If you're ever in a situation where this happens, consider it you're big flashing warning sign about trying to run a competing offering!
(Mac users of a certain age will remember Apple buying SoundJam MP.)
It came with a stereo RCA to 1/8th inch adapter cable, for digitizing audio files straight from your record player / cassette player.
I also remember being bummed that iTunes never properly supported aliases [0] when running under Mac OS 9. And I remember Audion [1]. Heady days indeed!
0. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...
If not, then there isn't much to complain about
The same can't be said for the Meta properties, and so I'd argue we're seeing something different/worse here.
If you don't think you're taking a major risk, then you're just being naive.
(I'm not defending Reddit here, but I am saying anyone should have been planning for this highly probable outcome.)
It's well known that most online communities are 1% super-contributors, 9% modest contributors, and 90% lurkers/occasional contributors.
"Third party app users" are far more likely to be 1% and 9% users. They're committed to the platform enough that they're willing to seek out or even make software to improve their experience on it. The lurkers will just download the official app if it's the top match in the App Store and deal with the inconveniences.
So if you take that away, you disproportionately punish your most valuable users. Note I say "valuable" not in terms of "they click a lot of ads", but rather "they bring the content that makes the other 90% of users stick around and click ads."
It feels like a bar cancelling "Free Drinks Ladies' Night" because they figure that the 10 female patrons will buy 20 bottles of beer, then acting surprised when the 50 men who would come in to hit on them (and buy four beers each) don't show.
It is a perfectly reasonable and rational thing to do. They are not thinking in the same terms and caring about the same priorities.
We can discuss how reprehensible or short sighted that is but business is ultimately about making as much money in as short time as possible. And that is exactly what they are doing (and what they have been trained for in those MBA courses).
You’re speculating at this while the Reddit team just has all of the data and knows exactly where traffic comes from.
Also maybe the 3p app user, while being the most prolific poster, is simultaneously a high % of toxicity.
The business world has been forever changed by the creation of the institutional investor, which was largely created by pensions, 401k's and other such funds where by the actual people putting in the money is several steps removed from the people investing that money.
So now the business world, for public companies, lives and dies on the quartely report.
Apple could license off a bunch of crap. Boeing could sell assets and designs. Toyota could just rebadge cheaper vehicles and sell all of their factories.. all of those could make record “profits”.
Are we doomed to everything just being a pump and dump scheme from here on out because why shouldn’t everything just be speculation?
Reddit is none of those things. It's a VC Frankenstein at this point and it's probably never going to make real money, so it makes sense that they're trying to change the recipe to at least get something back.
I worked at one of the larger UK social networks and people there were terrified to make changes in case it suddenly stopped working.
From what I’ve heard the old Twitter management didn’t understand why it worked and were therefore very conservative with making changes. Mind you, the new management also doesn’t understand why it worked but are quick to make changes, and we’ve all seen how well that’s going.
Fast forward only a few months and they are now:
1. Charging exorbitant prices for the API. 2. Removing the ability for apps to display ads to free users. 3. Removing NSFW subreddits and content from the API.
Said in another way, they are:
1. Decreasing app revenue (no ads). 2. Increasing app expenses (paid API). 3. Making third party apps worse (removing NSFW from the API).
That's...about as close to "ruining the API" as you can get.
What made Lucy like that?! I often think of the trope in the context of US politics, and specifically progressive capitulation to capital. I find it one of the darkest and yet prescient parts of Schultzes lore.. (Snoopy being an adult with a long, colorful history yet still treated as a dog, being another)
1) if you export your data (yes, your data!) they don't include contact's email.
2) The can refuse to give you API access to your own data.
Even the way that Old Reddit showed ads was so quaint. If you look at Old Reddit without an ad blocker, you'll see an ad in the list of 25 items, but it has a different background color so you can easily visually differentiate it from the real content along with two high-contrast things noting that it's an ad. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have been minimizing your ability to differentiate ads from content by making them look nearly identical with a tiny, low-contrast marking that they're ads. Of course, New Reddit shows ads with the same tiny, low-contrast marking that other companies use. But unlike others, Reddit still allows you to choose the Old Reddit experience.
Yes, in some ways the writing has always been on the wall. In other ways, Reddit has been a bit different. They've largely ignored the kinds of things that other sites have gone after. Yes, when you've hitched your wagon to a company's site, you're at a certain amount of risk. That's also true of users who might find the site infested with ads or changing how they're allowed to do things. At the same time, Reddit has resisted that direction for so long that most people assumed it would continue. Why now? Why not 5 years ago?
It seems like the thing people are reacting to is the culture shock. Instagram was never open. They wouldn't even let companies schedule posts for a long time. Facebook was barely open, but never had the kind of ecosystem that Reddit had (and often fought against third party access). Reddit's policies felt really different and they aren't changing in a gradual fashion. It's not like Reddit told Apollo, "we're going to start charging 20 cents per month per user" and Apollo only works for those paying $1.50/mo for Apollo Ultra (and then a year later Reddit wants 50 cents and then a dollar and slowly Apollo Ultra goes up in price and more people move away from it). It's not like Reddit put in limits like "you only get 100 API calls per day per user" which would be 30% of an average Apollo users' usage. That would start bleeding users from Apollo over time, but not feel like slamming the door shut - and maybe Reddit charges $1/mo for unlimited API calls for the user and only those paying a subscription fee can get the unlimited calls. That would offer a way forward that users might grumble about, but could work with. Free users could still get a decent amount of usage and people who really cared could subscribe to a new Apollo Ultra at $2/mo. In fact, it could drive sales of Apollo Ultra - maybe 5-10x more people start paying for Apollo Ultra.
I think the big shock is that Reddit went from so open to so closed in one step while Reddit had historically accommodated the community's resistance to monetization. Old Reddit has stuck around for half a decade now. Despite being one of the most visited websites, a lot of monetization opportunities seemed to be ignored. Condé Nast/Advanced Publications seemed to mostly ignore the site. It was spun-out with Advanced Publications remaining owner and just kinda went along. Even after raising $200M in 2017, Advanced Publications was still the majority owner (and I think they're still today even after Reddit raised another billion dollars).
Lots of younger sites/networks have gone public with a lot less traffic and aggressively moved to monetize. I'm not saying this was the case, but it always seemed to users that Reddit's owners were a bit disinterested in its potential monetization and were mostly fine ignoring it - allowing users to easily block ads, keeping Old Reddit around, allowing free access for ad-less third-party apps, etc. In that environment, it does come as a shock. Reddit felt like this hidden place (that also everyone knew about). It just felt different.
You're not wrong that building on someone else's site is risky. At the same time, I can see the shock from such a sudden change to a site whose reputation was quite different.
He did. Apollo has a freemium model, and if the API pricing was reasonable, he coult take the hit using the subscribers to subsidize the free users. The problem is the exhorbitant pricing, meaning all his users should be paying four times what the usual suscription costs, just to pay Reddit. It's bonkers.
The problem, everyone seems to think Reddit doesn't provide enough value to be worth $5 a month to enjoy without ads and a nice UI.
Reddit wants about $0.024 an API request. To think that isn't reasonable, seems odd. Sendgrid wants $0.0399 per email. ScrapingBee wants $0.098 an API request. Docraptor wants $0.4 an API request/pdf. I'm sure I could carry on and find more and more sites that cost more per API request, I didn't find one that was cheaper.
$10/month to use a free website on your phone is just not a very attractive deal at the end of the day.
$2.50 would be the API costs per user. So $5 would cover, take in some money and pay appstore feeds. And if you're looking at 10% of his userbase, that would be about 4 million a month income with 2 million being for Reddit. Based off his claims of 20 million a month with a $2.50 cost per user.
I'm sure he'll be able to survive off $1,000,000 a month profit.
Edit corrected the numbers:
$2.50 a user for API costs.
$5.00 a month subscription would cover that cost.
$1.50 going to AppleTax.
$1.00 a user to the indie hacker
If 5% of users that would cost $20MM sign up for $5 a month it would be $2,000,000 a month overall revenue.
$1,000,000 to Reddit.
$600,000 to AppleTax
$400,000 a month to the indie hacker.
And there is also probably a part of him that doesn't want to be greedy. But is it greedy to sell your software for $5 a month? I don't think so.
Dang, maybe there’s room to make a Reddit app, haha.
He says that he can charge more and still make a living. However, the price change goes into effect July 1st of this year. That’s less than 30 days from now.
The issue is all the current premium users who have 2-12mo left on their subscription suddenly become a huge liability. He cannot suddenly ask for more (against apple rules), and he must not remove features they paid for (apple will issue a refund to them).
It's a spectacularly stupid move, almost on a par with Musk >50% of Twitter's value and Waves trying to force their customers onto a subscription model by making old versions obsolete.
Reddit will lose a huge number of users, its brand will be trashed, and the app companies will be forced out of business.
There is no way this can't end up as a net loss.
I've cancelled my subscription.
Reddit will lose a bunch of deadbeat users, who generate little to no income for the company but cost money to serve. In business, these are the sort of people you don't want.
Who do you think will spend hundreds of millions a year to replace Reddit so that deadbeat users can use it? There would be no money in serving those users and any attempt to serve them and monetize later will result in the same thing that is happening at Reddit. The days of VCs burning money for social networks seems to be over.
I would suspect Reddit has done the maths. And saw that most content generators use their app or the website to post.
And every big decision they've made has made it worse, not better. Do you use new reddit?
Some form of “tough break kid welcome to the real world”
There’s a pervasive “if you can’t beat them join them“ attitude about these antisocial financial and social structures.
We need more people to say “Here’s an alternative to that model” instead of just throwing their hands up.
Stop excusing it. Start pushing for alternative ways to organize.
Because it's the right one.
> Some form of “tough break kid welcome to the real world”
Yes.
> There’s a pervasive “if you can’t beat them join them“ attitude about these antisocial financial and social structures.
The argument would be sound, if and only if others weren't making a business off the free to one side of the equation.
> We need more people to say “Here’s an alternative to that model” instead of just throwing their hands up.
You have no alternative until you offer free compute, storage, hosting, for reddit, Twitter, Google, etc., as far as I can tell, you do none of these things, nor will you be able to fundamentally break physics to do so.
> Stop excusing it. Start pushing for alternative ways to organize.
Pay me.
You are totally right.
This shit attitude needs to change.
It's increasingly hard not to be cynical but I've been through the cynicism phase a few times and I know how useless it is.
It's not ONLY Christian but creators of apps like RiF, Relay and others face a similar destiny..
I haven't read any reactions from those creators regarding this Reddit Vs. Apollo saga since they're also "saga-ed".
It's unfortunate, but when you hitch your wagon to a corporation's API, you are taking the risk that one day they wake up and say ok we're ready to control our narrative and turn off the API (or set exorbitant prices to access)
Writing was on the wall when facebook/instagram did this years ago.