Gotta love how they are giving themselves 2 months till coins go away and they only gave app developers <1 month to completely change their business models.
Also how dumb are the people who run Reddit? Like I know they are liars and assholes but why would you take away a perk of Reddit Premium before figuring out what’s replacing it? It’s not too dissimilar from when they announced there would be pricing changes but not what they were but come on, this was clearly going to piss people off, why not just wait till have the replacement ready to go?
fwiw it was two months to make changes (announced apr 18, apollo dev publicly confirmed impact by apr 19, changes effective jun 19) and another month for the first bill to come in
June 19th was when they announced pricing [0]. Announcing that you are planning to make changes without giving pricing is unactionable. June 30th was the shutdown.
how could someone be shocked that an api request to an ad supported service costs $0.00024? for comparison, twitter's new basic tier costs about $0.0016/request
the only way this blows away your expectation is if your reference point is cloud services instead of consumer-facing platforms
> Reddit appears to be working on a “contributor program” that would let users cash out gold or karma (basically, points you get for posts, comments, or giving awards) they receive into real money.
I can’t see that being anything but an unmitigated disaster. They already struggle to deal with repost bots. Now you’re going to add a monetary incentive?
It's even worse than that: Moderators can remove a post, then immediately repost it themselves to gain the currently-meaningless votes.
If the money-for-votes scheme is implemented, those moderators will have a financial incentive to do that.
Why would anyone who isn't a moderator want to participate in that?
In my opinion these kinds of decisions are being made by people who have only interacted with the business side of reddit for a long time. It's ridiculous how out of touch the management of reddit appears to be!
Why didn't they implement a per-user API key with reddit premium and provide a method for any 3rd party app to obtain and use said key? Do they really think they would make more money from advertising than through subscriptions? If they wanted to push their own mobile app, they could make its subscription cheaper than the 3rd party API key. Heck, they could have added a moderator or "extended use" API fee for those people that want to do extra stuff with the API, or more often, etc etc.
I do wonder about the legality of paying people for posts. My ideal situation would be that mods and content creators get paid from the reddit awards something like this: 50% goes to reddit, 25% goes to a user-designated reddit-approved charity, and the final 25% goes to the user.
Then again, I'd also implement comment signing via gnupg so I'm obviously not CEO material.
> My ideal situation would be that mods and content creators get paid from the reddit awards
I've been working on a community platform/Reddit alternative that has a business model exactly like this.
It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them under one umbrella. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do.
I'm not the type to hate on capitalism but Reddit's management is truly capitalism gone wrong. Ruining a public service for the profits of a few. What a waste.
I'm not sure that is the case. Reddit's problem is that they have consistently used up more value to run the service than they have been able to deliver in return. Now they are running around like chickens with their heads cut off desperately trying to find some way to increase the value provided/decrease the value needed to stave off certain death.
A socially owned organization operated in the same manner would be suffering the same fate right now. The idea that exchanging parties expect trade of equal value is not a feature of capitalism. It is the basis of all economic systems; at least those which do not depend on an imagined post-scarcity world.
> A socially owned organization operated in the same manner would be suffering the same fate right now.
The thing is I don’t think a socially owned organization would have operated the same way. The core Reddit product of Reddit, text and links to images, is still valid today and what the long time users want. The expensive part: development/maintenance of new features like live streaming, mobile apps, recommendations algorithms, etc are all driven by profits and IPO hopes.
If that is all that drove them, why did they not dig random holes on the Reddit campus instead? I think you will find that there was a belief that these features would provide the missing value. It is likely fair to say that it failed, but such is life.
The socially owned telephone company in my neck of the woods, of which I and the rest of my community are members, once spent big to enter the cell phone market. It too failed to deliver on the necessary value and we eventually had to back away from offering the service. The operations manager has said it was the biggest mistake the organization has ever made. Being socially owned doesn't mean value will magically present itself. After all, beneath it all is still humans and all of their faults.
In a similar vein, the original Reddit, Usenet, may not be strictly socially owned but shares a lot in common with social ownership. It too has, for all intents and purposes, failed. The core product is there: Text, links, and images, but it seems that's not enough. Few are willing to give up anything for those things. They really don't hold much, if any, value. The humans that lie beneath to keep it all working want something in return.
And that something in return is what Reddit is, now desperately, trying to find. They took to try and find it, but one can only hold out on giving back for so long and the clock is ticking.
Again, this is not something of capitalism. People not wanting to keep giving to people who won't give back in return has been around since the dawn of mankind, long before capitalism was invented. The laggard who always sleeps all day, offering nothing to the community, while the rest of the tribe works tirelessly has never been welcome and no economic system can change that fundamental truth.
>Now they are running around like chickens with their heads cut off desperately trying to find some way to increase the value provided/decrease the value needed to stave off certain death.
Problem is who they are appealing to has different "value" than the actual users of the website. A classic problem of shareholder funded business. This is inevitable for stuff like ads but there are definitely ways to increase value that actual users would appreciate and at the very least shareholders would be neutral towards. Better moderation tools, for instance.
> This US government could easily afford to host Reddit.
I imagine the government has access to a lot more runway. Government is ideally suited to hosting capital intensive projects for that reason. But the piper needs to be paid eventually. Government isn't magical. It still has to deliver value in return for the value it takes.
This is not just theoretical. In the real world, governments that have failed to deliver sufficient value in return have fallen. In fact, that has happened many times throughout the ages. Government is a business like any other, only special in that you become an owner by virtue of citizenship.
Government is just people. It can't take, take, take without giving back any more than you or I can. For the US government to be able to afford to host Reddit long-term, it needs to start providing value that Reddit Inc. has been unable to find. What do you think they could do differently to start to deliver value?
> The reasons it does not are cultural, not economic.
I am not sure they are separable. Culture defines the economy. I agree that our broad culture sees little value in Reddit, giving no reason to bring it under the government watch – or to exist as a private business for that matter (hence the scrambling to try and change that). It is true that advertisers see some value, but not sufficiently so.
Reddit really backed themselves in a corner with respect to advertisers. The other social media giants realized that they had to make commercial users part of their core offering. I can promote my commerce all day long on those services for free and they're happy to point their users in my direction. Paid advertising just makes it better. Try doing the same on Reddit. You will be quickly banned for posting spam. That introduces a lot of friction in getting advertisers in the door, and also makes the paid ads that do make it onto the platform strangely bolted on the side, not a smooth part of the experience.
> no, but framing all aspect of life as a quantifiable trade, is
No. Such framing very much predates the invention of capitalism. Capitalism only speaks to a separation of ownership and labour. Nothing in this discussion relates to that.
I understand better what you mean now. Clearly you've thought about this topic more than I have, so I don't think I can contribute much to the conversation unfortunately.
"It still has to deliver value in return for the value it takes.": To make sure I understand, how do you define 'value' exactly here?
"makes the paid ads that do make it onto the platform strangely bolted on the side, not a smooth part of the experience.": I guess for me that's the appeal in Reddit, in that it is not completely "consumerfied" yet. I feel like a Wikipedia-type management would be a much better fit for the end-user, but obviously it would be harder to collect donations to run Reddit than to run Wikipedia.
"I agree that our broad culture sees little value in Reddit": I agree, that's really the crux of it and it's too bad.
I suppose in the same way the dictionary does – the importance or worth of something.
When one has something they hold important, they won't want to give it up. If you expect others to continually give up something they deem important and not offer them anything in return (or only offer things they do not see as being as important), they are going to quickly grow disgruntled.
If the government took control of Reddit, it still needs people to operate. Not just developers, but people to build computers, people supplying power to run the servers, people providing connectivity, etc. along with other resources that people have. Generally, these people a high importance on their time and other resources. You need to offer something pretty compelling to get them to give it up – they will look for a fair trade.
That means other people need to give things up in return to make it a fair trade. Food is usually a pretty compelling offer. Most people will give up important things if you offer food[0] in exchange[1]. Is r/farming compelling enough to get farmers to give up their food for? Not likely.
Yes, a government can point a gun at their backs and tell them they must give up food to the workers at Reddit. And that might work for a while, but eventually they will become disgruntled as described before. "I'm slaving in the fields all day and all I get is a few minutes on r/farming before bed in return? That's not fair!" they will start to cry. This is when you'll start to see protests, conflict, and perhaps even a fall of government.
[0] Replace food/farmers with any other compelling good/service.
[1] In practice, you'll offer money. But remember money is just an IOU. Everyone will ultimately redeem a portion of the IOUs they collect for food.
> but obviously it would be harder to collect donations to run Reddit
Seems that way. Gold was effectively their attempt at that, but it doesn't appear to have amounted to much.
> I agree, that's really the crux of it and it's too bad.
Is it? Discussion forums are a commodity.
Reddit didn't do anything Usenet wasn't already doing 30 years earlier, other than providing a client with better UX. But arguably clients like Apollo provided even better UX than Reddit and, based on what came out of that drama, it appears Apollo was taking an even larger share of the net value than Reddit.
Theyre not trying to be profitable, theyre trying to grow and earn a high company valuation. I agree that they have not done well on that front either, relative to the size of their user base.
That is how they were operating, but with investors growing cold towards tech their old "Just secure another round of funding" they have leaned on has fallen short.
Nobody is going to take a chance on a company that hasn't managed to reach that kind of growth after nearly 20 years when safe investments like CDs are paying 5%+. Long gone is the low interest rate environment where investing in places like Reddit was the only hope you had of seeing returns. The world has changed significantly in the last year or so.
Today, Reddit is clamouring at anything to try and turn profitability around in order to keep the lights on. The runway only lasts so long.
This is a prime example of why capitalism is good. If Reddit was state owned or equivalent with regulatory capture, then nothing could be done about it. Doesn’t matter how bad it is. Like the DMV.
Now since Reddit is determined to shoot itself in the foot, new competitors can rise up and replace them. Reddit did the same to its predecessors.
Capitalism punishes harshly companies that decide to be stupid.
The second MD started doing appointments it was 100x better. Even before appointments for simple things like returning plates there were people with ipads you could just checkout with.
Last year, I moved to Texas. Texas has a DMV, but most of its functions are semi-privatized so you can get your license plates from a private agency, which is super convenient. In contrast, I had to get my drivers license at the DPS, which was booked months out.
Purely anecdotal, but I’ve already started to see noticeably less activity in a few of the subs I follow. It’s still a long way from dying, but it’s a promising start.
That's a fair point about allowing competition. But frankly, it just sucks that Reddit choses to purposefully hurt its service. With social media, there's also a strong moating effect that is fundamentally anti-competitive.
"If x was state owned... nothing could be done about it." Is this fatalism or is the American disease truly that your democracy has inexorably evaporated? Theoretically you have much more input over state-owned functions than private ones. However that assumes you don't live in a dystopian oligarchy ruled by capital that has completely supplanted the function of your government. If that was the case though, surely that'd be a prime example of why capitalism is NOT good?
If Reddit was state-owned, they wouldn't be desperately scrabbling for profitability and none of these problems would have happened in the first place.
That's not to say they wouldn't have other problems, or that state-owned social media is a good idea at all, but this particular argument doesn't work.
Reddit is enough of an echo chamber as it is. Now people will be posting or reposting things trying to hit that group think even harder than they are now since karma and awards won't just be for ego-boosting anymore.
>Hey [OP], from your comment history it looks like you’ve been working on NFT and blockchain stuff for the last year. Does that mean these award changes are likely to be related to that in some way?
After the disaster with 3rd party apps, Reddit needs to make some big changes to keep its userbase. Elon already saw how vulnerable Twitter was when Threads attracted 100 million users in 1 week.
100 million users in a week appears, based on what I could find, to be about on par with other features Instagram has added over the years. Given that Instagram's user base has grown quite a bit since some of those other features launched, 100 million users of a new feature may actually be a poor showing, comparatively.
Indeed, Twitter is as vulnerable as Snapchat was when Stories launched, and Twitch when IGTV launched, and TikTok when Reels launched. But how vulnerable is that, really? In fact, I was just thinking about how much better Twitter's content has become lately. Perhaps Threads has served to relieve Twitter of the dregs that was bringing it down?
Those hurdles no doubt explain its relatively poor showing, but it remains that it is just another Instagram feature, no matter how poorly implemented the launch was. I'm sure all the above (Threads, Stories, Reels, etc.) took from the services they were intended to copy, but how significant is that in the grand scheme of things?
It seems like an anti-pattern to me to remove something without announcing it’s replacement, but say “we’ll figure it out later.”
It’s hard to understand things and communicate. Having two different messages at two different times is extra confusing.
I think it’s generally easier to have a single message than to have two. So this probably means incompetence. Even if they think the replacement is worse, this indirection will make whatever they come up with worse.
I think it may be a situation where they have to make a change and get political capital tied up in any change, not a specific change. So the conflict is “will we change” rather than “we’ll replace gold with blue” (or whatever).
I've been on Reddit for at least 14 years now. I have Reddit Gold and after I received the "use it or lose it" message, realized I had absolutely no idea what it's used for!
Also how dumb are the people who run Reddit? Like I know they are liars and assholes but why would you take away a perk of Reddit Premium before figuring out what’s replacing it? It’s not too dissimilar from when they announced there would be pricing changes but not what they were but come on, this was clearly going to piss people off, why not just wait till have the replacement ready to go?