Basically they forgot they built a site built on community and then tried to sell those communities like inanimate objects. No surprise it blew up in there face.
What evidence do we have that it blew up in their face? There is clearly a large backlash, but it's not at all clear how much that will impact their key metrics, which is probably all they care about moving into IPO.
I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of engineers - we can't really evaluate until much further down the road.
We don't have numbers, but if it hadn't blown up in their face then we wouldn't be talking about it. What is reddit's product? The users. What happens IPO valuation when the users leave?
We're talking about it because some percentage of users are very pissed, not because it necessarily impacts the business. I agree there is a line where reddit would be worried for their IPO, but we have no idea if 1% of reddit traffic will drop (not a problem for them) or 50% (big problem).
We (and reddit) also don't know whether users will return, ie: will this just blow over?
Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users.
We will see in few months what is the situation and if someone manages to advertise an alternative for millions of people.
Then, Reddit IPO is doomed. If there is no new significant alternative where people will go, then IPO will probably continue as planned and API change went well from the Reddit’s perspective.
>Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users.
Worthless under their current model. What if their new model is to simulate other users with ChatGPT? Many users don't engage with comments beyond voting/reading. How long would it take them to notice, and if they notice would they care?
Can Huffman coast to IPO, grab the money, then bail?
Because there are a great many people that have legitimately used Reddit as their "frontpage of the internet" for years and don't enjoy the form factor that other websites / apps provide. Places like Twitter and TikTok aren't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content.
>if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content
My take is that this type of person is more likely to not need to replace their feed fix with another feed and is more likely to pursue fulfillment in other areas of life.
I spend 5 minutes today with some user CSS to reskin Lemmy to be more like Reddit with RES. Another half-hour of effort and at least the form-factor will be pretty similar.
The main thing Reddit has that is not available elsewhere is a massive relatively unbiased backlog of discussions and community wikis covering topics like what are the best delis/restaurants/bars in city X or car recommendations, or how to find good deals on menswear, or almost any other thing imaginable, this is truly valuable and worth having in society.
The CEO's message has no information content, because regardless of what was actually going on that is what he would say.
I'm not even saying he's lying. He could be telling the absolute truth. However, that post would not constitute evidence for him telling the truth, because it is what he would say if it was the truth, and it is what he would say if traffic dropped 98%.
This sort of thing is true of a lot of corporate and political communications. The only thing that carries information content is things they didn't have to say and couldn't be predicted in advance.
In this case, the only tidbit of information in that post is that they still intend to ignore the community(/communities).
Of course the CEO during an IPO year is going to downplay the shutdown. That said, there's no way the shutdown is going to change reddit in this case. They will replace the mods on the bigger subs.
They may downplay it but it is likely true. On the Google Play Store alone, the Reddit app has 100 million+ downloads, third party apps have <5 million downloads each. Like it or not, third party users are in a bubble, most people don't care to use third party apps and will see ads just fine.
And yes, due to these kinds of numbers, the shutdown will do nothing. Hell, many subs opened up today and r/all is back to normal.
I wonder if participation rates are disparate across those apps, i.e. maybe official app is popular for lurking, but all content posted from mobile actually comes from better third-party apps. (In general, a small number of people produce overwhelming fraction of content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule?useskin=monobook )
On the other hand, if you count downloads of all the 3rd party Reddit apps on Google Play, it'll sum up to at least 10m. So 3rd party apps users might actually be in range of 10%-20% of users, which is far from negligible
That's only on Android, on iOS it's likely another 100 million or likely more (Reddit has around 500 million to 1.5 billion monthly active users, the vast majority of which are mobile, based on their stats). Apollo is around 10 million, so 20 million total / 200 million is 10%, which is high but not that high compared to overall.
> Amir Shevat, Twitter’s former head of product for the developer platform, who
> lives in Round Rock, was responsible for ensuring that the tools Twitter
> provided independent software developers using the platform met their needs.
> He said about 17 percent of engagement on Twitter, historically, was through
> third-party apps, which played a vital role in defining Twitter’s identity.
That's 17% of _engagement._ I strongly expect that with both Twitter and Reddit there's a sort of double Pareto distribution going on: the majority of _users_ go through the first-party site/tools/clients, but the majority of _valuable_ users go through the third-party site/tools/clients. The users who are invested enough in the platform to have strong opinions about how things should be done and who use the platform enough that they seek out tools that actively meet their needs rather than just taking the default tools, are also users who are worth, at the very least, _placating_ because those are also the users most able to cause problems if the platform stabs them in the face the way Reddit and Twitter have done.
That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol, but people still got outraged at that. The Apollo dev said that he would have to charge every user $2.50 a month to cover costs of the API, so even if the Apollo dev is exaggerating, $2.50 is not that high if people really want to user third party apps.
> That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol
No, they're charging exorbitant rates for API access lol. I honestly can't understand how people can look at $2.50 / month per user for a few JSON responses and think "wow now that's reasonable."
If their infrastructure is that bad that it costs even on the order of a dollar per month per user to serve API requests, then I'd be horrified to imagine how much it costs them to send entire HTML pages to the millions of people that use desktop exclusively.
> The Apollo dev said that he would have to charge every user $2.50 a month to cover costs of the API
He did not say that, he said
> Apollo's price would be approximately $2.50 per month per user
which is an estimate of how much they'd have to pay Reddit for each user in API costs alone. But it doesn't take into account cost of Apollo's own servers and infrastructure, Apple's fees, or the fact that there are people with paid for yearly subscriptions that'd have to be served:
> Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even.
>
> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible.
All in all it's a much different thing if Reddit said they want to charge the users $2.5/mo for API access, given them their own key and let use whatever 3rd party app they want. They want to charge the 3rd party apps directly, which is a whole different story that can't really be summed up as to "$2.5 is not that high if people really want to use third party apps"
For one, it's a message from Reddit — of course they'll want to pretend like it's a no big deal, and one could expect such memo would leak.
But what I'm more curious about is that this memo went out not even a day after the protests started. Both revenue indicators and impact itself might be delayed, especially now that many subreddits chose to extend the protest indefinitely
Indeed, the fact that Apollo can use the API for free then turn around and charge users for a premium version all while giving nothing back to Reddit is simply insane, you would never see Facebook, Instagram or other services allowing the same thing. And before one says that third party app users drive user driven content, what kind of content do you think Facebook and Instagram have?
The Apollo dev agrees! Free api is not sustainable. It’s the proposed price that’s killing all major third party apps, and most minor ones, and Reddit has not only insisted that they won’t budge, but have even gone on to attack the Apollo dev directly while also stating in public that they do not offer analytics about an apps api usage nor will they help app developers (partners!) identify inefficiencies in their api usage- just tell them (publicly, with no warning) that their app is inefficient.
I don't think anyone disagrees. The rate they were charging, and every. single. message. that has come from Reddit's CEO since that announcement have been so full of shit that they'd make the porto potties at woodstock (or the shit pits at Fyre festival) look like flower pots.
They could have changed NOTHING about the move except their messaging and attitude and things would've gone a lot better.
Umm, isn't that exactly what Facebook apps like FarmVille were? I don't think Facebook charges app developers to publish apps on their platform, and the app was monetized.
Farmville is ancillary to Facebook as a whole. Those users might play Farmville but also read up on their feed or click through their friends' posts, thereby allowing Facebook the chance to show ads.
Apollo et al are different in that they are packaging up the entire experience wholesale, they are not ancillary. There is no way for Reddit the company to show ads through third party clients (the client could simply block ad posts if they wanted to).
I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of engineers - we can't really evaluate until much further down the road.