Reddit, accused of trying to kill third-party apps, is cutting 5% of workforce.
      •  RadDevon   ( @RadDevon@lemmy.ml ) English
        15•11 months ago

        Only if there’s a community left there to sell! 😅

        You’re right though. As many people as there are fleeing, there are many times that who will stick around and endure whatever changes Reddit makes. Reddit will have plenty of eyeballs left to sell ads against. Now, will the people generating content and moderating still be around? What happens long-term if they aren’t? That remains to be seen…

        •  Alkalyon   ( @Alkalyon@lemmy.ml ) English
          15•11 months ago

          I had this discussion in here before and I think it’s for the better that the majority doesn’t leave reddit, for both sides.

          The vast majority of redditors are lurkers. It’s a small minority that actually care enough to post the content and engange in conversations. Coincidentally, this same minority is the only one that cares enough to leave so I am expecting the most engaging people to migrate to other platforms like this one right here and I expect that Reddit is going to be left with lurkers and no one to drive the communities forward.

          Granted, they will still be able to sell ads to lurkers but who cares? That’s not why most of us were in Reddit.

          I was there to get more news and educate myself. If that’s gone, I’m gone. I’m happy to do this here, as well.

  •  Pisck   ( @Pisck@lemmy.ml ) English
    43•11 months ago

    What really stands out from reddit’s statements is the conspicuous lack of disagreement about the alleged charges to 3rd party apps. They can keep trying to characterize it as fair but the factual numbers in the conversation make it plainly obvious that they are instituting a model that makes it impossible for existing 3rd party apps to survive.

    •  zkikiz   ( @zkikiz@lemmy.ml ) English
      4•11 months ago

      Per-app API billing also makes very little sense for something like RIF or Apollo. If the usage itself is so expensive then tie billing to the user account itself: want to datamine? Great, pay up. Casual user? Good news, you get ten thousand free calls per month and rate limited beyond that.

      But no that would be sane and not lock people into their shitty ecosystem.

      •  pitninja   ( @pitninja@lemmy.ml ) English
        3•11 months ago

        100% there is absolutely no reason Reddit needs to be making 3rd party apps be brokers in paying for these API calls. Aside from the ridiculous price for API calls, they’re implementing this in the dumbest possible way. And no NSFW is dumb as fuck too and honestly anticompetitive.

        •  depreciated_cost   ( @depreciated_cost@lemmy.ml ) English
          2•11 months ago

          I mean Reddit is clearly a company that shoyld focus on making proft. I don’t have problems with that. The problem is that it’s a stupid decision that doesn’t seem to nessesarily help them profit wise. Besides, it has been a great platform for countless communities that I just didn’t want it to end.

          •  fomo_erotic   ( @fomo_erotic@lemmy.ml ) English
            9•11 months ago

            I mean Reddit is clearly a company that shoyld focus on making proft.

            Reddit is a company that commoditizes human communities and profits from the free labor of those who are willing to put in the effort to belong to something. Their value is derived from the communities that use their platform and the communities derive value from the tools reddit creates that allows for them to organize.

            Reddit should focus on being a good platform. The profit-centric focus degrades the quality of the platform and will be the death of the thing in the end. The expansionist attitude is the achiles heal of capitalism. Anything of value gets turned into shit under that motive.

  •  Shrek   ( @psysok@lemmy.ml ) English
    30•11 months ago

    They can insist on being fairly paid, but the users have to think the transaction is fair as well. Ask Digg how much their platform was worth when all of the users were gone.

      •  fomo_erotic   ( @fomo_erotic@lemmy.ml ) English
        2•11 months ago

        I would say the majority of posts on Reddit are admin ran karma bots and scammers. Just a bunch of bots talking to themselves.

        Its hard to say and I really wonder about this. Specifically, I think there is a lot of astro turfing, but not in the way most people think it is. I think very specific subreddits like r/marvel, formula one, celebrity news (which only really started making it to the front page in earnest 2 months ago), are some how in cahoots with reddit to sponsor their popularity. The game goes like this: you work with reddit to astroturf organic engagement with the channel, and over time, organic engagement takes over.

        I think this is how Reddit makes real money and I wonder if they give two wiffs of piss about the embedded ads. I think you can attribute the success the modern marvel franchises have seen as well as the success that the modern star wars series saw to astroturfed social media campaigns on reddit.

        Its pure conspiracy, I have no evidence other than watching the way that reddit has evolved.

        •  CmdrShepard   ( @CmdrShepard@lemmy.one ) English
          2•11 months ago

          I believe this 100%. I was just permabanned after 10 years on reddit without a single ‘violation.’ It started with a ban from /r/news for what I can only assume was replying to the wrong mod with something they didn’t like. Then a few days later a ban from /r/movies for mentioning piracy. I had a couple alts that I cycled through and made the egregious mistake of accidently leaving a comment in both subs as I was scrolling through my Frontpage on a different account. Boom – back to back 7 day bans and then a permaban for ‘ban evasion.’

          During my time there I definitely noticed that recently things seem to be getting worse with bots and scammers and subs toeing more and more of the corporate line (like my ban from /r/movies for mentioning piracy) or pushing some agenda. I’ve seen numerous articles posted to /r/science recently with misleading editorialized headlines that don’t even match the study they’re linking to. When pointing this rule breaking violation out, my comments were deleted. Then with many other of the formerly default subs, we have tons of repost bots able to freely recycle content with more bots recycling popular comments from previous reposts every single day.

          Seems like this would be a good way to make subs seem more active than they really are, users are more active then they really are, and subs more advertising/corporate friendly right before their IPO. Both Facebook and Twitter have been caught lying about the number of bots for this same reason in the recent past.

          I’ve also been wondering if this blackout is all orchestrated by reddit using some of these major corporate controlled subs. As if reddit sets this ridiculous API cost, major subs claim they’ll go dark until things change, smaller subs follow suit, and then reddit comes back with a number 50% (or whatever) lower than previously stated. People will claim victory for getting reddit to change their mind but what they’ve really done is hoodwink everyone using what’s called Price Anchoring. This leads people to believe that the ‘50%’ price is a “great deal” without realizing that this was their real intent all along, but they served it to us in a way that made us feel like we won in the process.

  •  Andreas   ( @Andreas@feddit.dk ) 
    29•11 months ago

    I remember when Reddit’s FAQ had the question “Is there a mobile app for Reddit?” and the answer was “No, we don’t have a mobile app and have no intention to develop one, but you can choose from a list of third-party clients”. And what do they mean by “not fairly paid”, does Reddit not already have a working monetization system with paid awards and profile customizations? Not enough people paying $80 to put a sticker next to a comment?

    •  zalack   ( @zalack@lemmy.ml ) English
      16•11 months ago

      Wow. I had not done the math. That’s an obscene amount of money. 1000 requests is nothing for a web app like Reddit, even with agreeing over-fetching.

      The crazy thing is that they might have gotten away with it if they had structured it right. Set up the infastructure themselves to charge the individual user directly for their API use rather than the App creators. Carve out exceptions for moderation APIs and known moderation bots. I probably would have paid a few bucks a month to keep using Relay. I would have grumbled about it… but I would have done it.

      Now I’m just gonna leave, lol.

  •  creek   ( @creek@lemmy.ml ) English
    23•11 months ago

    “Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app,” the Reddit worker said.

    Uhh… Plenty of services charge less than half of that for the same number of API calls, and they are still able to make money. I would imagine that as large as Reddit is, their cost per 1k calls is way less than $0.10, unless their API is poorly engineered and inefficient AF. This is 100% them just trying to drive third parties out so they can get that sweet sweet ad revenue.

    •  Beto   ( @beto@lemmy.studio ) English
      17•11 months ago

      So they expect less than 4166 API calls per user per month, or 138 per day? That doesn’t sound like much.

      I just loaded reddit.org and my browser did 57 XHR requests. I clicked on a post with zero comments and it went up to 84. Clicked on a second one with 430 comments and I’m already at 137 requests…

    •  dylan   ( @dylan@lemmy.ml ) OPEnglish
      11•11 months ago

      Exactly what it looks like to me. This is clearly an attempt at driving up revenue for the upcoming IPO, but I think there’s a little more to it.

      We all know that Reddit depended on third party apps for years before releasing their own, which is full of ads and all the other features they cram in there that long-term users don’t care for.

      To me it looks like they’ve planned for this move to drive out long-term users, who remember old Reddit before the crazy amounts of ads, and will still have the people who will tolerate the official app, and the many people who have only ever used new Reddit and the app, and of course are used to the ads.

      I think they’ve underestimated just how many of their mods and content contributors are using/dependent on third party apps.

      •  cavemeat   ( @cavemeat@beehaw.org ) English
        2•11 months ago

        I think you’re totally right. My siblings only joined reddit after the new site and official app dropped, and to them, reddit is the same as its always been. That being said, they’re lurkers who have never contributed a post, like the majority of new reddit users.

    •  jmcs   ( @jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de ) English
      9•11 months ago

      Exactly, they depend on thousands of people working from free (from people that post stuff to the moderators that don’t even get proper tools), and then they try to extort them. And in the middle of this I think people running some social media companies don’t understand that active users are both their suppliers and main asset, and that they should do everything in their power to not piss them off.

      •  fomo_erotic   ( @fomo_erotic@lemmy.ml ) English
        2•11 months ago

        Exactly, they depend on thousands of people working from free (from people that post stuff to the moderators that don’t even get proper tools), and then they try to extort them. And in the middle of this I think people running some social media companies don’t understand that active users are both their suppliers and main asset, and that they should do everything in their power to not piss them off.

        Lemmy is about as good, if not better than reddit afa software experience goes. Maybe embedded videos would be nice, but it doesn’t come with the deluge of garbage that reddit does.