But network effects businesses are really hard to kill. Sure, Musk has set $20-30 billion on fire and Twitter is rapidly decaying. But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos. It would have been out of business long before, instead of merely shrinking significantly.

Twitter and Reddit are just run by incompetents who can’t figure out how to advertise anything relevant.

Trying to monetize that at scale is hardddd.

Facebook has got groups, yes. But they have instagram. Messenger. Whatsapp. They have my friends and family. They have my photos going back 10 years. Facebook is personal to many people.

I don't see Twitter and Facebook being interchangeable.

What does Reddit's core functionality cost? They have annual revenue of half a billion dollars. Tell me that you can't use that money to run a text distribution infrastructure.

I doubt Slashdot in its day cost half a million dollars to run.

I wish there was Usenet servers to back that up - which didn't carry the binaries or unsavory newsgroups.

The fact that I subscribe to r/woodworking, r/diy, etc, is really useful for targeting but I never see relevant ads.

I’ve literally given Reddit a big list of my interests and the asked to be served content, and the ads are almost completely unrelated.

Good thing nobody is asking for that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2g2

[2] https://www.h2g2.com/

However, the drawback is they had a lot of great ideas for improvements but the power users throw a fit over any changes.

Such a freq complaint it's a cliché.

Certainly been true for every software product and service I've worked.

The events leading up to the US 2020 election are burned into my mind. Sure people tend to talk about the craziness of the US far-Right but the non-centrist Left also got attacked and censored.

In one case a popular Youtuber on the Left (Kyle Kulisnki) had posted some commentary on independent attack ads that were extremely negative to the Democratic party. That led to a multiple threads on Wikipedia calling for the deletion of his page.

After 3 attempts to remove his page by the same editor, it finally got removed on the 4th attempt.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

Watching this whole experience play out in real time was utterly disgusting and showed me how the site has since become captured.

Its a shame because despite calls for secondary sourcing in my experience many people do in fact trust Wikipedia whole heartedly. It is really dangerous that leadership did not clamp down on this behavior when it was happening. Now they have exposed themselves to attacks from the far right and eventually people with a lot of exposure (People like Musk) might call them out(if he hasn't already). That will begin the slow slide into half the country not trusting the site at all and their minds being made up no matter what Wikipedia does.

Interestingly the page was recreated over a year later after the election was over but the lasting damage has been done. I presume that in the next election it will be targeted again.

We see this behavior on other platforms such as Reddit during election season and you can be sure that Musk is whipping up something big for 2024 (and his rivals are probably developing some sort of countermeasure) but I thought I could always count on Wikipedia being a place of refuge. I guess not.

Back in the day (2006-2010ish, I think) I was a pretty active member of the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians. I was kind of on a crusade against people who would put up their own pages to try to promote themselves, in violation of the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy. Mainly, I was worried that it would be untenable to keep WP accurate if we had too many pages. I also went on a rampage deleting pages for individual pokemon, which I'm not proud of. There was a well-established consensus at the time that most individual pokemon did not meet the notability threshold (I don't remember the exact criteria, but it had to do with multiple sources of the information being available) and therefore their pages should be deleted. Looking back, that was kinda silly... The Wikipedia is not Paper policy probably outweighs the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy when it comes to Pokemon.

Anyway, I don't doubt that there is a political element in the case of this Kyle guy, but it's probable that I would have voted to have him deleted on completely apolitical grounds. (I haven't heard of him and haven't read enough to form a political or notability opinion on him at this point)

I find it amusing that pokemons get pages, but real people don't.

Yeah, notability, I get it. Still.

This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by "intangible as well as tangible things" which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which at the same time are recognized as the tangible par excellence.

"""

Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord

And of course, giving back to Debord, we can say that the society of the spectacle is one of infinite supply of manufactured social objects.

"sometimes it's not political" is not really a defense to the claim of "this time it probably was".

Anyway, the problem is there's a lot of valuable content on wikipedia that is essentially borderline according to the rules, but also delivers a lot of value, and this content exists at the suffrage of whether or not they have some greasy nerd as patron or whether another one gets a bee up their ass about it.

"Lists" policy is a great example, and I've seen quite a few important lists go through cycles where despite being a de-facto resource for 10 or 15 years, all of a sudden some editor will get a bee up their ass and just delete it all, because WP:Lists and WP:OriginalResearch. But of course having been the resource for 15 years, nobody external has bothered to collate a list that already exists on wikipedia, so we just lose that information unless some other greasy nerd pushes back on it.

The wikipedia editor cadre sucks, it's the definitive answer to the question of "what's the absolute least power that can go to someone's head". It's a real problem with the public trying to interact with wikipedia, much like stackoverflow answers everyone just knows it's not worth the time and does their damndest not to interact with it if they have any other alternatives.

And yes, "anyone can do it" in principle but it's not the public's job to push uphill to try and chase out bad actors in the organization. People won't do it and they'll just go do better things and you'll be left with a bioconcentrated poison - it's the "dead sea effect" in action. A sufficient concentration of poison will kill any life that might have any chance of remediating the poison.

Just in case anyone here is taking paulmd too literally, it's not possible for "some editor" or any one person to cause an article or list on WP to be deleted. If I remember correctly (and if it hasn't changed) speedy deletion requires at least 3 people, and if it's contested then there's a whole voting procedure. Speaking as a (former?) greasy nerd, I've actually always been impressed with the democracy and consensus systems on Wikipedia; it strikes me as pretty effective, especially compared to most governments.

You're probably right that self-aggrandizement and gatekeeping is a problem among wikipedians.

I'm sorry to hear the diagnosis is terminal... but since you say you've been complaining for at least 5 years, maybe WP has a few more years to live?

(anybody curious about how deletion works, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction_to_dele... )

Well, that's the point of the stackoverflow comparison. Nobody actually goes to stackoverflow to ask questions anymore. The culture is rotten and there are better places to ask. It's become "read-only" for most of its potential userbase, people actively avoid using it. But is there still a site called stackoverflow? Yes. It's just lingering in agony, like many cancer patients. Doesn't mean without some turn in fortunes (or leadership) that it's ever going to come back though.

> Did you try proposing a policy change

That's the thing I said though... why would I voluntarily choose to spend more time working with a toxic organization in a fruitless attempt to solve its organizational culture for them? Not only is that not actually going to change anything but it's a huge drain on me personally for little direct benefit. Why is it my responsibility to tilt at windmills to try and fix your organizational culture?

That's the whole point about StackOverflow and Wikipedia's culture problems in a nutshell: at a certain point you are just so toxic that nobody who's not interested in the game-playing itself is going to tolerate the game-playing. And at that point you have the "dead-sea effect" going, because the game-players will always stay around.

Is this a little unreasonable in the abstract? Sure, I am not engaging with the organization and then complaining when it doesn't work the way I want it to. But this is the practical reality - the public isn't going to build a better Wikipedia organization just for the sake of it. If you have a viable organization then some of them will contribute content, maybe. And if your editors piss it all away because it didn't meet X rule or Y rule then you will simply have a worse product, and in the long term people will stop contributing content because they see it doesn't matter (which is where we are with wikipedia right now in general).

I am not being prescriptive here - merely remarking on a phenomenon that is observable. Nobody likes interacting with StackOverflowers or Wikipedians. They're, on the whole, kinda shitty people, and the product is worse as a result of this public disengagement. And this is not an uncommon opinion, you will not find a single person on Reddit who speaks positively of StackOverflow or Wikipedia's organizational culture, everyone (including their CEOs) knows they suck to interact with. The culture is toxic and rotten and the organizations cannot change it because a subset of the members relish in it being toxic and rotten, and over time the projects lose steam and falter due to public disengagement. You'll always have the greasies but the public is not beating down SO's door in 2023 to enlarge the community or to edit wikipedia and create content they know will be reverted by some basement-dweller.

https://medium.com/@jayhanlon/welcome-wagon-dd57cbdd54d9

Anything beyond fixing a minor typo or awkward sentence is a waste of time on wikipedia, and that's really more than most people will even do to begin with. Just not interested in the social-game-playing aspects of it, and the content you create will be reverted and removed without you being an advocate for it. The gameplaying matters more than the content, and that's what's killing SO too.

But yeah, it's the paradox of intolerance in action. Being tolerant of shitty people leads to a shitty org culture or a shitty society/world. If they get too entrenched, you end up being unable to pry them off the levers of power and the dead-sea effect begins.

If it were just me, I'd keep my mouth shut (ok maybe not). Everyone knows SO and Wikipedia have culture problems. There's just also not really a way for them to move past them because the people causing those problems are powerful internal stakeholders. There's no easy solution to a rotten organizational culture and it leads to bad outcomes. It's a shame to see it happen but again, there's no magic wands to fix any of it. Whatcha gonna do.

I've had projects fail because of org culture problems (may have taken down the whole company at this point). But when the boss and the boss's boss are part of the problem, what can you realistically do? Not interact with that org anymore, that's about it.

Was it probably? I took a quick look at the deletions, the deletion reviews, and some of the older versions of the article. The article seemed to be very thin on actual citations, with way more text for a living-persons biography than I'd think reasonable for that level of sourcing. The deletion discussions were a hot mess, but my main takeway is what somebody else wrote there: "There's still not a single keep !voter here who has discussed which sources actually show notability."

Looking at the current article, my take is similar. I only skimmed, but I'm not seeing a lot of WP:RS compliant sources listed that would persuade me of notability even now; it's an awful lot of citation to his own works.

No need for such verbal contortion.

You're describing the far-right (Republican Party) and center-right (Democratic Party).

Left parties in the USA include Green Party, DSA, CPUSA, etc. They are largely irrelevant.

However, it doesn't have to be limited to legislations passed, but rather what is widely being discussed and pushed forward by the Democratic factions, the biggest example is the "Green New Deal"; more government intervention, increased spendings, massive expansion of state power.

US Senate and the solid blue core? Still firmly center-right.

For instance, Republicans are very unlikely to be elected in my city. So competitive candidates call themselves Democrats. And to establish their bonafidas, they might even hold a few select leftish positions to brag about. But when it comes to legislating and appropriations, the boring stuff that no one pays attention to, they're just as nimby, reactionary, regressive as any generic Republican.

Who are the likes? How many of them are there? AOC is a house representative; is there a progressive senator?

Is "VC" tech's catch-all for capitalism? Reddit is pining to go public and Twitter just LBO'd. Neither is having its chain yanked by venture capital.

Took. Past tense. Limited need to take more. Look at Reddit's Board: it's ten people, only one of whom (Mike Seibel) is a VC.

No, they can ignore the venture capitalists' shares. Reddit's Series F was led by a mutual fund. Most of Reddit's shares are non-voting common stock, under a voting-rights agreement or held by non-VC investors.

The difference is meaningful when tracing incentives. Venture capital, almost by definition, involves a high-loss high-reward portfolio. Most bets are expected to bust. That makes a middling bet that doesn't return the fund essentially worthless, which in turn encourages shooting for the moon. Late-stage private portfolios cannot sustain heavy losses. They are looking at preservation of capital in addition to returns, which makes them fundamentally different from VCs.

Shorthanding all investors in tech companies to VCs denies you visibility into a rich spectrum of actors, incentives and alignments.

Most of Reddit's shares were issued in the era of founder-friendly voting rights agreements. The fact that those investors don't have anyone on the Board means they don't have the right to elect one to it. Private-company Board rules are Byzantine. But they're not thoughtless.

No. It's a term specific for those investors working with: I don't expect you to survive, but if you don't get at least 10000% of return, you could as well be dead.

Almost all of capitalism works differently.

Well, not anymore.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sal...

Thing is, Twitter was profitable in 2019. Then the venture capitalists decided "Now is the time to increase your workforce by a factor of two. You need to start losing money again or you aren't trying hard enough!"

You can’t just shrink it. That’s the problem. They still think of it as a factory where everyone is just a robot.

Most places lack enough documentation and processes that shrinking the teams reduce knowledge. There is never an even distribution of skill sets etc. You kill off team dynamics. It’s not the same.

You can’t just slot people in and out without impact in software.

Fine in what sense? There's less features, less capacity and more outages. They couldn't even hold someone's presidential announcement fine without it breaking. Is that fine?

As a business they've gained debt and lost a lot of income. Is that fine? With less income, less ads and less of everything it's a different scale. Something that's fine with 1 million users is not the same as 10 million.

I would say it's different - different ownership, different direction etc. Time will tell what the outcome is. Projects have been axed and new 1s will appear.

The changing of staff has definitely hurt Twitter. Whether they can recover is a different question.

If you double the number of employees of some place in a year, you have a really large risk of completely redefining its entire culture. And a software business has basically 2 things, a culture and locked-in people.

Lots of places reported people having nothing to do, don't know what to do and lacked direction. The hiring standards also went down.

If you didn't follow conventions, your onboarding wasn't great or reinforced, then very few things in your system will be consistent.

If, on the other hand, you hire 100% more people, then fire 50% of the people and try to use that culling to get rid of a lot of older (and more expensive) employees, you can doom your company.

You've just rephrased the exact issue I had differently. It doesn't matter if it's a new division or not unless your organization doesn't interact.

People have to go via onboarding and other steps. It involves HR "people and culture", the internal IT teams, the reception, you might get assigned a mentor, etc. These interactions spread when people socialize.

It's also as people and possibly shareholders how you view the company. Watch any sports and a player in form in the right team can perform 10x better. These so-called minimal disruptions actually have an impact.

Meta was paying a higher salary because less people wanted to work there. I don't see all the negatives as "minimal consequences".

So they got investment and scaled up to everyday users. Terrible redesign but at least the site doesn't look nerdy anymore, right? There are now actual advertisers on board. People are paying for badges and hats. They are tracking the shit out of people and pushing the app. They're on the way to profitability, and the next step is to cut out the old guard - who they couldn't monetize anyway - by removing third party apps.

Their costs are almost certainly ridiculous but their plan is either to become the next TikTok or crash and burn.

Cynically, nobody is going to donate to a full or nearly full "donations requested" bar, so nobody is going to specify a bar that gets full.

I'd rather contribute to something that is actually going to be successful.

If you say you need £1000000 to go to space, and ask for £10 sponsorship, if you tell me you've so far raised nothing, what chance is there of my money going to use as intended? If on the other hand you've raised £999000 I can be more confident you are actually going to reach your goal.

Also personally, it seems to me that if you have a goal, then that's a minimum. If you don't reach it, the thing doesn't happen. A website never reaching its funding goals is one that seems more likely to shut down, and what's the point of supporting something that could shut down tomorrow because it can't pay it's way. I know that's self reinforcing but there it is.

Income is the same as profit.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1260066/reddit-advertisi...

Shareholders care not for employee happiness, in so far as said employee is working and producing. Ditto with user happiness - if they're not happy they can leave. By not leaving, they must be happy to stay.

I think these proposals to "change" the metrics is as flawed as the current system.

The only way to avoid that I know is to address a specific target audience and scale up to dominate that. Tumblr has achieved this. A rival then can't dislodge you because you already own the relevant network. It's still risky though, because if a rival builds a product that covers the general audience and also servers that subset well, then the subset might decamp. Hence Tumblr trying to break out of it's niche. G+ addressed a lot of niches very well, but Google just wasn't interested in that kind of network.

Facebook is astoundingly profitable, and is the canonical example of network effects. Almost everyone I've ever known is or was on Facebook.

So I don't consider Network Effect Businesses to be terrible as for-profits in and of themselves.

The issue perhaps is that there is an expectation that they can become Google or Facebook.

Now we have a generation raised on social media that doesn't require your real name, maybe we will see a new platform reach Facebook levels.

TikTok and YouTube are obviously huge, but slightly different again to Facebook.

As an aside, people talk about how amazing Tik Tok is, but in the end, it's really just the creators uploading content that make it work.

Facebook captured Advertising dollars, in part, by investing in Ad infrastructure and building tools that companies could use to create targeted Ads. Every other platform, apart from AdWords, felt unfinished, especially Twitter!

Unfortunately any platform that draws >10 million daily users will reliably have people calling and offering billions of dollars to adopt that strategy and chase after revenue growth. Eventually the owner breaks down and agrees to take a huge personal payoff in order for the company to adopt a "Double or nothing" policy. Over, and over again.

There's too many enormous piles of money out there seeking a return for this to be a sensible self-regulating system with stable provision of goods & services.

Holdouts are few and far between, like Craigslist.

All of the BigTech companies are built on network effects and two sided markets

I think doing feature development on big socio-technical systems with an entrenched user base, is fundamentally hard.

On the other hand there are sites like Danbooru which seem to thrive without advertising probably because the nature of their content drives advertising away.

I know that is a minefield of issues regarding access and moderation and it would make it a frequent election day financial harassment target but it would be nice to have something that is publicly funded, ad free, and not vulnerable to deep pockets stealing the entire system from the people.

Musk keeps picking fights with vendors; the latest feud with Google means they may soon lose significant trust and safety tooling. Twitter keeps losing staff, Ella Irwin being the latest, and word is that they're running skeleton crews for core functionality, with a lot of the current staff being people who are trapped in the jobs by visas and the like. That suggests we'll be seeing more messes like the failure of DeSantis's campaign launch.

And that's all off the top of my head. If you want to read more, I'd suggest Casey Newton's articles on it; he's been covering it pretty well.

Yes, lot's of people tried Mastodon as an alternative, but I still see almost all my followees on Twitter.

Twitters users, the advertisers, have noticed. Thus the revenue decrease. Twitter's product, sets of eyeballs, are still around (despite being compositionally a different population, mostly).

Sure, if you like cat mutilation and transphobia and white supremacist propoganda. But you be you.

It's not illegal either.

And then someone gave a valid response.

And then you responded to this response by saying "Twitter as a private entity does not have to just say, "Welp, it's legal" to anything that happens on their site."

This response is a non-sequitor.

Nobody in this thread said that twitter is forced to do anything. Instead, the original claim is that this was an improvement.

And yes, twitter is allowed to make this change where they censor less things.

The claim I'm responding to was in the a part you failed to quote, "censorship". Censorship is generally meant as suppression of content, not behavior. In the case described, Twitter was cracking down on harassment, not specific content.

As a clear example, imagine I call you up at all hours of the day and night, reciting the Bill of Rights every time you answer. When you stop answering, I show up out front of your house with a bullhorn and start reading the Federalist Papers at maximum volume. When you call the police and they haul me off, is that censorship? In typical usage, no, because the problem is not my ideas expressed.

The point being that some people think that all legal speech, or legal "insert whatever word you want to describe what twitter now allows" should be allowed on the platform.

So talking about "Twitter as a private entity" is not really a valid response, and actually works against you.

It is not a valid response because twitter the private entity is now choosing to allow this stuff, whatever you want to call it.

> When you call the police

In the context of these types of conversations, people are usually saying that they want all legal behavior to be allowed on the platform, not illegal behavior.

People saying that are generally people who have not tried to run a for-profit social media site. Or even thought about it much, really.

To have a functioning social media platform these days, you need a lot of users and a lot of advertisers. This means you need the site to feel reasonably safe and welcoming to all concerned. However, many of those people and brands do not want to spend time around many of the things that are in a typical T&S policy. Which is why all major platforms converged on pretty similar policies, and why the anything-goes platforms tended to stay niche and look like incel Klan rallies.

It's not like Jack Dorsey really cared about anybody but Jack Dorsey. Ceteris paribus, he would have been happy to stick with Twitter's original "free speech wing of the free speech party" ethos, if only because it saved a lot on moderation costs. But he recognized that his platform could either have the racist shitgibbons or the people that said shitgibbons got their kicks from attacking, by which I mean the great bulk of humanity.

There's also the moral and practical vacuity of treating "whatever the legislature voted on" as the correct standard for anything except criminal enforcement, but let that pass for now.

Your understanding of the law is highly dubious.

After: reporting on e.g. Russia invasion of Ukraine gets you shadowbanned, troll farm accounts get boosted once they pay for Blue.

Definite improvement, if you run a state sponsored propaganda troll farm.

Earlier I used to see irrelevant ads. Now I see suspicious ones, like one promising an AI girlfriend and another one promoting some dubious bitcoin token and random people promoting themselves.

That explains why the rest of your comment doesn’t make sense to me. IMHO Casey Newton is a vulture journalist. He specializes in exaggerate and twist every minor problem he can find in tech companies.

But I am one of Twitter's first 500 users and am a former Twitter employee who keeps an eye on Twitter. And I think Newton's doing a much better job of reporting on Twitter than most places.

For the average user who enjoys free speech more than not, Twitter is better now.

You're wrong about the "average user" enjoying "free speech", of course. That's the view Twitter started out on, "the free speech wing of the free speech party". But they learned that certain kinds of speech drove away users and made it hard to sell ads, so for very good business reasons, they decided to take away the "free speech" of people to, say, shout the n-word at black people. [1]

I believe you enjoy it more, of course. But other people enjoy it less. You and Musk are making the same mistake in thinking a thing that you like is a thing that everybody will like. Running a social network means you have to create something that is liked by a very wide variety of people. And a lot of people who wave the "free speech" banner just turn out to want no constraints on their own speech, while having much less concern about creating a place where a wide variety of people can safely speak up and be heard.

[1] Something that surged under Musk's new "free speech" regime. e.g., https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/tech/twitter-hate-speech/inde...

I don't recall it being truly necessary before, though there were annoying banners sometimes.

But right now "age restricted" tweets require a login, and the thing that makes tweets age restricted is the presence of images plus a very buggy per-account setting.

https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-removes-autocomplete...

Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter, 10, searching for cat videos.

There have been other examples beyond that cat video too, that just got a lot of attention.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%20Cats&src=typed_query

> It was later fixed for ‘cats’, but it took a while.

I don't think Twitter has ever been a place for children.

I picture my mother using Twitter, searching for cat videos.

She can search YouTube for cats and not get that stuff.

But I frequently think of my kids even for situations they don't directly risk. Call it an empathy gauge.

We also didn't have the massive amount of statistical evidence in mental health that came to light just recently about teenage social media use, especially in girls. Several times these studies have made it to the top of HN.

https://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias...

Overall this comment is weird to me. Does this show Elon was wrong and the org should continue being massively overstaffed and burning money like before?

Not that it's any better presenting such videos to 13 year olds. Or adults, for that matter.

Anecdotally, due to Musk's support of extreme-right views (for example re-inviting Trump [2], supporting DeSantis [3], or protecting bullying [4]), many people have left in protest and so these views are over-represented on the site.

The word "decay" seems appropriate.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/technology/elon-musk-twit... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/19/business/twitter-musk-trump-r... [3] https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-... [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitte...

His overall summary was that he saved Twitter by firing unnecessary staff.

Everyone in Silicon Valley screeched that this was an evil move by an evil person, and that Twitter would immediately crash and burn without all those thousands of infinitely valuable developers and IT admins.

That was in October 2022, nearly 8 months ago. Twitter is still up, and hasn't imploded.

As a business, it's obviously fucked. Revenues are down, regulators are circling and it's difficult to see them recovering when Musk has made a habit of publicly pillorying his customers.

Granted, it was the last boom's RJR-Nabisco/Harrah's Entertainment top-tick LBO, so it started the race ass first. But it's difficult to see Twitter avoiding restructuring, a necessarily distracting and value-debilitating process. (On even a generous revenue multiple, its equity value is zero.)

Musk's only face-saving exit is to fold when a foreign regulator fines him.

Yeah, maybe if what users are actually doing is bully each other you shouldn't support that.

Could quote tweets be used by ringleaders of mob abuse? Sure. But the solution to that isn't to remove the feature. There are many other ways to deal with that, including banning the people who enjoy fomenting mob abuse campaigns.

I dunno, look at private equity buyouts, which Twitter kind of resembles—Musk somehow convinced banks and Twitter itself to foot most of the bill for his purchase.

The whole point is to avoid putting money into the prey company by saddling it with debt, while you squeeze every last cent of value out of its living corpse. It can take a long time for companies to die when this happens: Sears is a solid case study from recent times.

https://ivyexec.com/career-advice/2018/sears-case-business-f...

Considering how little of his own money Musk spent on the deal, I wouldn't be surprised if he was just having fun lighting a huge pile of other peoples' money on fire. He's obviously gotten bored with his car and spaceship toys.

Good for you and Musk! So proud of people who can put money into something and lord over it because of capitalism.

TBC: you thought the throughline was money when it was nothing. You were talking about investing money that can be used to exploit workers and turn a higher profit by paying workers less than they benefit the stakeholders. Exploiting people is an obvious immoral action.

One of the things Spez is whining about is that they’re not profitable.

https://m.slashdot.org/story/275835

And honestly, I don't care about Reddit being profitable. I care about it being sustainable.

A VC-driven push for profitability doesn't mean breaking even. It means making a shit-ton of money, yielding a very large return on their very large investment. And they are perfectly willing to destroy an adequate business if that means they are getting a chance at something larger and much more profitable.

Without a lot of internal data, we'll never know the truth of it. But I suspect that there is a sustainable version of Reddit-the-company that would do everything Reddit-the-community needs without this sort of aggressive destruction of value in pursuit of high revenue numbers.

As a small business owner myself, I can very much assure you that we're not thinking of that at all; we're thinking of ways to get back into the black!

Once we're in the black, we'll start thinking of ways to get an early retirement.

For nearly 20 years I helped run Bandwagon, a co-op of nerds who toward the end of the dot-com bubble needed a place to put their personal web projects. We clubbed together to rent a full colo rack and we each put our servers in.

There were many opportunities to try to turn this into a business. It might have been lucrative, might have been a failure. We kept it as a small co-op, and it was fine.

And right now I'm looking at starting something that I might eventually get a salary from, but if it has surplus revenues beyond that, I'd rather use it to improve the thing and its impact in the world.

I understand that a lot of people want a zillion dollars so they can live a life of luxury. To each their own, but I feel kinda bad for people who organize their lives around that. They rarely succeed, are usually quite unhappy, and frequently create a trail of pain and misery behind them.

Trying to make a massive profit is another activity altogether, and the quest to do so can easily destroy a sustainable business. As Reddit may learn.

> Profit maximization is often in conflict with sustainability.

The head count increased ten fold since Spez took over. This is because VCs want billion dollar companies, not some moderately profitable ones. They want to deliver more (so more employees) and increase monetization, including by charging for the API.

If they stayed smaller it would have been more sustainable and wouldn't have to charge for the API.

He’s chasing new markets, not doubling down on current ones. to the detriment of everyone including his companies profitability.

Congratulations Reddit! You pulled in users with no good way to cover the costs of those users.

[0] Despite any promises, the writing is on the wall.

KeyserSosa, reddit's GM at the time and now their CTO, was rather supportive of my development efforts; let me make the crappy little thing I was building an official part of reddit after a conversation on IRC

Therefore they are extremely reluctant to make changes in case they break it (e.g. old twitter), and because they don’t understand it, any large changes they do make are generally negative (new twitter, Reddit).

Plus, in my experience , users will bitterly resist any changes at all because the site doesn’t belong to management, it belongs to them. It’s their space. Changing anything is like someone’s snuck into their house at night and remodelled their lounge.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this is Reddit’s Digg moment or it’s more like the Facebook newsfeed where everyone kicked up a fuss for a bit and then carried on as before.

Instead they were busy running cost/benefit analyses on how aggressive the dark patterns to drive users to the maligned mobile app should be.

If they tell you to implement a banner or dark pattern you do it.

This reminds me a discussion with a landscaper. He was wary of landscapers who wanted to go against the flow and who view themselves as painter artists. He explained the fundamental difference between his work and the work of a painter as follows : "a painter makes a work of art for people to see, and a landscaper makes a work of art for people to live in". It's not the same to see disruptive art from time to time, and to live in a city with a disruptive landscape.

A stable environment can also allow people to build other art on top of it. Such as painter artists inspired by a sustainable landscape to create disruptive paintings.

In order for this to be Reddit's "Digg moment", there needs to be a viable candidate to switch to.

There isn't, as far as I can tell.

Until we get interoperating platforms where people can easily migrate and reward the places that treat them the best we are stuck with the few platforms that managed to create network lock-in.

The social media as a prison operating model.

https://youtu.be/0ZM9-ZbBoAc

That's probably NSFW.

HN and RSS remain in the mix. Also using my mobile browser's option to create a shortcut/browserApp for a few news sites. There really is an awful lot out there - I'm just beginning to look (again).

Interestingly... last year - with no effort on my part - reddit became an also-ran when I dived into TikTok. When I left TikTok, reddit re-entered the picture.

Obviously this is relative, it's a huge site! And there may even be value to gatekeeping users who can't figure it out.

The reason the trans people are an issue is that conservatives lost big on trying to suppress homosexuals, which in turn is just a distraction from the economic inequality and general disempowerment that regular Americans face. There is a vast right-wing conspiracy that wants to keep the conversation around culture war issues instead of, you know, making sure all people have food, clean water, shelter, healthcare, and education regardless of their economic value to the market.

Claiming authoritarian censorship displays a kind of persecution complex, especially considering you're able to claim censorship and I, a rando, am able to read it. The top articles shared on Facebook feature mostly conservative voices. Reddit is different in that it has a downvote option, available to users without HN's karma threshold. You're not getting censored, you're just espousing unpopular views.

Just like with abortion, for trans kids, the doctor's office is not big enough for the kid, the doctor, and the government. People know themselves better than we think. Kara Swisher, the tech reporter, has said she knew she was a lesbian when she was 4 (or 5). Guess what, she's still a lesbian. No kid is going to choose the difficult, scary prospect of surgery or invasive meds without a strong motivation. And kids are not getting surgery that often - it's mostly puberty blockers which are not permanent. And to be clear, I couldn't find any story about a person younger than 17 getting a surgery done. These are folks just about to leave minority age.

Also, no child is getting this without parental or guardian's consent. The idea that some liberal parent is twiddling their fingers, Mr. Burn's style, to get their child to believe they are trans is ludicrous. You have to believe there's a large group of parents who are cartoon villains attacking their own kids for clout.

But deeper than that, I know that conservatives don't actually care about children because so many of them won't have a conversation around guns which actually kill children, often mutilating their bodies so much an open casket funeral is out of the question unless it's for shock value. It is the leading cause of death for kids in the US. The Utah law against trans athletes applied to 4 people. Malnutrition deaths in Utah were 1,044 for 2022. WTF.

Some of us have work related to politics and don’t need an ignorant explanation of the propaganda video called what is a woman (a title and question that is silly in and of itself…people know what a woman is).

—-

You don’t understand right or wrong. The person being incorrect about minor un important stuff bout some kids sometimes rarely getting more serious stuff happen doesn’t mean anything. We are still talking super rare stuff.

At no point do you, someone who is pretending watching a propaganda video gives them evidence for their side. A video can say anything haha. The amt of shady shit the porpoganda was doing was unhinged.

Stop repeating what your ilk does. Again the person being technically wrong does not matter. Any one who reconsiders positions based on only technically being wrong is by definition not fair minded enough. They are reactionaries without enough theory or knowledge to back up any convictions they have that are focused on unhinged things like focusing on oppressed people.

At no point do you understand what ideology means. To act like people who don’t want to see fascism as ideologues is unhinged.

Also. Did you know leftists get banned all the time. Leftist subreddits get banned In whole (Chapo Trap House).

Stop living in a fantasy world where you’re the moral victim.

See also Twitter and Facebook and many other social networks that are objectively terrible platforms now (they all had periods of greatness that they fell from). Despite continually getting worse, the majority of people (tech and early adopters aside) will continue to use these sites no matter what because that is where their friends are, so they put up with it.

There's an app I have on my phone called Marco Polo. I hate every fucking thing about this app, the fact that it asks me to pay them $120 per year basically every morning as a full screen popup, the fact that it completely wrecks my battery life, the fact that they continue to block more (previously free) features behind paywalls, the fact that video records at like 8 fps (and still manages to destroy my battery by some miracle), the fact that they consume all of your friends contact lists and automatically befriends you with ex-girlfriends and people you would rather not talk to, and the worst sin of all, it completely resets your phone's audio now-playing whenever you open it up. So if i am listening to a podcast or music and I get a marco polo and listen to it, I can't just pick up listening to my previous audio when I am done. I have to re-open Spotify or Overcast to start playing again. But why do I use this monstrosity of an app? Because all my friends use it. We bitch about it everyday, but we are all on it and we all use it to talk multiple times a day between eachother. It has market effect. I want nothing more than for this app to die, but market effect keeps it around.

There has always been a controversy over the relationship between success and competence.

Two-sided markets are so powerful that you can run one very poorly (e.g. craiglist…) or even actively try to run one into the ground (Musk and Twitter) and they will persist anyway, so the good luck of being in the right place at the right time can mask incompetence, particularly when that incompetence develops over time (see the Peter Principle)

If there wasn’t a powerful force keeping people into bad platforms there wouldn’t be an “enshittification” problem, because people would vote with their feet and bad platforms would immediately feel the consequences of their actions.

The app they’re burning down Reddit over is already charging $1/month and was ready to sell out and shut down for $10 million.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but we usually don’t give out API keys to allow users to wholesale reproduce, redistribute, resell our data for free.

Tech people ought to think long and hard about whose content it actually is.

Of course, given the edit, one must wonder who's data they think it is given who they're collecting it from...

You are free though to access the referenced content on your own if you can find out about it on your own.

Not Reddit. They're just the landlord here.

People here should understand this more than anyone else. It is one thing to have site as hobby, but something with number of users is expensive to run.

API hosting is a drop in the bucket, even if their own accounts are to be believed wholesale.

Perhaps if Reddit the company had been more disciplined over the last ten years, it wouldn't have come to that.

You’re free to setup your own, or rent somewhere else. Regardless it costs money.

Now they want to charge for some aspect that was free and you decide not hang around anymore.

You say reddit is throwing it away when you are the one who is throwing it away because you have to pay if you want api access.

Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.

Lmao. Do you even realize what all these are about...? Reddit's pricing API policy is making ALL the apps unsustaniable. It's not "the app".

> Facebook is $200 ARPU in the US.

Yeah so? Only users and mods in the US matter and fuck the rest of the world?

Plus Reddit is, surprisingly, not Facebook. I don't even understand why you're comparing them. Actually I believe many people use Reddit because it's not like Facebook.

Charging for it would have been insane landlord behavior because all the content on it was created by its users.

Which is all the big players btw. And most small players too. It’s not just a big n corrupt edge case.

I struggle with pitching the value of it in my products and would like to help peers

^1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataDump

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4LUn9Nv.png

You mean... like Reddit, which's reproducing and selling users' data...? (play canned laughter)

To answer your question, I'd charge them to cover the bandwidth cost.

The idea of having third parties only pay for bandwidth and not lost ad revenue is absurd. Some special class of users who are not paying their fair share which in turn means more ads for everyone else to make up for free loaders.

If you're a community leader in charge of some subreddit... would you continue to let Reddit host the data if they continuously make it more expensive to access the data?

For my apps that rely on UGC, I take it a step further and remove myself from UGC liabilities somewhat by having users self host in various ways, appified for simplicity. I definitely don’t paywall license access to UGC - this allows me to operate much more leanly by not having full custody of UGC. Win-win

Obviously UGC hazards are still important to build against but these models offer interesting ways to do that as well

In the case of Reddit and Wikipedia, it's also an important part of how the volunteer moderators/contributors run the site. On Reddit there are a huge selection of community-owned moderation bots that monitor subreddits for posts matching rules.

If Reddit thinks it's theirs, they will soon notice that nothing is left of their business when those communities have moved elsewhere. To even create this war against your own users is complete folly.

You also get from it the good feeling when people ‘upvote’ your content. It’s a pretty good deal in that you only pay for it by seeing some ads.

You’re free to setup your own blog and send emails to your friends about the links you like.

We'll see who ultimately comes out ahead. I figure it will be Reddit, but that doesn't mean anything about this is difficult to understand. This is how being a consumer works when you're upset with a provider and can't vote with your wallet.

And we are just talking about links, which in most cases the submitter does not own the referenced content anyways.

Where are they gonna move to?

I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know - where on earth are all these moderators going to start up their new groups on?

If there was a viable alternative they would've found it by now and there wouldn't be a strike, there'd be a desertion. The fact is that even if the moderators want to move, the userbase isn't necessarily going to follow them.

Maybe they will, but there's nothing to move to today.

With nothing to move to, the users aren't going to move. Having a viable place next week might be pointless.

Did you really think there was nothing else? Services like reddit are big because of their network effects, not because they have so special sauce that no one has been able to replicate.

I think the pricing model is per API call, and Reddit was claiming that a typical user, with the app using the data the way Reddit envisions, would use that quantity of API calls.

This, of course, assumes that every app is designed similar to the way Reddit expects, i.e., Reddit is assuming that nobody will do anything to add any value on top of Reddit's own design. But isn't that value-add part of the reason these apps exist in the first place?

And they couldn't figure out how to transition to it without causing a shitstorm.

Reddit, by which I mean its vast user community, does not give a shit about ARPU as long as the site stays up and things get modestly better over time. And I've seen no evidence that Reddit needs a massive bump in revenue to meet those goals.

Wouldn't have got nearly as much backlash.

One way to look at it is that Apollo, the app you're referencing that was able to charge $10 a year, would have to charge 2.5 times as much just to cover the access fees, and not any of their own overhead, much less allow for profit.

The issue here is that the ARPU calculation and assumptions are wrong. Is reddit losing out on that entirely if someone comes to them from a separate interface but still is served through them? Also, it's just too optimistic. Reddit has revenue of less than a dollar per site user (or maybe slightly more than a dollar now?). Most references I'm seeing showed reddit with an ARPU of well under $1 in 2021, closer to half a dollar. Are we expected to believe there's been a 40x increase in a year, or that after all the years reddit has functioned they'll be able to achieve that in the near future?

Is it fair for a third party app to be profitable before the service itself is?

Reddit has to cover the access fees, its own overhead, and try to make a profit itself too.

Third party apps benefit the platform, especially in the early days. They result in more content from power users and easier moderation, so they contribute to revenue and aren’t only a cost.

They generally have extremely low overheads though, with nearly all being the work of just one or two developers. The profit they bring in is minuscule compared to what Reddit is looking to achieve. Apollo’s profit from annual subscribers, once accounting for taxes and the App Store fee, appears to be just a couple hundred thousand dollars based on the numbers Selig has provided.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

> Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month.

That's half of what the subscription costs... though he could update the subscription.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252

> Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the price of a subscription without interrupting service only under certain specific conditions. If the increase does not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may change the price without interrupting service. Developers may do this no more than once per year.

> If the subscription price increase is above the thresholds, exceeds the annual limit, or occurs within territories where the law requires it, you must opt in before the price increase is applied. If you don't opt in to the new price, the subscription will not renew at the next billing period. You can subscribe again within the app or on the Manage Subscriptions page.

He could have limited free use and turned off push notifications or drastically cut down on the polling rate ( https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13... "The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user") and increased the price.

The full passage is:

> For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server costs.

Note that the claim of the average user 344 requests per day and the polling rate of 600 requests per hour per user do not seem to be in agreement and may significantly contribute to the API pricing quote.

I don't think the app is making those 600 requests 24/7.

[1] https://apolloapp.io/pro-ultra/

    In-App Purchases
    Apollo Ultra Monthly  $ 4.99
    Amazing Tip           $10.00
    Generous Tip          $ 5.00
    Nice Tip              $ 0.99
    Kind Tip              $ 3.00
    Godzilla Tip          $19.99

I don't think a person using a third party app necessarily implies they are a power user or better at moderation. Hell, in the beginning reddit didn't even have a mobile app and the only options were third party apps.

> They generally have extremely low overheads though, with nearly all being the work of just one or two developers

Hmm, I wonder how they can provide that with such low developer counts - maybe because Reddit as a service is subsidizing the majority of the value the third party apps are capturing.

Its entirely within reason for Reddit to want to capture that value instead of giving it away to free to third party apps.

Reddit has also expanded its staff count (and therefore costs) dramatically to chase new product areas and has seen big jumps in revenue. They’ve clearly been chasing growth in revenue and user numbers over profit. It doesn’t meant they couldn’t be profitable based on what they have.

> I don't think a person using a third party app necessarily implies they are a power user or better at moderation. Hell, in the beginning reddit didn't even have a mobile app and the only options were third party apps.

Not every user of a third party app is a power user, but power users and mods are almost certainly using third party apps & tools. The shutdown statements made by so many sub moderators back that up.

> Hmm, I wonder how they can provide that with such low developer counts - maybe because Reddit as a service is subsidizing the majority of the value the third party apps are capturing.

That doesn’t make any sense. They’re not replacing the platform, they’re just an interface to it. The better point of comparison is to the official Reddit apps, which are much worse in almost every way than the third party equivalents despite being built by teams of engineers. They don’t even have proper accessibility.

> It’s entirely within reason for Reddit to want to capture that value instead of giving it away to free to third party apps.

Not if it results in a drop in engagement from power users and moderators, which would in turn result in less content, a worse experience for users, fewer users returning or joining up because of that, and thus less revenue over time.

If nobody can make your pricing work and offer a product, then you're losing out on that revenue. I'm not saying they should be allowing API access at a loss, but if they've priced every API user out of the market and they aren't pricing at cost or at their actual expected revenue per user internally then that means they're taking actions that are net negative with regard to profit.

I, like many others, think that their pricing is nowhere near the actual per user expected revenue, so either they're doing something incredibly stupid and shutting out a source of profit, or the goal of this was never really to monetize the API, and instead to kill third party apps while attempting to give themselves some cover from the negative publicity of those actions by reframing it as asking for the third party apps pay for the cost of their previously free access.

I think the latter is more likely, but you know what they say about attributing malice...

There is a notably large group of app developers who all say they have been completely ghosted by Reddit when it comes to any kind of private communication.

Not to mention this comes out of the blue immediately before their IPO after years of status quo, without consulting devs, moderators, or literally anyone outside of reddit HQ. They are also well aware of the cost it would have on 3rd party devs and how unreasonable they are given the extremely-similar level of activity inside the first-party app.

Should a company be allowed to try to make a profit? Of course, no one is arguing against that. The issue is context.

And the way your question is worded implies third party app devs are greedy and unreasonable for wanting to continue to exist while reddit is too mishandled to make a profit. It's a childish "well why can they have anything when I have nothing" take. If the issue is actually profit, why does it only come up without warning just before the IPO? After over 10 years of never coming up before, never even being a discussion point before.

Also, can you name any of the things Reddit has added over the last 5 years that you care about? A single one? They took on both image and video hosting, at I'm sure an insane cost - why? They added NFT avatars - a transparent attempt to cash in on NFTs. A new layout that all the old users hate, removal of the ability to log in on the mobile site. Does anyone remember when they fired Victoria for no god damn reason? Pretty sure that was the last content-related contribution they've made to the platform. Administration is dead set on extracting any kind of profit they can out of something they give no fucks about outside of their ability to profit off of it. They handicap and ruin their own platform for the sake of attempting to make a bit more money.

Context matters. Don't blind yourself by ignoring context.

And the goal of this is to attempt to further monetize the platform on the backs of other people's content by forcing them to see as many ads and upsell opportunities as possible.

And the goal of this is to appear more appealing to current and future investors in order to drive up the IPO price and build demand.

And the goal of this is to make those with significant equity stake filthy rich.

The issue is that the changes they're trying to make are inherently hostile to the community whose free content and moderation has made the platform what it is today. And if the community decides to leave the platform and not come back, then regardless of potential for extra ad revenue, the inherent value of the platform will disappear because ads will be shown to less and less users. This is assuming people leave and actually don't come back, which remains to be seen.

The whole "front page of the internet" idea was pretty neat, and is a stark contrast to the days where each internet community had their own niche forum somewhere. Maybe we'll see some other platform overtake Reddit as the new front page of the internet, or maybe an old platform like Digg will make a resurgence. But that's a tall ask when Reddit is now so entrenched in that space.

Edit: technology -> platform, in the last paragraph above.

Unless you have some alternative that has Reddit functionality, but can somehow operate without revenue, I'm just going to assume there isn't and Reddit will continue operating as normal.

Just doing the math $2.50 seems reasonable if you're going to redistribute the data to users while bypassing the ads.

As far as I know they're not doing any of that. To me it looks like the goal is to wall off all the user-generated content in an attempt to extract maximum dollars from it while intentionally excluding third parties.

What incentive is there for the API users to add in ads that reddit serves for the 3rd party client users? Can reddit be guaranteed get a share of the revenue for the IAP of "block all ads?" Is it worth it for reddit to do it when they can't control the price of said IAP ($0.49 for "block all of Reddit's ads")

The Reddit that the loud minority wants is never, ever coming back. These protests are just a blip -- if you don't like what Reddit has become, your only recourse is to leave.

Because if it isn't then reddit can simply revoke their access.

How can reddit know if the ads are being stripped out or not? Simple - download the app, run it and see.

The API license can always force things like:

1. Only for apps, whether mobile, desktop or web (i.e. forget about training your LLM on the data) 2. License revoked if content is modified in any way (i.e. no stripping out ads)

It's not that difficult, honestly. I've signed more strict agreements with companies (NDAs, and so forth) to access their system, their data, etc.

And then we are right back at the complaints that reddit is killing 3P clients.

A headless program that does moderation actions (changing flares, approving or deleting posts, updating wiki) uses the same API that a mobile app would use - and ads would only get in the way of those tools.

If the app is poorly behaved or you have a very heavy hitting backend service, then you pay more. If you (the app owner) wants to put advertisements in the user's view - that's up to you. If you want to do offer the app advertisement free out of the generosity of your heart, that's up to you.

The API calls cost the same no matter how they're made - the API doesn't care where it's called from. Be it polling backend service, moderation tool, or mobile app - it's all billed the same with the exception of it being free for certain exceptional cases.

That's much easier to work with for all parties involved.

For Reddit Inc, it's bad because they'll under-charge for things where they could capture more money, and over-charge for things that are helpful to their platform but not directly profitable, like moderator tools.

It's bad for developers because it forces them to deal with having a revenue model well before they're ready to. A lot of people just like building things, and only worry about revenue once it's successful enough to matter.

It's bad for users because all sorts of tools that would be free now have to charge them. Instead of somebody just hacking together a moderation tool suddenly has to find a way to pay for it.

The headless case is easy enough; in each content blob you include an "is_ad" field. Tools that are user agents display that content. Tools that aren't are free to ignore it under the TOS.

https://api.imgur.com/#commercial

> Your application is commercial if you're making any money with it (which includes in-app advertising), if you plan on making any money with it, or if it belongs to a commercial organization.

Otherwise your app (for all users) would fall under:

> Your use of the Imgur API is also limited by the number of POST requests your IP can make across all endpoints. This limit is 1,250 POST requests per hour. Commercial Usage is not impacted by this limit. Each POST request will contain the following headers.

The pricing is https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing (note that this is quite different than the pricing that Apollo claims to have)

$500/month for 7.5M calls/month and $10k for 150M calls/month

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/reddits-new-api-pric...

> Selig says Reddit wants $12,000 for 50 million API requests, while Imgur, a similar social media photo site, charges $166 for 50 million API calls. Selig says even if users were willing to pay out of pocket for the API costs, Reddit announced the new billing plan one month before it would take effect, and Selig says that's just not feasible for developers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...

> Our pricing is $0.24 per 1000 API calls

That puts it at about 3x more than Imgur's published rates.

For someone hacking together a moderation tool, I have done this (wiki updates) It means that my run to get data on a few hundred subs would cost me about a quarter. When I was in testing, I was only doing about 5-10 calls though on a sub that I managed so that it wouldn't go haywire somewhere else.

---

Consider the outrage where an API key is yanked (for whatever reason) with Twitter. Yanking an API key gets even more problematic if there is an existing business relationship.

You're also proposing that someone periodically audits the different reddit clients to see if they are displaying enough / all the ads and that there aren't any uber style shenanigans where if it is found to be coming from the IP block that Reddit owns it shows ads while certain users (who subscribed with a private non-apple subscription) aren't getting ads.

It is just easier to charge for an API.

And for an app that already has a monthly subscription ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 shows $5.99) available to it, to increase that rate to match the number of calls. If the average user is making 350 requests per day that's $10/month for the user, so update the subscription to $15/month ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252 ). If the push notification server ( https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13... ) is making an additional 600 requests per hour per user... that might need some scaling back or adding another tier (that's $15/day/user of API calls by itself).

No, just the big ones. Which they will know, because they'll know the API usage. Below some level, it doesn't matter if somebody's doing it wrong.

> It is just easier to charge for an API.

Easier in the sense of less labor for a few people at Reddit? Sure. But who cares? The goal isn't making it easier for a few low-level employees. The first goal is to create maximum value. The second goal is to extract enough cash to cover the costs of the value generation, plus a bit extra. If something is not easy but is profitable, that's a-ok in business-land.

That makes sure that applications are incentivized to write code well that doesn't take advantage of a free resource.

The Apollo push notification part of the server is hitting 600 requests per hour per user - 10 requests per minute per user. That has a cost to it for Reddit even if not a single page is rendered for a mobile app.

It doesn't matter if it's a headless moderation tool or the push notification server or an exceptionally poorly behaving front end. API requests have a cost that up until now have been free.

If Apollo turned off the notification server, he'd be down to pennies per user per day for the app. If it was scaled back to a request every minute it would be $1/day/user. Scale it back to a check every 10 minutes and you're back to pennies per day per user.

As it is, it was designed with a free and nearly unlimited rate limit available.

Trying to do an audit of advertisements being displayed (again, easy to defeat so that the auditor sees the ads while others don't) this doesn't fix the problem that apps are taking advantage of free resources that aren't free to the host.

If the cost of the API is too high for the load that it (and any backend) puts on the host, then it should be up to the app designer to find a way to monetize it - it is their responsibility to write the code within the limits that it can afford.

The marginal cost of a single API call is approximately zero. Reddit, like most SaaS businesses, is much more about fixed costs than variable costs. I think they are much better off following the standard freemium approach, where they give away what's basically free, and then use value-based pricing to get a fair share of the possible revenues. The sort of cost-based pricing you suggest a) doesn't match their cost model, b) overcharges for valuable things that may not produce direct revenue, and c) undercharges for things that are especially valuable to users.

Plus $2.5 to Reddit, means that apps need to charge $3.60 before 30% App-Store fees. But the app developer also needs new infrastructure to handle the billing, payment, and tracking, between end-users & Reddit along with their existing overhead. So the current $1/month aka $0.70/month after fees they're operating on likely isn't sustainable.

So now we're looking at $3.60 to Reddit + the existing $1/month = $4.6, but also all this new payment/billing infrastructure. Could easily exceed $5/month which frankly nobody is going to pay, and then get all this done in just 30-days even though that date is completely arbitrary from Reddit's end.

It's actually hard to believe people are throwing this big a fit over something they don't deem worthy of $5 a month.

Had it been something like "starting next year only Premium users will get to auth to the API" (which is analogous to the $5/mo. of Discord Nitro) the lead time would have been greater and the users would have been able to solve the problem of access on their own.

I imagine this being less desirable when individuals have multiple accounts.

If you have 10,000 users that Reddit in 30 days is going to charge you $250,000 per month to continue allowing your third party app to operate and you only had 5-10% of your users paying for a premium version you could see how that becomes somewhat unreasonable.

A bit more of a heads up is all the Apollo developer wanted. He understood that the API no longer being free is reasonable. The timing is what he objects. No assistance in allowing premium Reddit accounts that use Third Party Apps to cover API costs, etc.

He wasn't literally offering to sell out for $10 million. What he was saying was that if Reddit was being honest with the claim that Apollo was costing them $20 million per year in server costs, the obvious business decision would be to offer to buy him out first, thus bringing in those users with much less friction.

The fact that they're instead choosing to be manipulative (unrealistically short period for apps to adapt, API prices far above what other services charge) indicates that the $20 million number is a lie made to make themselves seem less scummy.

As it stands, Reddit hasn't even tried even simpler solutions like returning ads in the API requests and requiring that the 3rd parties include those for free usage.

There's only a few niche subs that will be hard to replace for me, but they're talking about moving.

That’s the entire problem and why Reddit is so successful. People don’t like jumping around between topic specific websites. Discoverability is too hard.

You go there for the user content, not the mods. You can say mods cultivate communities, but to say that they deserve credit but not the admins or platform itself seems untenable.

Furthermore, insinuations that the API changes will lead to a substantial decline in community quality via its impact on moderation seem to be broadly unsupported. It's unclear that there's a monotonic relationship between moderator power and community quality, similar to how most people would be skeptical of an argument that said that there's a monotonic relationship between state power (irl) community quality. For example, one thing that moderators have wanted to do in the past is create cross-subreddit blacklists. The admins pushed back on this with some success, which was probably healthy for the site as a whole.

The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top. And any social context is prone to vicious circles where dark triad find somewhere successful and ruin it. Preventing that requires active weeding.

The platform deserves some credit. But as all the developers here know, Reddit is not succeeding on the strength of its software. Reddit doesn't have a technology moat. It's a pretty standard web forum. They didn't invent it, they didn't perfect it, and not only could it be replicated, it has been many times.

So should the platform get paid? Definitely. Reddit-the-corporation should have enough cashflow to cover the bills and support the necessary staff. But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having it.

I mean, if you're going to Reddit at the marvelous sidebar rules or CSS stylings, then I guess you're going there for the mods qua mods. But I would assume that this represents a relatively rare user psychographic. Beyond this, my point is that it's unfair to give the mods credit for indirectly cultivating communities but refuse to extend this same consideration to the admins or platform.

>The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top.

Yes, and Reddit was successful long before the moderation tools that are being impacted by the API changes were created. Treating this protest as being about the basic question of whether Reddit should have moderation or not is disingenuous.

>But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having it.

Well, the powermods aren't having it. We'll see what "Reddit-the-community" thinks when the dust settles. A bunch of activists can't claim to speak for it, though obviously they'd like to pretend that they can.

For smaller communities mods keep away trolls and spambots. They enforce custom rules that sub will have.

> Yes, and Reddit was successful long before the moderation tools that are being impacted by the API changes were created

Are you forgetting about Reddit Enhancement Suite? There is no mod that just uses the built-in reddit moderation. There hasn't been since the days when Reddit was a website only known to tech related college students.

It's a weird comparison to make, too. You're comparing a default subreddit that is mostly for memes with one of the subreddits held in highest regard. Lots of highly-moderated subreddits are just awful. Why not compare /r/AskHistorians with the large number of highly- but poorly-moderated subreddits? There are many (I won't name names) that you would expect to be reasonably neutral places but because of who picked the name originally have become politically extreme over time. Or just as a result of the effect of the upvote/downvote mechanism. The high influence that early votes have on submissions means that if a small group of people make it their life's work to watch /new (and they do exist!) they can control the narrative very successfully.

The idea that reddit mods are some great asset to the site is just strange, IMO. To me, they're one of the worst things about the website. Most of the big subreddits are dominated by the same group of power moderators who have some questionable conflicts of interests with outside forces. Smaller subreddits tend to be dominated by high-school-style cliques.

Truer words have never been written about reddit. It is a cesspit of censorship with tiny islands of insights.

The funny part is occasionally I've come across subs without mods (someone started the sub, then stopped using Reddit), and they've mostly been great. But Reddit tries to crack down on them, and they also have ways to push power mods into any sub that gets too big.

If you were the CEO of reddit what would you change? Replace the volunteer mods with paid mods?

1. You could have some kind of community influence over moderator selection for subreddits over a certain size. StackExchange has (had?) elections for moderators.

2. You could have rules preventing anyone from having moderator powers on more than a certain percentage of the site.

3. The best change would one that prevented moderators from sitting in IRC/Discord talking about reddit 24/7. Having so much meta-discussion happen "behind the scenes" is not good. The problem is that normal people who think "lol imagine having drama over an internet forum what a load of nerds" would be the best moderators but are the least interested in doing it.

But in this case I would expect that a substantial part of active users use Reddit with a 3rd party app so I'm inclined to say a lot of people will stop using it because of the passive way it is used.

I could be wrong and that is why I'm commenting. I can go back to this comment in 2-3 years. My feeling is that Reddit will have shrunk by that time

I personally think this will last a few days and then all the default subs will either open by mod decisions or be forced open by Reddit admins. If it's the latter, I expect all existing mods to get the boot and replaced with people who are friendlier with Reddit admins. I also expect that usage of the official app will jump and there won't be any major disruptions to Reddit usage.

Reddit becomes harder and harder to actually post on. Subs are now ruled by mods and strict automods with ridiculous rules and posting requirements. You post something and it gets automatically removed and then you have to post a dozen more times changing this word or that word to try and figure out how to actually get something through.

In reality there are a few DOZEN mods that basically control all of reddit. Yes, dozens. It's the same mods over and over again.

But the way the direction is going, and some experiences in some subs have made me take a decision, and my 12+ year account is no more.

It won't matter, and probably reddit will survive, be it as strong as it is now or in a diminished state. But I'm tired of this kind of directives in these kinds of companies.

I hope that leaving that, and not having Instagram or Facebook on the phone, might give me a little push on being more productive. Wish me luck.

Be it sms, WhatsApp, telegram, phone, etc.

People get really skewed perspectives of what being socially active means. Instagram/FB/etc is not really needed.

The real problem is Reddit mostly sucks at design and UX. https://new.Reddit.com shows it’s not getting better besides search.

The users don’t really give a shit about API pricing or understand/care about Reddits steep financial demands. IRL Reddit probably have bankers down their throats for the IPO and Sam Altman/PG/Steve’s VC friends are pushing the AI data goldmine angle. Only the execs know what is really happening behind the scenes but there’s some very clear motivations here they aren’t doing a good job of communicating (possibly out of fear of the super niche r/antiwork type audiences who in reality will whine regardless).

Reddit could do plenty to fix the mobile (and web) issues and buy good will by openly confronting them. Plenty of product and transparency failures here well beyond spez’s Apollo dev conflict taking up the bulk of discourse that mostly only powerusers care about.

Otherwise Reddit is known for having powerusers, mods, and a general anti-authority “we’re making a difference by shitposting on the internet” culture. Especially after their net neutrality protests. It’s only natural for such a thing to turn into a big deal when the poweruser minority gets upset and for the rest there’s a prime opportunity for outrage against [faceless big corporation]. Reddit’s favourite target.

Reddit could much, much more easily placate the regular non-hardcore users by simply being transparent about their very real business demands to make money (esp with LLM) and by very publicly doubling down on making a better mobile app - since clearly they view 3rd party apps as not feasible for their current business plans. So why not fix why people love the 3rd party ones?

But as always big business PR is awful, transparency is downplayed and intentions are obscure as if users are idiots. Etc. Typical big co mediocrity.

I'm not crossing the picket line, but I think that's a likely outcome, too. That's why I'm preparing to archive what little content I'm personally interested in and am leaving the platform permanently.

Outside of a few (relatively speaking) small circles, the Reddit strike boils down to "Reddit is striking?" The revolt goes unnoticed. Lurkers are happily scrolling the front page right now.

Your strawman is just that.

You can't comprehend that not everyone is as casual like you and will happily take whatever they get like a good boy because, "you don't really care".

Some people do contribute and care and are a significant part, on aggregate, of what makes reddit special.

Your expectations about "reddit will win because it holds all the cards" are pretty obvious to make. You're not some Nostradamus, when there's no clear reddit alternative like last time around but it's still too early to tell if the users who are intended to be driven to the main app will actually go there instead of empowering other places and causing a slow but eventual migration.

Internet is, many times, about power users and "what's cool" driving others there. Reddit is not Google or fb in that they can simply buy the competition when it appears.

But hey, there's always someone with an "the authorities are always right and will win" mindset.

Social media platforms are almost always generous in allowing for tools and third party clients that result in new content being created. What they restrict is the same sort of thing for the passive viewing side.

Reddit and Twitter were always unusual in that there’s such a 50/50 split between posting and consuming, and power users valued being able to curate their reading experience as well as the tools they had to post with. Most of Twitter’s core feature set came from power user features invented in third party apps, including retweeting. But as the apps became more popular they also took away a larger proportion of passive eyeballs for advertisers. A balance of some sort was needed, and I think both Twitter and Reddit have gone the wrong way.

Facebook is different to those two in that it always had the benefit of exploiting your existing in person social graph and growing outward from there, meaning it had different drivers and incentives for frequent posting.

Might not be a bad thing tbh

Why?

Many reasons:

Reddit was a party, now it is a business. As Spez said in the AMA, it is not (yet) profitable, and as is apparent, there are no more rounds of capital raising happening. They filed for an IPO two years ago. Will they have that IPO? I say, at this point, No. The mere fact that Spez said that it’s not profitable tells me that they’re no longer going for an IPO. Now, they’re just aiming at making Reddit into a real business, for the long term.

Third Party Apps using the API to serve Reddit content with subscription models or by running their own adverts alongside the content, and raking in cash — bottom line, they were stealing revenues from Reddit. Even though Reddit didn’t enforce any API TOS or AUP or user agreement, etc — the terms were still there in the main user agreement that use of the site and use of the API was personal, and not “scrape the contents of the site, slap your own brand on it, and pull in profit from that”. Not even if it had a better UI and better mod tools. It’s still theft, even if the aesthetics were clean. Even if it was “anti censorship”, even if it was “accountability and transparency”, even if it was for research and even if it supported, tangentially, moderator efforts. Even if Reddit mismanaged their API for a decade.

Reddit admins already prepared for this eventuality. They started preparing for it in 2015 when a bunch of “free speech” bigotry-oriented ecosystem subreddits blacked out “in protest” of Reddit shutting down a half dozen subreddits — subreddits dedicated to white supremacist hatred and violent misogyny, and which, we would later find out were run by a now-convicted White Identity Terrorist, European88.

They later prepared for it in 2018 and then when the founder of KotakuInAction figured out that the people who had been running KiA were the same people who helped u/European88 run thousands of White Identity Extremism terrorist subreddits and misogynist subreddits, and were in a conspiracy to burn the site down by drowning it in terrorist hate speech and making it into 4chan’s /pol/. He closed KiA. The Reddit admins reopened it and gave it back to the people who had been running it to drive misogynist hatred and recruit for White Identity Extremism groups.

Moderator is a Verb, not a Noun. The new moderator code of conduct and modsupportbot “moderator candidate” function makes it clear that moderators are supposed to be the people who actually take actions to steward a community, not people who claim a title and never take action, not people who abuse the privileges to push an agenda, not people who do things that aren’t in the interest of the communities they serve. Not absentee founders.

Moderator teams tend to be cliques of 80% people with strong opinions about how the subreddit should be run but who take very few actions and 20% people who take a lot of actions to enforce clear violations of the Sitewide rules and subreddit rules. The 80% don’t recruit new moderators. The 20% can’t recruit new moderators. The 20% get burned out, they leave, the 80% still don’t recruit new moderators, and eventually can’t recruit moderators at all, moderation doesn’t happen, the community fails.

That shouldn’t happen. But it does.

Reddit is a forest; Subreddits are plants in that forest. Some are huge trees, and some are tiny shrubs. Anyone can plant one and grow it. But guess what happens when a huge tree is cut down? Suddenly, fifteen trees spring up to fill the air and sunlight and soil and ecosystem niche the fallen tree once had.

You cut down your own tree, Reddit doesn’t care. You clearcut a field, Reddit doesn’t care. You take down one of the core and oldest trees … ok Reddit might care, but they will deal with it.

You and a bunch of Reddit moderators who don’t want to recruit and manage and train and mentor dozens and hundreds of new moderators to replace the mod teams you’re burning out, to replace you, eventually — because, hey, we’re all mortal — are choosing to leave the site? Close your subreddits? OK, Buddy. A dozen of you, and the toxic, static, insular mindset and cliqueishness you brought to running communities, you’re gone — and in your place, 500 fresh faces. People with a passion for community, who don’t know you, don’t want to know you, and who will build communities in the forest.

Sometimes, forest fires happen, and can be good for the ecosystem.

Two day protests don’t change corporate behaviour. There has been one protest that successfully coincided with Reddit changing its behaviour, and that protest built over nine months in the contemporaneous instance, and began 5 years earlier. It succeeded largely because it was protesting terrorist hatred and violence, and Reddit could either come to terms with it, or lose advertisers & audience.

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, only bad managers. Reddit’s in the headlines! People will come check it out. Free publicity.

In summary:

The two-day and/or “indefinite” blackouts are a good holiday, and a solidarity speech act with our co-moderators & communities.

I doubt they’re going to change the behaviour of Reddit, Inc.

Because at this point, it’s profits or bankruptcy.

Moderator is most certainly a noun, and can be an adjective when placed in front of a "candidate". What are you even on, man.

https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/moderator

I'm not the OP but that context makes it pretty obvious the OP is being figurative.

The rest of the comment describes things that did, in fact, happen. So what's the problem?

For a platform hosting user generated content and with volunteer moderation having third party clients is usually a net positive despite the small loss in advertising revenue, purely because they have a very positive impact on content creation and curation. That keeps passive users coming to the site so they can be advertised to.

At some point after a platform matures there needs to be some additional monetisation of third party clients, especially as they begin to capture a larger share of users. It doesn’t have to result in the clients being killed off entirely.

Reddit is nothing without people voluntarily adding content to the site and good moderators voluntarily running subreddits. That’s especially true for special interest and high quality subs like AskHistorians.

Except reddit is mostly just a link aggregator and host of other stolen content.

I suspect at first they didn't really care about the 3P clients in coming up with pricing, they were looking at the bulk of API usage which is elsewhere (not sure where, but based on numbers provided by Reddit Apollo would be at most 1.4% of API usage and likely much less; other clients likely significantly lower given how Apollo was singled out) and looking at preparing to get paid for user content by VC-backed AI startups.

Once the pricing was announced and the 3P app developers started complaining, there was probably a Cartman moment in the executive offices and things just went downstairs from there.

Because of their hamfisted handling of this they're going to lose a significant number of long-term users, a fair amount of content as a noticeable chunk of those users delete their content on the way out the door, an absurd amount of community and unpaid volunteer moderator goodwill, etc.

Reddit is likely to keep most of the users for now, but the reaction is also driving a lot of people to suddenly explore alternatives that would have been completely ignored before - and at some point it's quite possible that those popular clients that don't even have Reddit in the name will shift to providing mature and familiar interfaces to those alternatives and that may be enough to push growth. Remember that no social platform started out big.

If Reddit actually wanted to make money from the third party app users it would have been almost trivial to do - require a paid account for API usage, introduce new paid account tiers ($18-24/year, $3-4/mo, the current Premium, a couple of more expensive 'family'/multiuser tiers). Have them variable in how much monthly API usage was allowed and other perks (e.g. multiple IDs with either split or pooled API usage). Run it through the payment system Reddit already uses which means they get almost all the money instead of 30% off the top for app store fees plus a chunk going to the app developers so they're safe from getting screwed by mis-estimating usage. Edit: heck, just converting a chunk of users to paid accounts would likely have been huge for them because it gives potential for converting even more in the future, plus the chances of upsells.

But no, 'You have 30 days to change your business model, prepare to handle $millions/year in cash flow, and rewrite chunks of your software to be subscription-based.' Hell, the only 2 that I know of that even used subscriptions are Apollo and Sync, they might have had a chance. Instead, Reddit went for plausible deniability, 'we didn't kill the apps, they had a path to work with us but they all just gave up!'

Feh.

Well, don't piss off the content makers, or the content consumers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Reddit was launched in 2005 (which I admit is a year or two earlier than I remember/would have guessed).

But how is it possible that the reddit bosses don't know who their users are?