It is just a fun thought experiment. But I think Reddit the company has been more than just a landlord. They have made more than just rented out space to make Reddit what it is.
In a landlord analogy, it would be like opening a big mall and lure shops and consumers at a loss, making the city centre a void, then raise prices when the original functional community in the city is lost.
>But it doesn't.
I'm sorry, but it absolutely does. Yes, it has to do this subject to brand risk constraints. But the idea that investors should just expect to make losses on the site is insane. That trying to turn a profit on their own platform represents "freeloading". I guess normally I'd feel sorry for whatever platforms are afflicted with people who hold this sort of ideology, but Reddit has done a lot to cater to people who think like this.
> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
But I'm sure this wouldn't be true in magical communist land. They'd be well up for ploughing resources into r/cats and absolutely wouldn't be sending you off to dig up a field to improve production for the next five year plan.
I mean that there is a spectrum ranging from paying the bills and making profit to blatantly exploiting everyone involved. Based on the Apollo logistics, reddit API pricing seems to fall on the greedy end of the spectrum. At the same time we have examples with high-traffic websites (e.g. Wikipedia) which manage to build upon volunteer effort and be sustainable without pissing everyone off within a few days.
They're not making profit, that's the entire point.
> Sorry but I'm not really a fan of this "make your own (...)" attitude, especially when excusing corporate behavior against volunteers
I'm similarly not a fan of discounting just how much money and work goes into building a company with millions of users, having helped do that in the past. My comment was not glib, it was entirely sincere; if you want to know just how much it costs, host your own community and see just how "greedy" it is.
The thing is that they should be able to introduce their API pricing without triggering the events of the past days. I'm not even remotely an expert, but the pricing seems too aggressive and seems to contradict was communicated earlier (again based on the apollo transcripts).
On the other hand they are supposed to be experts, or they should at least ask one, given the millions of users, thousands of mods, etc involved.
Per Christian (the Apollo app dev): "(...) Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls." [1]
All assuming he is not lying (which I have no reason to believe, contrary to the reddit reps). Two orders of magnitude over Imgur pricing sounds a bit greedy, unless Imgur is also at the verge of collapse, which I'm not aware of.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
He's got a sweetheart deal.
https://api.imgur.com/#commercial takes us to https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing
There is no $166 plan. The least expensive $500/month plan is "only" 7.5M requests per month.
50M requests under the ultra plan (7.5M requests and then $0.001 for each one after) would cost $43k/month - and it would be more sensible to go to the "mega" plan then which is $10k/month for 150M API calls.
Just the simple fact that most of Wikipedia can largely be cached long(ish) term via CDNs reduces the capital needed to keep it running. reddit on the other hand, has constantly changing content, user configured listings, threaded discussion, media hosting, etc. Caching those types of things is a lot more difficult.
You mean like how Wikipedia has pages that anyone can edit that can (and do) get edited many times per minute?
> user configured listings
Kind of like how Wikipedia supports saved articles and reading lists?
> threaded discussion
If only each article on Wikipedia had a discussion page where you could talk about edits to the page. We could call it the Talk page. But I guess that’s too dynamic for them.
> media hosting
I’ve always thought Wikipedia would be better if they had images and maybe even videos to go with each article. Maybe we should petition them to add this.
Of course, I have trouble taking this seriously when I suspect there's a huge amount of overlap between people decrying profit-seeking behavior here but who also are fine with wrongthink communities being banned out of advertiser revenue concerns.
This seems like a more narrow problem, where the goal of new companies is no longer "Build good product, acquire users, slowly and steadily grow", it's "Build a product, give it away for free at a loss for years, get millions in VC funding, sell your users out, destroy product while laughing to the bank to repeat the process". Seems to really have picked up in the past 20 years or so, and largely specific to the United States.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate
Coincides almost perfectly with zero or below 5% interest rates.
It is like this "Karen"-meme where the protagonist and antagonist are mixed up. The nominal protagonist blames Karen for the employer's fault. If you make money as being a firewall between the Karen and your boss, you are the problem, not Karen.
Every contributor and consumer of every post on Reddit was being exploited for profit. That’s why social media platforms exist, to exploit its users for profit.
The users are the product, always have been. It’s unfortunate, but the internet is businesses all the way down.
Of course, that's setting aside the more radical position of "social media is fundamentally harmful to humans, therefore we should all stop using it regardless".
In fact, I’m always a little bemused at the level of shock from folks, especially here, when a company does what companies will inevitably do.
Reddit, doesn’t exist for the good of its users, outside of retaining significant numbers for the purposes of generating profit from selling their data and selling ad space.
Like every other social platform, the primary motive is profit, full stop.
It absolutely feels sleazy that billions of people freely contribute their time and talent to generate content and then get pushed aside when the companies business model changes. But everyone should absolutely expect that from day one.
Social platforms are a fun, but one sided relationship that will eventually turn sour.
I'm not saying they have no legal right to try - of course they do. I'm just saying it doesn't work because nobody thinks they should be allowed to let it work.
How they run the site and whether they need to make a profit is of no consequence to users - they don't give a shit. You can't make them give a shit. It wasn't who they attracted. They don't have a 100 million users who want them to make a profit. They have 100 million users who don't give the slightest crap about whether they make any money at all.
Yes, trying to generate profit on value they don't create is freeloading. Quite literally, in fact. It is the literal definition of freeloading to try to extract value by taking advantage of what others do. You don't argue they create the value, but instead because they own the platform they are allowed to extract it.
Legally, yes. But that's sort of irrelevant. Socially, no.
The crux of your argument is basically "if my ideology is right than investors are dumb and this is a bad investment" I would agree with that. It was always a bad investment. It still is!
Precisely because freeloading of the kind they are doing always generates enough ire over time to ruin the community. Usually before you can extract enough profit to be worth it.
You can feel sorry for platforms, and for me, that's okay. But you still haven't shown that i'm actually wrong, and in fact, what i've said is backed up by the consistent failure of things that operate the way you seem to think is okay.
I mostly feel sad for you. You seem to have forgotten somewhere along the line that corporations as a kind of entity were created to serve society (not investors), and not the other way around.
I'm not saying all things this large should be non-profit, mind you, just that the kind of skimming that reddit is trying to do, where they think they can make a few bucks in profit per user through freeloading, is neither helpful to society, and doesn't work anyway!
It is Reddit’s to use at that point, right or wrong.
Unless the community were to just up and leave, I’m not sure anything changes. People provide other social media services their content for free too, even those they don’t like.
I look at these situations where growth is the main goal and it's always a matter of time before the goal outgrows the actual utility or function of the company itself. Reddit really has a job of just keeping the servers online and being there to enforce basic "property" rights.
They make a boat load of money from the dumb cosmetic features of the site.
I used to believe that too, but reality has convinced me of the opposite. There isn't, and there has never been, a large (hundreds of millions of active users) online community that wasn't run by a for-profit entity. So the really difficult part, the one where the value ultimately comes from, does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users. If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it.
The demise of Reddit has been a long time coming, and now that it is actually happening, there is once again no plan for "the community" to move forward. The open source alternatives are all effectively worthless, with Lemmy apparently telling people not to sign up (yep, seriously!) because they can't handle the influx. No doubt Facebook & Co, or perhaps new commercial competitors, are going to pick up the slack as usual, because the real value is in the infrastructure and network effects that make platforms like Reddit possible in the first place.
While not a message board, the Wikimedia Foundation does well financially, hosts lots of content, receives massive traffic, and has an open API.
> So the really difficult part, the one where the value ultimately comes from, does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users.
Federated authentication and open protocols are a thing. Imagine the internet of old with countless message boards, but under a single sign on.
As far as content moderation, folks talk a lot about AI and the spam it will bring, however, there is also the opportunity for AI moderation.
In theory, yes. In practice, they are a niche endeavor used by a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds.
Lemmy is constantly mentioned in these discussions as an open source, federated Reddit alternative, yet the largest Lemmy instance has 1500 monthly active users. That's... nothing. There are tens of thousands of individual subreddits bigger than that. The "Fediverse" isn't going anywhere.
The Internet is not moving towards open communication protocols, it's moving away from them.
There are anti-spam measures that don't require locking down protocols. Ideally, a user's feed would only consist of message boards they subscribe to. Similarly, message boards could limit posting to subscribed users, approved users, paying users, or those users with a "certificate" proving their human - the latter would be akin to certificate authorities we have today who assign certificates to websites.
> It's generally not in the interest of commercial providers to use open protocols.
Not to derail, but that's the capitalist's contradiction: a capitalist points to competition as a theoretical advantage of capitalism, but then in practice does everything to eliminate it.
Of course. Locking down protocols is never required. It's being done because it benefits the largest service providers by restricting their users' ability to move elsewhere. You're acting as if the status quo is an unfortunate situation that can be resolved by giving service providers the necessary technologies to interoperate. The exact opposite is the case. Service providers are actively undermining open protocols (EEE). They are very much aware that federation is possible, and they do not want it.
I agree which is why it will take a 501(c)(3) non-profit to drive the change.
That makes scaling the main instance impractical without redesigning how its built, deployed, secured, and connects to its backend database.
Note also that adding other sites increases this load without adding users as polling for content constantly is likely more expensive than having a user connect directly (and use it for a limited time).
I don't know anything about federation, but what you said basically describes the Internet when it started, so I don't see how you can imagine it is not going anywhere based on that. Most tech starts as a "niche endeavor of a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds" (I'm also thinking of Apple starting at a computer club).
The ever present nags to donate would beg to differ
Usenet.
That's certainly news to me.
Do people forget it's a common protocol that isn't monopolized by anyone and is the widest prevalent even today, perhaps because of it?
Your logic is: there has never been a not-for-profit large online community, therefore the value comes from the specific for-profit company that currently exists.
That is unconvincing because it is overly specific in who it is attributing value to. Is Facebook responsible for most of the value of its community? No, because if Facebook didn't exist, Myspace would still exist and do the same thing that Facebook is doing. Therefore, Facebook (and Myspace) are both not creating the value, because if they didn't exist, someone else would exist that does the same thing. The main reason there's one behemoth is because of network effects, which makes it nearly impossible for competition to start, which gives the illusion that that behemoth is doing something unique and exceptionally skilful. But they are not. One valid interpretation is that they're free-riding off the community that they've captured.
No, my logic is: there has never been a not-for-profit large online community, therefore the value comes from infrastructure, network effects, and brand recognition – and not from "the community" as commonly claimed. Once the infrastructure is in place (which requires immense upfront investment) and enough money is spent on promotion, the userbase will cross the critical threshold required for growth, and content will be generated as a result.
Just think about it: If it's really "the users" that bring all the value to the table, then why can't those users manage to organize into a community that's not run by greedy profiteers? Because the "running" is where the real difficulty, and thus the real source of value, is.
That's reasonable, but then you leap from there into giving credit to Reddit per se, instead of a Reddit-like company that would exist in Reddit's place if Reddit didn't exist. That's where we disagree. In Reddit's absence, another company would rise to do the same thing, therefore Reddit is providing little to no unique value to the world. The delta of the world with and without Reddit is close to zero. Hence no value.
> If it's really "the users" that bring all the value to the table, then why can't those users manage to organize into a community that's not run by greedy profiteers? Because the "running" is where the real difficulty, and thus the real source of value, is.
This is a conflation of necessary and sufficient conditions. Infrastructure, by itself, is a necessary but not sufficient condition. So are users. Either of these things in isolation have no value because neither of them are sufficient conditions.
You almost act as if some people stumbled upon great software/infrastructure and improperly started charging people to use it. This isn’t some mountain spring some company claimed and is now charging the tribes down stream for access.
The communities on Reddit aren’t the valuable part. I don’t visit 99% of the subreddits. The valuable thing is I can go on one site, find a subreddit for everything I’m interested in, participate with the same account and have no learning curve/same UI/UX as the other communities I’m a part of. You can try to argue that those communities being there is what’s valuable to me, but without Reddit they all wouldn’t be on the same site.
Your argument reads as some poor adaption of the labor theory of value. Right now Reddit isn’t profitable, as long as these economics hold, no one is going to fill in for Reddit if it were to close. And all the mods and users can’t change that.
Without a Reddit-like company, they wouldn't all be on the same site. That's the key distinction. If a clone won't arise if Reddit shuts down, then yes, you are correct, Reddit is adding a lot of value. As is, given they have a monopoly on this vertical of social media due to network effects, whether or not a clone would arise is a hypothesis that we can't test, but my money would be on a clone arising in their absence.
That's not the definition of "value" that everyone uses.
Suppose there was a bread company called Breddit that baked loaves of bread and sold them. It's very easy to argue that if Breddit didn't exist, someone else would bake and sell bread. No duh. But that doesn't mean a company that makes bread doesn't have value.
There's pretty much no company in the world that offers unique value...
The same is true for the users. There are 8 billion people on the planet, two thirds of which use the Internet. There's no shortage of users able to form online communities. By the above logic, those communities have no value since they are replenishable from a near-limitless supply of new users.
Why would anyone invest in this IPO they are trying so hard to make happen? I can’t think of anything left for them to do after this length of time to become profitable. The only things left are the things they are doing that alienate the user base. It seems Reddit is Uber and WeWork with a different hat on.
Reddit replaced Digg. Some other startup will replace Reddit.
It’s the users and the content they produce that’s irreplaceable.
Maybe sites like this will only be able to function in the long run if there is some profit sharing involved. Every user gets X ads in their feed every month, and for every 5X posts or 50X comments one ad disappears.
What?
Sure there have been. Somethingawful? 4chan? Wikipedia? Usenet? etc
They each commanded a significant portion of the attention of the community on the internet at the time.
If you don't limit it to hundreds of millions, i belong to mid-sized successful communities (woodworking, electrical, DIY, etc) that are maybe 100k-1 million users, doing fine, have been doing fine for decades, and don't have for-profit entities behind them.
In fact, almost all meaningful communities i have belonged to online were not run by for-profit entities. Some later got taken over by for-profit entities, but then failed ;)
"does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users. If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it."
This is not at all related to the for-profit piece. The difficulty is in becoming popular, which seems to be, maybe mostly luck? Because unlike what you say, everyone is doing it. Is there any evidence at all that the for-profit was a pre-req to being popular?
In a world where reddit was not for-profit from the start, i don't think it would have changed anything.
It was a place that most Digg users were willing to go to. That was dumb luck. If Digg had not been so stupid, Reddit would not be popular, for-profit or not.
For the long term survival of Reddit it is essential they become profitable, otherwise they’ll go bankrupt. And seeing that these communities depend on the existence of Reddit it’s also in the interest of these communities that Reddit turns a profit.
They seem to have serious revenue, about 500M in 2021 (https://businessmodelanalyst.com/reddit-business-model/), you’d think they could make a profit based on that. They had 2000 employees in June 2023 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit), assuming average of 100K cost per employee, that already adds up to 200M.
That may seem excessive for running some community website, but they get 400M+ from ads. Just running an organization to handle a 400M+ business for ads will require lots of people, infra, marketing, etc.
I can see the reasoning behind the thought that if you’ve created all this to enable these communities, someone doing less that 1% of the work, by simply putting an app on top of your APIs and infra and starting to make a profit seems unfair.
What i don’t understand is why they can’t outcompete these apps by providing a better app.
The good apps are (a) free, and (b) don't show any ads. Pretty much by definition they can't compete with that and make money.
I used Apollo because it provides a much better user experience and it is not even close to Reddits own App.
I guess they can't and they won't unless they become a NGO.
And I’d say that aiming for long term viability by ensuring they run at least break even is in the interest of their users, so not sure how their current actions are against the interest if their users.
And the fact that users put time and effort in creating content on the platform, this doesn’t mean all its services need to be provided for free to these users.
Oh boy. First, this already happened once, that's why Reddit exists. Second, it wasn't happening because it wasn't enough of a problem. Once they generate enough ire it will happen. Will this be enough? Maybe. If not, something else will. It always happens.
always
When for-profits are involed.
You make the same mistake they do - to believe that the success they have is deliberate, and not just mostly dumb luck. Had Digg not failed, nobody would give the slightest shit about reddit. But right up until that point, what you said here could have been said about Digg. In fact, it was said. By lots of people. Yet they moved to Reddit.
In the end, these communities don't exist because of reddit. They exist because people have shared interests. The only thing reddit enables is for them to find each other. If reddit disappears, they will find each other again. I've watched the end of similar sites. I had friends on them. We found each other again on other sites.
Reddit has just laid off employees and is probably paying 4-5x it was before for financing due to interest rates and has to find new sources of revenue, and quickly, IPO or not. Users are great for building communities but they can just as easily turn into a non-rational mob like is being done here.
Reddit, like so many other places, believes it has a right to extract the value the community creates.
But it doesn't. It didn't create the value, the community did. It convinces itself it has a right to profit here, but it really created almost none of the value.
It is then surprised when it can't just sit and extract value from the community without pushback.
This kind of value extraction only works (If at all), when the value being provided by the company is somewhere near that being provided by the community.
Then people are a little more willing to feel like you deserve something.
In reddit's case, it's very uneven. Despite providing the website and bandwidth, Reddit feels to most of its community like a large scale freeloader, as funny as that may sound.
That sort of relationship eventually goes south, though it takes a while sometimes.
All of these places eventually discover that they are not the thing driving real value.
Those that are smart realize this early on, try to make as much as they can while they can, and diversify before it all goes to shit.
Reddit is not one of those.