of https://rdddeck.com; I have not receive any mails; where can I find more information regarding what will be rate-limited starting July 1st?
I blocked reddit for a week. I was much more productive and I'm having a hard time thinking of what I missed out on. I told myself it was full of interesting discussions but I basically forgot all of it the second I had closed the tab.
He should work together and join up with all the other alternative reddit apps and create their own backend api that they all pay for pro rata according to how much data they use.
It's business. While I do hate reddit with the passion of a thousand burning suns I acknowledge their right to set their API prices however they wish. They are not a monopolist by any stretch of the word.
Unless Reddit rectifies, that sounds like the end of Apollo. I feel like old.reddit.com is next in the chopping board. Perhaps we need to go back to the browser and reskin the heck out of Reddit.
He will get a better deal. If he has to shut down, he can turn Apollo into a lemmy.ml client and migrate a huge part of his 500,000 power users. Reddit cannot risk that lemmy.ml becomes mainstream.
Stupid question, but: Why do client apps need to use a separate API? Is it due to some terms and conditions? Why would an Android Reddit app need any difference calls than, say, a web browser?
Yes, get some limited funding to build out the infrastructure. We can build a platform that is better for the users and that will get them all to come. We will make it modern and very easy for third parties to help build on top of it this will increase value and uptake.
We will need to pay for servers and dev time so maybe we can allow our users to donate to upkeep. Maybe call it new service platinum. Unfortunately, most people don't pay so maybe we can have a limited number of non-intrusive ads on the site. Well now people with equity want some money back so we need to figure out how to make some more money. These third party apps aren't showing our ads, so lots of our power users use these third party apps and lots of companies are leveraging our service to make lots of money. The obvious answer is to get some money back from the api users.
I shall call this site reddit.
Fuck you, Reddit. A guy develops an app way better than your dogshit for FREE and now you want to charge him for API calls? Frankly you should be paying him, and it should be a lot of money!
If Christian, the Apollo dev, started his own community I’d move to it and stop using Reddit in an instant. Even if it’s just me there talking to sock puppet accounts.
I deleted the Twitter app a while ago, and if my only way to access Reddit is with their official app... I guess I'll be a little more productive this year.
You'll still be able to access the website, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried killing that, too. If I were a profit-above-all bastard that was trying to squeeze my users for telemetry, I'd force them to use the mobile app exclusively to access my service.
Over 90% of my reddit usage is through Apollo. Sounds like I’ll have to find another way to kill a few minutes while I am eating lunch or waiting on a bus.
In the end users must be for the service in one way or an other. Either be it add impressions, subscriptions, selling imaginary stickers or charging a lot for using the API...
Not sure why couldn't subscription cover the API use for the user.
It's clearly intended to weed out third party apps, same as Twitter. I have a pet theory that all the companies doing this are converging on the same long term plan - kill third party apps, have premium subscriptions (Facebook recently launched one too), and then give the users the choice - use the service for free, with forced opt-in into personalized marketing, sharing data with 3rd parties, or pay for premium.
There's legal precedent already in Europe that this is fine by GDPR rules, as long as the price of the subscription is "reasonable".
That way they get to preserve (or even improve) their ad targeting business, on the assumption that most users will just choose selling their data over a subscription. And if they go for a subscription, even better. In a sense, let the market decide the value of privacy.
The first step in this would obviously be killing any third party alternatives that would be the first place of refuge when they make that move.
In any case, a pet theory, but there's been a strange convergence by these big companies and the way they're changing their business models.
Late to the party and this may get buried, but wanted to add a contextual POV. I'm an Apollo user, and I am also someone who was Reddit's earliest enterprise advertisers. As in, the campaigns I've green lit are perhaps still in their advertising media decks as case studies.
Reddit for the past few years have been changing the UX to benefit their revenue streams. Visit any reddit thread on a mobile browser, and get a nag to download the official app. Their app is less likely to be blocked by ad blockers, has advertising SDKs, and can link advertising parameters.
I believe certain threads need you to login. It is also in their best interest to find opportunities for you to login to again link browse behavior. Forgot to mention, the app also allows a logged in state to persist easier than browser.
TL;DR All of Reddit's UX decisions have been to grow their revenue stream.
Do they have the right to do so? Of course. Does it suck for this audience in particular, probably. In my opinion, they will lose their early adopters and perhaps some power users. Is that a risk they are taking? Clearly.
I stopped using Reddit last week when they shadowbanned me for, I assume because you cannot know for sure, saying something related to gun violence in America and my local area in a political subreddit. I only ever commented about sim-racing at any other point in that account's life, and so perhaps it was shadowbanned for posting my own YouTube videos that were not monitized and had like a dozen views? I don't know, and I don't care, my mental health has never been better than the past week!
tl;dr: I quit Reddit because I didn't want to make yet another account, and my life is better for it.
Edit: Also, I've been trying not to come into HN political and pop-culture threads too much, but am failing at that. Maybe today is the day I start just hitting the technical threads!
While I use RSS for many things, I find Reddit's RSS feeds rather useless due to the large volume of posts, even on moderately small subreddits. If there is some way to limit it to just the top posts of the day I would consider using it, but AFAIK it's all or nothing.
A good reminder that Reddit is not actually usenet, or even the individual forum sites that it ultimately killed off. It's a massive surveillance capitalism corporation that ultimately only serves its owners.
I got nervous that the API changes would be the end of Apollo, and thus largely the end of my Reddit use. So, I made a way to export all of my post and comment data into a searchable SQLite archive:
Reading the comments in their announcement thread[0] reminds me of the "I'm leaving to Canada" from the Trump era. I'm sure they did the math and I'm sure Reddit will be just fine.
Switching to a new trendy online platform is very, very different from migrating to another country and all that comes with it. It takes a few minutes at most.
Imagine where Meta would be now if it hadn't just bought up all competition from WhatsApp to Instagram.
Right now GPT-4 is the clear front-runner. But it could easily be the case that in a few months there will be someone else in the lead. And Claude/Bard are already catching up. What I'm saying is that LLMs are more of a commodity than Reddit is. If one locks out 3rd party developers then another can become the favorite.
What a sad sad sad state of the internet. The Cluetrain Manifesto/Intertwingularity ideals of a connected world are being hosed by shitty bullshit greedy capitalism. Possibility is closing up shop & ending. Sad days.
Having spent too much time on Reddit recently, I'm not entirely sure. The comment is hyperbolic, to be sure, but on the other hand the most popular subreddits have gone largely insane. Quite noticeably in the last year. Every subreddit now has a political ideological stance, and some quite overtly threaten your access if you don't toe the line.
I don't think this is a Reddit problem. All social media platforms have increasingly large groups of crazy people. However, I highly suspect that those groups are just a very vocal minority and not hundreds of millions of people as the OP said.
If I recall the statistics, and assume them to be accurate, something like 1 out of 100 people make almost all the posts you see on a site like Reddit. Which means if anyone who looks at Reddit thinks the thoughts & opinions they are reading are representative of the population at large, they are very mistaken.
I think after a while a lot of the quieter people get so turned off by the whole experience they just step away altogether. I strongly suspect that a subreddit claiming to have a million subscribers probably has at least two orders of magnitude fewer in reality. And that may still be an overestimate.
Whether or not "toe the line on the subreddit's political stance or be banned" is insane depends heavily on what the political stance is. Saying you can't post your Nazi grandpa in SS gear in r/oldschoolcool is a "political stance" but it makes total sense to force users to toe that line.
Have you used Reddit or Twitter recently? They're basically open air insane asylums.
You should spend 0% of your life talking about being a "Based Alpha Male." You absolutely should not use the same website as a "Based Alpha Male" influencer.
I can come up with left wing equivalents if you're more into that?
I don't see any of that crap you are talking about on my feed. I am subscribed to tech, news, soccer, some linux subreddits, a few game subreddits like Dyson Sphere Program, Diablo and finally programmer memes. I browse "home", ignore "all" or "popular". It's a really nice tool that is being destroyed by incompetence.
That's a smart strategy. If you allow your feed to have things from whitepeopletwitter, blackpeopletwitter, politics, news, damnthatsinteresting (and other similar things), then you get a really awful experience. Every bit as bad as some people claim.
But if you filter all those out and go for smaller, targeted subreddits in your interest area, you might as well be on an entirely different site, it isn't the same at all.
What I can say is that there are some extremists on both Twitter and Reddit on both sides and as also found in other communities. Unfortunately, the commenters you are replying to choose to pretend that it is not the case with ridiculous anecdotes such as 'on my feed', 'not for me though' to dodge and as another question without answering yours.
As soon as one uses an anecdote, it is safe to immediately dismiss their comment.
Let me take a moment to express gratitude that I have no idea what “DID,” “tradcath,” and “groyper” mean. Seems like I’ve made the right choice to eschew Twitter and Reddit.
The cause are the people not the platforms. The same people will move over to "digg version 3" once reddit finishes shooting itself in the foot and you'll add a new name to your list of "problematic" platforms. It's the minds that need changing, not the CSS or the domain name of a website that is effectively lists of URLs and comments.
For what it’s worth, I literally just created my first HN account after seeing the Apollo dev’s post. Hope I don’t bring down y’all’s collective IQ by being here lol.
I found Apollo to be fairly shady. I paid for the app and they “lost” my account or something so suddenly I could no longer use the pro features. Pretty lame, no amount of support could help, so I used the app for a while as a free user because I didn’t want to pay twice. One day they pushed like 50 modals over the course of a day to “upgrade to pro” and eventually moved to a monthly subscription service, which suddenly made me realize why they “couldn’t find” my previous account.
Love the features, but feels shady to me still. The API pricing thing does suck, but at this point I’m not willing to throw any money at them.
Is it so unreasonable to charge 12k for 50mln requests? I don't know.
Is it so unreasonable to charge 20m/year to a super popular iOS app? I don't know.
Does apollo make money from this? Do they take advertisement income?
But I imagine, if you are the most popular app, on the most popular mobile platform, of a very popular site like Reddit, there has to be a lot of money floating around no? They definitely have income, and definitely have expenses (development isn't free). Curious to actually see the balance of these.
But if reddit want people to use their own app, I don't see why they would support Apollo for free. I also don't know that the actual cost towards reddit would be. A reasonable price is probably somehwere between 0 and 12k.
Apollo is free to use. There’s a one-time fee for some frills like choice of app icon to show on the Home Screen and subscription for features that cost money and require maintenance of a server (notifications mainly), but they’re both optional. So many of its users aren’t paying anything currently.
The subscription currently costs $0.99/month or $10/year. With the new API pricing, he’d have to pay around $2.50-$5 per month per user. This means not only would the subscription have to become non-optional, but that he’d probably have to bump its price to $5/mo to just have API and server costs covered. Factor in super heavy users, the App Store cut, and a bit of margin to live off of and you’re looking at $7-$10/mo.
A few users will pay this much but I’d bet that most will not. It’s as much as a streaming service costs for a free service. The user falloff would be immense, and this is exactly Reddit’s goal: they want to herd users into its official app and site where they can be subjected to ads, data harvesting, algorithmic feeds, and incessant A/B testing to juice “engagement”. Whether that happens by way of third party app devs throwing in the towel or from users being priced out of using them matters not.
You provide a website on the server. The client downloads it and decides how to render it. An API is going to be more efficient than HTML plus all the bells and whistles. But if you don't provide a reasonable API we go back to the stone age of HTML clients which parse and scrape. It is going to be more nuisance for client and server. Load is more intense and it requires more bandwidth at the cost of user engagement. And you'll get barely more advertising income.
The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates.
> The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates.
This feels the most fair to me honestly. Using RiF subverts reddit income by not showing ads. So just let me the user pay a bit to use third party apps. Considering how much time I spend on it a couple bucks should be reasonable.
We are at this inflection point where it is becoming practical to defeat any captcha services and extract information by screenshots with the help of AI. It is going to be a losing battle for the gatekeepers, as coming up with all the defenses and serving it is going to cost them more than keeping the API open. I hope they lose everything so future platform controllers won't repeat this mistake.
> The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates.
I'd be willing to shell out the bucks for Reddit Premium if that would let me keep using Apollo.
About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market.
Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and stealing ad revenue.
Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs launched its own forum reusing the client's name. It exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular message board among the youth.
The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to it.
I hope to see Apollo go down this route.
Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard as reddit going to paid awards and memberships.
One more thought: Keep the Apollo UI or whatever thing the users are most familiar with. Most of them do not care if it is fediverse or open source or backed by web-scale k8s, they only want it to just work (tm) good enough to post things on it. Eat the lunch you prepared yourself.