Wow, you’re really going to argue pedantically here?
Let me be clear for the fools in the room then. The behavior exhibited here is perfectly rational and likely to be rewarded from the perspective of a pre IPO company looking to pump its financials wrt user count, engagement, and ad views, and therefore any objections about moral or long term behavior ignore the fact that this playbook has been wildly profitable for many people many times, and thusly explains what the Reddit CEO is doing
Looking forward to when people start panning this system / status quo instead of acting like following the incentives is confusing
> If something loses me 20M$ per year and I have an option to buy it for 10M$ or kill it for 0$, I would choose the latter without much thinking.
Weren’t the $20M reddit claimed they are losing, missed opportunity costs? I.e. if Apollo users wouldn‘t use Apollo but the official app, they would make that amount of money off of them. So buying that amount of revenue for $10M sounds definitely reasonable to me. If what reddit claims would be truthful that would be a guaranteed 100% ROI.
>And it would have been a deal: 6 months of opportunity cost upfront to then turn into real profit. Instead they are permanently lose the [possibly] majority of that opportunity when those users lose access to Reddit.
I dont think that is accurate. Reddit doesnt make 20M a year if they buy Apollo in this situation.
If something costs 20 million/yr to operate, buying it doesnt reduce that cost. You are just out 10M upfront and then 20M/yr.
The solution is not to buy it, but to make it stop.
> They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO
My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point.
I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites.
It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done.
In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it.
To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making.
If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.
> 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie.
If something loses me 20M$ per year and I have an option to buy it for 10M$ or kill it for 0$, I would choose the latter without much thinking. And that seems to be exactly what Reddit is doing.
And that is something that any client using a third-party platform should expect that will happen eventually.
> with a $75B valuation, clearly has made its owner some money
Why do you assume that? It's not profitable, it only survives because of outside funding, and thus the owners of the company, are the ones providing the funding, not the guy who decided what the world needs is a better way to generate scummy click-bait content.
>the transaction does not cost these folks anything they value.
Absolutely and you can say that about literally everyone who gets caught by a confidence trickster and some do.
It really hasn't worked out for too many indigenous cultures where that was used as the precise justfication, for example. Usuary is another one you can defend that way and people do. It's not so commonly held anymore by those not profiting from it.
When there is a tradeoff between what is good fo soceity at large being the people who live in it and what is good for for a big company's market dominance the latter is meant to come absolutely last and be tolerated if it doesn't infringe anything much else of value to the people. I can't see that as being the case here. No doubt Zuckerberg disagrees because he's convinced anything good for him and his company is pefection for society by the definition that he wants to do it.
Nobody understands what they are paying. Nobody understands their liability. Google et al all desperately hide it and have done a bait and switch to make it happen.
There is _NO_ informed consent to the contract and the contract is invalid.
> He also presents his math, related to cost per user in terms of revenue and reddits proposed API cost is 20x average reveneue per user in any similar business model plan.
he gets traffic and potential Ads views from reddit, and can't monetize it well enough. Sounds also not like reddit's problem.
> The numbers very much point towards malicious pricing. And they are, in so far as they are presented, indefensible.
this is pure handwaving without any supporting evidence. Counter-example has been provided: imgur charges similar price on standard plans.
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.
> Good God, your firm exists to facilitate trading in speculative assets peddled by libertarian internet millionaires and that just so happen to be exceptionally useful for laundering money - enabling a whole online industry of shadow markets that were thought impossible a decade ago
This is a fantastic sentence. One of those times when I wish I could upvote more than once.
Arguably even more puzzling are the social activists at Facebook etc. They work for a platform that has interfered with democracy, has been proven to cause or exacerbate mental health problems, tramples over privacy, and at the very least is deliberately designed to be addictive and waste a lot of people's time.
It is strange that people can (claim to) care so deeply about the welfare of certain identity groups, yet work for a company that shows contempt for humanity as a whole.
>These are people -- tricking them into helping to increase your websites monetization is just unethical and wrong.
This only persuades me that they're doing it. I don't believe backlashes are effective in this kind of scenario, as there's no power on the backlash side.
> I am asking you, dear reader, do you know a single soul who has spent more than a few minutes on Clubhouse in the last 3 months? If you do, do they spend regular time on the app?
Yes. It is only A16Z and the other investors, still pumping the dying hype and spamming the notifications on Clubhouse.
Everyone else seemed to have moved on. This thing is not worth $4B as I have already said many times before. [0] [1] [2] [3]
To Downvoters: So I'm assuming someone is now able to provide a justification as to why Clubhouse is worth more than $1B (now it is $4B), when I asked 6 months ago? [0]
You are more than welcome to change my mind. Discuss.
He is asking for clarification, something you do when you have a good business relationship with someone.
> He wants to sell, shut down, or whatever for a $10M payout.
He doesn't. He is saying that 20$M is clearly overpriced and that if it was true then reddit would come up with a ludricous number like 10M to make that API be turned off. He just uses quiet because reddit described the API use as Loud.
It's not an offer, it's calling someone's bluff out.
Think in poker someone says "my hand is worth 20 million" and you got pretty good cards you would tell them "go all in because I am gonna keep covering whatever you raise" and then they do not go All In, you got a pretty good case to think their initial comment was not true.
Please chill up and don't forget the HN guidelines [1]
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
That is not the point of my comment, you misinterpreted the meaning of my comments and then built an assumption that it says that "nobody is allowed to start an internet company and make money from it?"
Which is not what my comments says. I will also not try to engage with a discussion in which side don't discuss in a good faith. Specially coming from a new account created for this purpose only.
Wow, you’re really going to argue pedantically here?
Let me be clear for the fools in the room then. The behavior exhibited here is perfectly rational and likely to be rewarded from the perspective of a pre IPO company looking to pump its financials wrt user count, engagement, and ad views, and therefore any objections about moral or long term behavior ignore the fact that this playbook has been wildly profitable for many people many times, and thusly explains what the Reddit CEO is doing
Looking forward to when people start panning this system / status quo instead of acting like following the incentives is confusing
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