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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!
>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.