Genuinely don’t understand how reddit has failed to make money.
Reddit’s entire value is based upon the unpaid contributions of its users- they generate and moderate all the content on the site for free, and these are the things that bring people to the site.
How entitled must one be to think they can ignore all this and be fine?
Also how tf is reddit not able to break bank?
The functionality of their website was relatively simple - not underming the reddit devs here. The costs must’ve been minimal before the redesign and the dumb ass decision to host their own images and videos. Did they burn up all their money for the redesign and the shitty app?
They’re bloated. Thousands of employees. Tons of developers. Marketing people. And in the end? The real product is like you said, it’s the users and volunteer mods.
Those developers? Produced an absolutely terrible mobile app and mobile website.
The marketing people? They’re more focused on NYC time square ads than fixing sponsored posts on Reddit.
It’s an absolute shitshow but that’s what happens with these extremely bloated companies…
Actually sounds like a pretty standard case of feature creep, the bane of all large scale software. A vicious cycle of trying to do too much, failing, and then needing more people to maintain all of the crappy code. All the while they can’t make any actual forward progress on things that do matter.
Not sure why they had to blow up like that. At its core Reddit should have been relatively simple to create and maintain.
It’s not “feature creep” when you prioritize ntf avatars over tools for moderators to keep the site functional.
I disagree. Feature creepy has to do with trying to do too much with limited resources. Nothing that reddit tried was super ambitious. It’s stuff that other platforms not only do, but do a lot more of. I think it’s just general mismanagement.
It’s amazing how much of this fallout could have been avoided if Reddit had just developed a competent mobile app at literally any point over THE LAST TEN YEARS. You had plenty of time Reddit. Posted from Jerboa, a mobile app which already works better for Lemmy than the official app for Reddit works for Reddit and was developed by one tankie in his spare time for peanuts.
And yes I know I am talking from a regular user perspective and not a moderator perspective and I can’t speak to the mod capabilities of Jerboa, but I work in IT and have developed apps, it’s not that hard to pay someone to make a decent one or just buy out an existing one and don’t shit it up. The solution to this problem has been available for Reddit for literally years. Almost like if Huffman was a legitimate businessman instead of a tech bro who fell ass backwards into internet relevance, he would understand the concept of investing in the future rather than just doing nothing until a few months before IPO and then flinging shit directly into the fan in front of him.
AlienBlue was reportedly good before Reddit bought it, so I’d say the official mobile app is intentionally bad.
Yeah, back in the day Alien Blue was better than almost any other app. It was the first place I ever used Reddit before I moved to Android. The official app is nothing like Alien Blue used to be. It’s been gutted and smeared in shit.
They didn’t even really need need to make a better app to make more money. If the objective is getting the telemetry for ads by forcing the use of the official app, they could have the equivalent just via APIs and user-specific tokens. The backend would be key, and it would take advantage of an established app market. They could additionally monetize the API, if they approached it more reasonably. They could have the data and have developers pay a toll. Maybe hindsight is 20/20, but the animus they’re displaying here is self-defeating.
To be fair I don’t think it’s that he’s not ending of a “legitimate businessman”, I think that’s the way that all large corporations are and if anything he’s learned too well how to think like CEO.
But yeah otherwise I agree with you.
Can’t forget about https://nft.reddit.com/, the real moneymaker. Nothing says value-adding like nfts, the dumbfucks.
An NFT as your avatar? Wow, it’s dumber than I thought.
Ah but it’s exclusive you see. Your avatar can be a glowy, animated Snoo, whereas everyone else just has free peasant avatars.
For the low price of 105 ETH $(227,389.05). Makes about as much sense as the really high priced ships in Star Citizen.
I hate how much effort they put into this.
Holy shit, I totally forgot about how stupid that was lol
I don’t get it, if 3PA is only 1% of the traffic, why even bother murdering them?
It’s possible that this is not about collecting money for third party app use, but instead about forcing people to use Reddit’s apps (both mobile and web), which are designed for data extraction and tracking.
Absolutely, if they wanted money from 3rd party apps, they’d have sane prices. The ridiculous API cost was done to effectively kill all other apps without saying they are killing all other apps.
That’s one hundred percent what I think this is all about
My best guess is they want to fight against adblockers next and can’t have people easily switch to a 3PA and avoid ads this way.
Ads already exist in Reddit’s system as a different subtype of the same entity that a post or a comment is. They could just… Present adds in the API call returns. And they could have someone doing regular checks to ensure that the app developers aren’t filtering out ads. This is so fucking stupid lol
That wouldn’t give Reddit access to your phone’s APIs.
Android permissions required by Reddit 2023.23.0:
- android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE
- android.permission.INTERNET
- android.permission.READ_MEDIA_IMAGES
- android.permission.READ_MEDIA_VIDEO
- android.permission.READ_MEDIA_AUDIO
- android.permission.READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE
- android.permission.FOREGROUND_SERVICE
- android.permission.ACCESS_WIFI_STATE
- com.google.android.gms.permission.AD_ID
- android.permission.POST_NOTIFICATIONS
- android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE
- android.permission.READ_SYNC_SETTINGS
- android.permission.WRITE_SYNC_SETTINGS
- android.permission.WAKE_LOCK
- android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION
- com.android.launcher.permission.INSTALL_SHORTCUT
- android.permission.VIBRATE
- android.permission.PACKAGE_USAGE_STATS
- android.permission.USE_BIOMETRIC
- android.permission.USE_FINGERPRINT
- android.permission.RECORD_AUDIO
- android.permission.CAMERA
- android.permission.FLASHLIGHT
- android.permission.MODIFY_AUDIO_SETTINGS
- com.google.android.c2dm.permission.RECEIVE
- com.google.android.finsky.permission.BIND_GET_INSTALL_REFERRER_SERVICE
- android.permission.RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED
- com.reddit.frontpage.DYNAMIC_RECEIVER_NOT_EXPORTED_PERMISSION
- com.android.vending.BILLING
- android.permission.BLUETOOTH
- android.permission.BLUETOOTH_CONNECT
- com.sec.android.provider.badge.permission.READ
- com.sec.android.provider.badge.permission.WRITE
- com.htc.launcher.permission.READ_SETTINGS
- com.htc.launcher.permission.UPDATE_SHORTCUT
- com.sonyericsson.home.permission.BROADCAST_BADGE
- com.sonymobile.home.permission.PROVIDER_INSERT_BADGE
- com.anddoes.launcher.permission.UPDATE_COUNT
- com.majeur.launcher.permission.UPDATE_BADGE
- com.huawei.android.launcher.permission.CHANGE_BADGE
- com.huawei.android.launcher.permission.READ_SETTINGS
- com.huawei.android.launcher.permission.WRITE_SETTINGS
- android.permission.READ_APP_BADGE
- com.oppo.launcher.permission.READ_SETTINGS
- com.oppo.launcher.permission.WRITE_SETTINGS
- me.everything.badger.permission.BADGE_COUNT_READ
- me.everything.badger.permission.BADGE_COUNT_WRITE
Probably. But throwing out 3PAs is easier, well except for the backlash.
I switched to Lemmy to avoid Reddit a̶d̶s̶.
All that suggests is that 90% of the traffic is bots.
Gotta put on a public spectacle of being ruthlessly profit focused when you’re trying to personally grift the public IPOing a platform you were unable to make profitable.
From what I heard it’s actually closer to 25% traffic.
Really? That’s huge.
from Umberto Eco’s list of 14 common features of fascism:
- The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
It’s no surprise spez worships elon musk
You can always get richer
Yes, Reddit is a big dataset and yes, Reddit deserves to make some money off that if other organisations are going to scrape that data, for AI or anything else.
That’s what they should be blocking and monetizing. Not those few users using 3rd party apps. Those folks (posters, mods) are amongst the ones creating that data set for Reddit, free of charge.
They are right about needing to make money to continue as a successful business. But they are doing it the wrong way and alienating their key assets.
Which is why I’m here :)
If they want organizations not to scrape their content, tough toenails; stopping them is impossible.
It’s especially impossible to stop Google and Microsoft from doing it, because they already have a search index full of said content.
Spez is alienating his loyal user base for nothing.
Yeah they could have left current large 3rd party apps alone and said any new API connections from AI companies and etc will be charged 20 million dollars a year…
That wouldn’t work either. They’d just scrape the HTML, feed that to the AI, and not pay Reddit one rusty cent. Even I could implement that, let alone a billion-dollar AI company with an army of top-notch programmers.
Why does reddit deserve to make profit from content made by others? They are service provider - they are not entitled to the work of people who used their service.
Ok. I’m about to abandon an account that’s 17.5 years old. I despise what reddit is proposing.
But, honestly, how do you propose they turn (some) profit so it could last forever? Losing money isn’t a long-term recipe for success. I’ve got no problem with reddit seeking to profit. I’ve got a problem with their short notice and their refusal to let third party clients be part of the ecosystem they wish to create.
First I don’t see why reddit has to be a for profit organisation in the first place, since that’s kind of the rout of the problem. Users becoming a product that reddit is trying to sell to advertisers. At the same time if reddit would be respectful to users, creators and mods it would be a different story. But they are clearly not, they don’t respect the people who are making reddit work - but feel entitled to the fruits of their labor. That just irks me on a deeply personal level.
My main problem is not even with the API decision but with the way the CEO communicated with the community.
COMPLETELY agree that reddit shouldn’t have developed in a commercial direction, but rather as a non-profit. That would avoided so many problems. That said, even as a non-profit losing money is not tenable.
I also agree that how the CEO communicated is a big part of the problem.
Same. Late to the conversation here, but in the same camp. About to delete a 13.5 year old account.
I’d be fine with Reddit making money, if they did it in an honest and predictable way. The way they’re going about it though is short sighted, deceitful, and completely unnecessary.
They could make money hand over fist if they just tweaked their approach a tad, kept the community happy, etc.
Bundle API usage in with Reddit Premium. Have it use upper limits of say 100k requests/month to the API. Anything over that and it’s on a per 10k/requests billing cycle sort of thing.
Push the cost to the consumer, so if AI wants to scrape all the data, they can pay for it just like everyone else.
I just burned my nearly 12 year old account. It’s just not worth it anymore. Reddit has made promises it can’t keep and does not intend on keeping.
Well stated.
It was never truly about them not making money though was it?
The whole thing would not have escalated, if they’d actually reacted to the problems raised, e.g. the astronomical API fees and the situation of mod tools and accessability tools.
Only when shit was already hitting the fan they responded to 3rd party devs, who tried to reach out to them for a month already.
Even if they’d postpone the changes and start listening to the raised problems now, they scorched a lot of earth and very well knew that would happen.
Isn’t it always about making more money? They don’t want 3rd party apps because they want more control because that allows them to optimize for more ad money. Now they can make even more money off their app by compromising the user experience, and users don’t have any other option to leave for a better client.
“Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things,” Huffman said. “We are not in the business of giving that away for free.”
Wow. Clearly Reddit now believes that they own all of the conversations that people have had on the site. That explains why they’ve also been restoring comments that people have deleted when leaving the site. That has major implications for data security, privacy, and even safety in some situations.
This episode has revealed Reddit’s true colors, and they’re not pretty.
When something is free, you are the product. Reddit has been a human farm for ages, using effectively “slave” (free) labor to maintain the herd. That massive data trove is now being sold for profit. That’s why it’s so important that Huffman preserve Reddit and is kicking recalcitrant mods (something I predicted would happen).
I admit, I unsubscribed to Reddit and logged off the day of the AMA, after giving Huffman a piece of my mind about his “double dipping.” I was fine paying him for no ads. I would have been fine paying Apollo a small subscription. There was no way I was going to pay Reddit AND Apollo for the use of Reddit, when Apollo was basically going to be forced to collect the money I was already paying Reddit (using the APIs as a blinder).
I am fine leaving behind a ghost account. And while I get the idea of taking your data with you, frankly, I am not a thought leader in any space, and most of my comment history are stray tidbits across multiple subreddits. Certainly nothing of any value. The only value I have is being someone who could have eyes on to ads, or interact with an ad, and that can’t happen if I’m not there. And I fully believe that there is more harm to cause by being inactive than in not being there at all. Huffman may have 400 million accounts, but how many of those are actively engaged? What if the number of inactive accounts keep growing?
Let u/spez be CEO of a graveyard of rapidly aging data and ghosted accounts. For those who have contributed, I think the best solution at this time is to get your knowledge archived in a searchable format and then just pick up elsewhere. Yeah, there will be work to re-grow the community, but I have found that folks do migrate to where the activity is. As subreddits go quiet, folks will look for where the action is. It’s what happened with MySpace and Livejournal, LiveJournal and Facebook and Facebook and Twitter. Reddit is no different. Nor is Twitter. People just forget and get complacent. Personally, I like to shake things up anyway. It’s time for change.
I keep my account and deleted every single comment or post I’ve made. If you have ever follow any thread, seeing a
[]comment is infuriating even if it turns out to be insignificant info. I want to maximize my departure’s effect and that’s exactly what I wanted.I have been having to rerun my deletion scripts daily. They are actively restoring comments. Even after writing gibberish and deleting. They are now holding more than 1 backup.
Make a GDPR request to delete your data. Use a VPN to be in Europe, how are they going to know if you are or not a EU citizen? Are they going to risk the GDPR fines assuming you’re not a EU Citizen currently traveling in the US?
They definately log IPs. I’ve gotten warnings for voting on a post, switching accounts, and later voting on the same post I stumbled on before. They can probably see that pattern.
Either way it’s fine. I’ll keep running the script. It’s all JavaScript so no api needed. And let them burn compute time on restores.
They log IPs. but your IP has nothing to do with you nationality. And GDPR does’t dicriminate wether you’re standing in the EU or US but if you’re a EU Citizen. If you make a GDPR request, they can A) Ignore it and risk getting a pretty bad fine B) Say “fuck it im not going to risk it” and delete your data. I guess getting on a VPN in the EU might also help the case. I would do it that way because if in 30 days some of my comments are still there, I can report them and they take that shit seriously and the fine is pretty bad.
Thats fair. Im not familiar with GDPR personally. I did see a post earlier where someone reached out about invoking it. They basically said its on you and that you ALSO have to delete your account.
Problem is, when ive wiped it, they have restored it. And if you delete the account you cut your own access. I would guess thats not compliant.
That’s not a bad point. I still get the occasional reply notification from comments many years old, from people who were looking for a conversation on a topic and engaged with what I said a decade ago.
I suppose it would be somewhat impactful if those comments were just empty voids, perhaps even moreso if they were all replaced by a message saying something like “I left reddit because of X, look for me on the feddiverse to continue this conversation.”
All of my comments that I can access have been edited and left in place. Every one is now simply
“Deleted: I refuse to let Reddit profit off of my content when they treat their community like this”
Imagine if phone companies started selling our conversations without giving us a cent for the content.
Oh, my sweet, summer child. Maybe not phone calls (yet?), but they sell lots of other data they maintain about you. Location data, specifically, is a hot seller.
Is that where Google Maps gets traffic data from?
Yes and no. Google definitely uses location data to improve traffic details, but GPS has always been able to get some level of data about it, despite being mostly a one way system. I don’t really remember the details, I’ll try to dig out an article
Don’t a lot of calls get recorded now anyway? (I’m just asking, I don’t actually know)
Not without consent of at least one party to the call, no. Unlike most forms of invasive spying, that one is illegal in many jurisdictions.
deleted by creator
I’ve had one from /r/wellthatsucks turn up today after deleting everything.
I lost count of how many times I used Redact to (re-)deleted my comments. They will simply popup after a few hours. They tends to be older comments of at least a year ago.
What I find interesting is this could be avoided by granting exceptions to the existing app devs and being done with it.
I get the api costs money and theres folks like pushshift aggregating data and using it for their own profit. I’m sure plenty of companies are using data for adverts and more. And there’s an argument there Reddit deserves a cut. Especially if they are using the api to train bots or ai to have conversations for their own inventions.
But just the ass backwards way they handled devs of existing 3p apps that constitute value add to their data sets is just…mesmerizing.
And if these users ARENT a majority of the usage or costs, why bother cutting them off and not just granting exceptions to avoid the PR issues.
I think you misunderstood
spez. He wanted no 3rd party app at all. RIF was paying Reddit for using their brand name andspezterminated the contract. It’s all about control.It would be much easier to just inject ads into data returned by the API. Apps will automatically display these ads and developers will understand that if they filter these ads, their access to Reddit will be either limited or completely cut out.
Wasn’t aware of the RIF thing. Yeah agree in that case 100%
There are myriad ways to make money off third party apps that benefits both reddit and the apps. Spez is an absolute moron, who has thrown a spanner in the works of both, when he was sitting on a golden opportunity. I don’t think he has any business sense at all.
So, a moron continues being a moron. I’ve moved on. Would love to see the rest of the world move on, too, but it’s unlikely.
I deleted ~2300 comments and submissions… Steve’s not going to train AI off of my work while behaving the way he has. That entire company can go pound sand.
Other users were reporting their deleted content was back after some time.
Amazing that he can’t think of a way to make money that doesn’t involve alienating the unpaid people who keep the place running.
I haven’t abandoned Reddit entirely, but I’ll never use the app…downloaded it once a year or two ago, and deleted it within an hour because it was ugly and confusing. I honestly think maybe the next phase of the protests, for those who still are active on Reddit, should be mass deletion of the app and using only the desktop site/mobile browser version. The API thing was meant to force people onto the app, so mass organizing to delete the app would hit them where it hurts.
Is there any metric measuring that, though? Of course they track app downloads, and can tell if people are using it, but I don’t know if there’s any way for them to know who is actually keeping it on their phone. A mass deletion wouldn’t mean anything unless it’s by people who were already using it daily. Giving it a low rating on the app store might be seen though.
Yeah it would have to be mass deletion by people who use the app regularly, which (should) lead to a measurable reduction in traffic and ad revenue, assuming that those people would spend less time on reddit if they didn’t have the app handy on their phones constantly anymore.
The craziest part is these people are volunteers and were the entire reason his stupid site worked to begin with. Why go to war with them? They can just walk away, they never got anything out of this to begin with. And why would anyone new join up if the previous generation is being treated this way? Just super mysterious behavior overall.
Just another CEO who is out of touch with his product and his customers
Unusually, however, this one has been involved with the product and customers since the beginning.
It’s common to hear of a CEO being brought in and promptly running the company into the ground, but for one of the founders to do it after over a decade of operation? That’s different.
Imagine looking at what Elon is doing to Twitter and thinking “that’s a great idea”.
Joke’s on us, that’s exactly what he thinks.
Just saw a comment regarding Twitter’s troubles:
Last time I checked, if a company has more than 12 creditors — as Twitter does — then any three of them can join together to put a company into an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding. And Elon is in danger here. At some point, the creditors he is mindlessly stiffing on a regular basis are going to get sufficiently pissed to throw Twitter into bankruptcy.
Honestly this is the silver lining of Elon buying the company; endless entertainment from watching the smoldering wreck. I do feel bad for the folks that were actually getting value out of using Twitter before his acquisition, but it’s fascinating to see Twitter constantly finding new ways to fail to meet everyone’s already-low expectations.
Lol I love how brutal these headlines are getting
“Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things,” Huffman said. “We are not in the business of giving that away for free.”
🤮
Real Nestlé moment from Spez.
Sure is in the business of TAKING it for free, though!
“But we we do ask that the people talking about things give us a perpetual irrevocable license to all the IP they share here until the universe fizzles out into nothingness, and the people moderating our site do so for free because being in my Speztastic presence is enough.” -Spez, probably
Exactly. I really enjoyed posting on reddit, but the idea that they see our comments as a trove of data to monetize at the expense of the community that created it really makes me never want to contribute again. Too bad I made the mistake of not deleting all of my comments or replacing them with junk when deleting my account :/
Sounds like deleting your comments wouldn’t have done any good, considering others are saying their comments are being undeleted.
Woah, that’s new to me. And sounds very illegal. Are these reports credible?
EDIT: I found a discussion on the topic here, which presents some alternatives to explain why the comments appeared to be restored: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/34112/Heads-up-Reddit-is-quietly-restoring-deleted-AND-overwritten-posts-and
I will give Reddit the benefit of the doubt because even though they are acting pretty badly, restoring user-deleted comments sounds to me like an even higher level of incompetence.
I just hope they are setting themselves up for a massive class lawsuit for GDPR violations.
“Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things,” Huffman said. “We are not in the business of giving that away for free.”
I mean holy shit dude. Do you listen to yourself? Where did that “data set of just human beings talking about interesting things” come from? It came from millions of people who gave you that content for free. And many of them used the site through third party apps because those apps made your site much more useful without charging you a dime.
The entitlement of Huffman is astounding.
He got free content and free app development work and now he’s going around whining about how “we’re not in the business of giving that away for free.”
Yikes.
🤣
also:
Huffman is engaging in the cardinal sin of the internet: trying to charge for something that has always been free. And acting as if he’s entitled to that money, and it’s the people who don’t want to pay who are the problem.
And, again, Huffman seems like all entitlement all the time:
“They need to pay for this. That is fair.”
I mean… the users of Reddit could just as easily turn around and say the same thing to Huffman for all the free labor, content, and data they’ve provided to him.
I mean genuinely if your charging for access to the content I have created then I am I entitled to a portion of your revenue. Same as Adsense on YT not that I want to turn it into a race to the bottom for engagement like those scenarios are conducive to. But if we want to make it about money we can make it about money /u/spez.
If I were an executive and If I was even 2% clued into the effect this is having on shifting the conversation to fediverse type projects I would be shitting myself. Not because this will have an immediately noticeable effect on my bottom line, but that it will continue to grow organically. We already crossed the threshold of momentum needed to self sustain, its all up from here especially as the tools and systems mature.
Just look at the tech literate around us start to question “yeah why the fuck are we leaving social media in the hands of corporations???”
The current communities we have presently are amazing, but I’m really curious to see the impact of the new Reddit alternative that Jimmy Wales is working on
Deleted my Reddit account today, not gonna let Huffman use my content to make money and his attitude is very concerning tbh
They’ll probably just use it anyway, unfortunately.
Now that we’ve given them the data, there’s not much we can do.
If you’re in the EU have a look at Art 15&17 GDPR. I’m so gonna have fun with them…
I tried nuking mine and they restored everything. At least I have the power not to give them anything more.
me as well - it’s all back.
Waiting on them to fulfil my GDPR data request.
One I’ve got all my data (since there was some useful stuff there over the years) I’ll follow up with the “right to be forgotten” request as well.
Keep us updated how this goes. Are they even governed by EU law if they are in the US?
If they want to operate in the EU (for example, selling ad space to European companies to show to European users) then yes, they are.
There are some American news sites that don’t serve to European users for that reason. Instead, we get a screan that explains that GDPR is too much for them to handle.
It can be circumvented with a VPN, but I haven’t bothered so far
So, a moron continues being a moron. I’ve moved on. Would love to see the rest of the world move on, too, but it’s unlikely.
To an extend I understand the lost ad revenue for the 3rd party apps. But it seems like there’s a different solution, like requiring apps using the api to either pass through the ads or pay a per user fee, allowing for app users to get all the features they want for free and pay som small monthly subscription to remove the ads…
make third party apps available to Reddit Gold subscribers, implement reasonable api feeds, etc.
There were a lot of solutions to this, however the real money is probably in the Reddit app harvesting user data that they could resell to advertising companies
I would have not liked this but it would have been understandable and OK. $5 a month for something I got so much use out of is peanuts. That’s the amount I’m contributing to Beehaw right now anyways.
Up until a few days ago, I thought Reddit Gold was just the awards. I had no idea it was an ad-free subscription. Reddit could have easily converted me into a paying customer by offering a personal api key that i plug into my favorite 3rd party app. The $5 more than covers my api calls, plus opportunity cost from not seeing ads, plus it would have kept me feeding quality content into their machine. What a series of ridiculous missteps.
This is further supported by their plan to block mobile browsers from viewing Reddit at all. Native apps can harvest far more data than websites can.
Hmmm. Thank you for that. And from a relatively reliable source as well.
