[moomin]

The adage that “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” cuts both ways.

Musk and Hoffman seem to be intent on waging war with their own product. They both get a lot of unpaid labour producing their content and then complain that the unpaid labour isn’t paying for the privilege.

[qzx_pierri]

Huffman (spez) has his reasons for the reddit changes, but they do seem a bit short-sighted. But there comes a point where these online services have to make money. It's as simple as that. So is he waging war on users, or making a business decision?

Also, Musk is waging war against advertisers. Running a site that is controlled by advertisers is the epitome of extreme centralization, since the site's income can be halted if an advertiser gets upset. Musk is charging on Twitter so the users aren't the product.

As for reddit, I think limiting API access to accounts with reddit gold seems like it would've been fair. That would've solved the income issues (the stated reason for the API changes), but then reddit wouldn't get all the telemetry data associated with users on their first party app.

It seems like Huffman (spez) got greedy and wanted gold subscriptions, and the telemetry data from their first party app. It's usually one or the other (ads vs. user payment).

I also want to end this by saying that I'm not trying to start an argument, but I know a lot of users on this site are very trigger happy with the downvote whenever anyone speaks objectively about Musk. If you don't agree with me, just chime in and we can discuss it.

[Karunamon]

If it was indeed a business decision, then Huffman is breathtakingly incompetent. To the degree that, were the company public, I would be agitating for the board to remove him as his actions negatively impact my investment.

A number of ways this could have been handled better in no particular order:

1. Give more than 30 days notice to third party app developers.

2. Mandate that third-party clients display advertising as delivered by the API and return telemetry.

3. Keep the API changes but exempt paying subscribers.

4. Refrain from making bad-faith lies about the developer of the most popular application, which he then had to disprove using call recordings, and then after that, don't try to play off your actions as misunderstandings or mistakes.

5. Don't lie about deliverables for years and years to the point where the community memes on you for your history of lying.

6. Don't fuck around in the production database to edit comments critical of you.

7. Be a little forthright for once.

[juujian]

Even just a little bit of giving concessions to legacy customers would have been fine. It's not like you need to completely give up on your new pricing model just because your have existing customers. It's crab.

[Mindwipe]

8. Don't go on major news outlets and come across as being on crack.

[jmholla]

> Musk is charging on Twitter so the users aren't the product.

I think the adage is a little wrong. In Twitter's case users are still part of the product as the existing network effects and ability to communicate with users are part of the product, and thus it's users are. Not to such a significant degree as when advertisers are sweeping up every bit of data about you, but still to some degree.

[qzx_pierri]

> In Twitter's case users are still part of the product as the existing network effects

This is a nitpick. I'm speaking from the POV of keeping the site running, or not resorting to changing the site's essence to please advertisers.

[jmholla]

My point was more in reference to GP's comment where even on a paid service, waging war on on users is waging war on your product. Though, after typing this out, that would seem to be even more so the case since that's where your money is coming from.

[qzx_pierri]

Ah, that makes sense. Good point. +1

[littlestymaar]

> But there comes a point where these online services have to make money.

Reddit is 18 old, and you're telling me that they are just thinking about making money now? How come 4chan and Wikipedia are both profitable, but not Reddit? And how is it a problem with their users and not their management?

[qzx_pierri]

> How come 4chan and Wikipedia are both profitable, but not Reddit

reddit has 1.7 billion visits per month[5], with an astronomical amount of persistent storage, with the content never being deleted. reddit is ranked #18 globally.

4chan has 51 million visits per month[4], has very little persistent storage (posts are deleted once the thread slides to the bottom of the board list), and strict size limits for the posts that exist at any given time. 4chan is ranked #708 globally.

Wikipedia does get 4.7 billion monthly visits[3], but they do have a public list of large donors[1], and the entire wikipedia catalog can fit onto a 20gb microSD card [2]

So I can't give a solid answer, but it seems like the other 2 sites you mentioned have a slightly better design when it comes to infra costs.

1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/don...

2: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...

3: https://www.similarweb.com/website/wikipedia.org/#overview

4: https://www.similarweb.com/website/4chan.org/#overview

5: https://www.similarweb.com/website/reddit.com/#overview

[Eisenstein]

If reddit had stuck to what it is good at: threaded, in-depth text conversations and links, it wouldn't need such a large amount of storage or bandwidth. Yes, I know that 1.7 billion users is a lot of text, but (1) there wouldn't be 1.7billion users if it were only text and links (2) the users who wouldn't be on reddit without multimedia offerings I am sure use a almost exclusively multimedia and account for the lions share.

Go back a few years, nix the 'let's host video and pictures and live chat and ignore every single thing the users are asking for so that we can bring in the eyeballs' idea and instead of that monetize the regulars using the their content and site's ability to guide google to it.

Keep 150,000,000 dedicated users who reliably generate valuable content for you and keep the site spam free for you, and all you have to do is keep some devs on hand to add tooling and site features that are useful. The caveat is that Stevey Huff has to live with one or two fewer commas on the balance in his bank account.

[jimktrains2]

That 20gb dump doesn't include history afaik and probably doesn't include images and other multimedia.

I don't think it invalidates your point, but I just wanted to clarify.

[littlestymaar]

> Reddit has 1.7 billion visits per month > […] > 4chan has 51 million visits per month[4],

This has an impact on their costs, but in an ad-driven business, it increases their revenues by as much.

> with an astronomical amount of persistent storage, with the content never being deleted

I'd like to know the actual amount of storage, but I really doubt it is actually “astronomical” (unlike Youtube).

Moreover, I suspect that the biggest part of that storage is actually video, which isn't really where the value (for the users at least) is.

Overall, if their costs are to high compare to other players their revenues, it's first and foremost a management and cost effectiveness issue, not a lack of revenues.

[moomin]

VC money. VC money gambles on big wins. They'd rather have a huge blow-out than a small success. So you take VC money, they want you to grow. They care about that more than making a profit. For a long time. Then, when you are huge, then they want money.

This sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. But Google and Facebook started out without a profitability plan.