[kaba0]

> It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders

It’s absolutely insane to call them freeloaders. Reddit’s business model is not “we serve pages with ads and advertisers pay us”, it is “those ‘freeloaders’ create content that is the whole value of the company, it is nothing without that — and this results in every traffic that hits the site”

[doctor_eval]

> They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO

My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point.

I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites.

It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done.

In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it.

To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making.

If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.

[AmericanChopper]

All of these 3rd social media clients really are “freeloaders” though, I don’t get what’s so controversial about shutting them down. If I made my own Netflix client that bypasses their revenue stream, and implemented my own revenue stream on top of it, would anybody be upset or surprised if it was shut down?

[kaba0]

Shitty analogy — does your users produce the movies as well?

[AmericanChopper]

The users don’t belong to Apollo. Reddit provides a service to Reddit users, Apollo freeloads on that service, cuts off Reddit’s revenue stream, and replaces it with its own. Why would anybody think that Reddit has some obligation to allow this, or that Apollo has some right to do it?

[doctor_eval]

Nobody thinks that, not even the Apollo author, which is why the problem is not that Reddit is charging for access to the APIs, but that they are charging far more than the amount they’re losing.

[AmericanChopper]

What is the profit margin on Reddit API calls, and what industry benchmark do you think it’s exceeding?

[fullstop]

From what I have read, a lot of moderators also use third party apps as moderation tools. They are not paid to do this job.

Heck, most of the video content on Reddit is reposted from other sources.

[seviu]

The moderation tools offered by Reddit don’t have support for accessibility. If you are in r/blind for example… How are you gonna moderate that? And for those who don’t need those tools, third party apps save them a lot of time since the official app is so bad for such things.

[fsckboy]

> They are not paid to do this job.

plenty more people want to moderate, seriously, why should they pay them? hear me out:

If you pay them "a livable wage" you'll get people in the chair who don't want the job, just the pay. If you pay them less, suddenly you'll run afoul of minimum wage laws, overhead of having employees, etc.

you could auction off the job (mods pay reddit for the privilege, given that more people want to moderate than currently can) but that would encourage the mods to monetize their sub (the more successfully, the more subs would become part of ebaum's world)

voluntary moderation actually is the happy medium, people who love the job and the sub are willing/want to do it.

Like they say "everything can't be measured in money" (ok, I never say that, but there it is)

[fullstop]

I never asked for them to be paid. I'm saying that reddit can exist due to their generosity, and that these people use third party tools and the API to do this. That's being taken away.

[nawgz]

I obviously don’t believe in capitalist philosophy but you’re joking if you think the market doesn’t consider ad-free users as a drain regardless of reality.

Which is what I’m trying to say: you’re framing the actions of Reddit’s CSuite in terms or morals and long term outlooks, which is not how the market will look at their ipo. At all.

[wpietri]

Sorry, but "the market" doesn't think anything. That's a category error.

If by that you mean something like "VC investors", sure. They are people whose job is trying to turn money into more money while filling their own pockets to bursting. They are zero-sum people by nature and practice. If they really understood and cared about communities, they'd mostly have different jobs.

But that doesn't make it true. And there's nothing wrong with framing Reddit's execs actions in terms of morals and long-term outlooks. We should generally not concede anything to the world-view of the greedy. Whether or not this will hurt Reddit's IPO is worth discussing, but we shouldn't confuse that with hurting Reddit the community, which it certainly will.

[nawgz]

> “the market” doesn’t think anything

Wow, you’re really going to argue pedantically here?

Let me be clear for the fools in the room then. The behavior exhibited here is perfectly rational and likely to be rewarded from the perspective of a pre IPO company looking to pump its financials wrt user count, engagement, and ad views, and therefore any objections about moral or long term behavior ignore the fact that this playbook has been wildly profitable for many people many times, and thusly explains what the Reddit CEO is doing

Looking forward to when people start panning this system / status quo instead of acting like following the incentives is confusing

[wpietri]

Asking you to be more precise where it matters isn't pedantry.

The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term. On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".

I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either. Which also isn't pedantry, because in analyses where we seek change to a system, we have to understand exactly who is involved and what their motivations are. So in this case it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO, but as a founder it's possible he's conflicted enough that he might depart from his short-term economic incentives to protect the think he's spent a major part of his life working on. Maybe some of the execs if they came in to prep in for an IPO.

So now we're not talking about the whole company, which is 2,000 employees, thousands of volunteers, and millions of content creators. We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people. That's a much more tractable number.

[nawgz]

> Asking you to be more precise where it matters isn't pedantry.

It is when you're about to restate what I've said...

> The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term

Do you think a company has non-economic incentives?

> On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".

Right, and I call these people capitalists. Did you genuinely not glean that?

> I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either

> it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO

> We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people

Right. Thus why I said: "capitalists are propagandists who will position themselves at the top and bully all threats they perceive to their system"

It really reads to me like you took bad-faith readings of all my comments, and then restated them differently, while stating it isn't pedantry. You've delivered exactly 0 insights to me. Maybe you were trying to elucidate others, but I don't really see that.

[kaba0]

If those ad-free users are over represented in content creatin then surely they are no drain. No one comes to reddit so they can browse ads.

[nawgz]

Seems like two big ifs - that they’re over represented, and that they wouldn’t switch to Reddit apps or web

[fsckboy]

I non-obviously do believe in the capitalist reality underpinning the universe (it's value-add all the way down) but you’re smoking if you think the market doesn't recognize ad-free users are relatively cost-less compared to their positive network externalities.

that doesn't mean that some free-to-choose sites won't experiment with paywalls, etc. in an attempt to enhance cost-covering revenue.

[wpietri]

Exactly. I'd argue the true freeloaders at Reddit are the Reddit execs and the venture capitalists squeezing for profits. Everybody here developer here knows they could rebuild Reddit in short order; there's no technology moat. The valuable asset is the community. Beyond recovering enough money to pay for servers and some core staff, everything else is parasitic.