> Eh, even if we can agree on it being fair I still don't see anything wrong with what Reddit is trying to do. While the profit might be minuscule compared to what Reddit is looking for, its still currently more than reddit is making.
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.
> Reddit is not changing at all, so the vast majority of users will stay
Cutting off and/or driving up the cost of third-party apps through which users access Reddit is changing Reddit. The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average, so even if they are less efficiently monetized as eyeballs, they are large indirect contributors to Reddit’s revenue. Making their experience worse will, it seems near certain, cost content that brings the users that are purer eyeballs to monetize with ads, and thereby cost ad revenue. How much is, of course, unclear.
> Don’t forget that Reddit can and already did close a bunch of subreddits that they didn’t like, so it’s their community, not yours.
Sure, and they can take over the moderations, and the content creation, and the viewing for ads from the users that they chase off. Not sure how that will work out for them as a business plan, though.
> While third party app users don't directly contribute to revenue, Reddit is highly reliant on its community to produce and moderate content for free.
This is an important point. Reddit gets its content and moderation for free by their users (who often steals that content from elsewhere...), yet they consider them to cost them money?
There's another thing I haven't seen many people bring up. Like a lot of Reddit users with an older account, I use old.reddit.com together with RES. RES uses the .json endpoints for a lot of functionality, and those are considered part of Reddit's API according to them. So this is not just about third party mobile apps, the desktop experience might get seriously degraded as well. I hope it does, because the worse it gets the easier it is to quit.
> People who use third party apps are outliers. They do not make Reddit any money
I'd wager that > 90% of moderators use third party apps, and they indirectly do make Reddit a lot of money. Without the moderators the entire site goes to shit.
In this case, the specific concerns were benefiting from third party developers for well over a decade to grow their business, and giving them a month of race before rolling up the carpet. The devs were working on code they thought they might have years to earn money back on, who sort of got screwed.
It was also the whole “poor us, we can’t make a dime, we need this money” routine Reddit was jawing on about when if they lowered that API pricing down to the point that the pricing was affordable for consumers, or locked it to Reddit Premium users, to me there seems a clear path to profitability or at least sustainability. Again even if they ultimately priced things high enough to slowly strangle these apps, I wouldn’t care as much.
It’s that Reddit fucking lied to everybody’s faces to push false public narratives to bolster its PR.
No doubt the admins, the freemium users, the paid users, the third party devs, and the moderators all contributed to what Reddit is today. However if the moderators don’t punish a decision by the admins thru gutting the profitability of this scheme they just pulled thru disobedience, in future conflicts the admins will be more empowered, and fuck everybody harder. So people collectively behave in this way in solidarity almost by intuition, at least for awhile.
> The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average
Are you saying that most users who post content also use third-party apps, or that most third-party app users post content? There’s a big difference here.
Back of the napkin math: You have to pay to post with some third-party apps like Apollo which has 50k subscribers. Reddit has ~500M monthly users, so we’re looking at… 0.01% if every person subscribed to Apollo posts. Even with a 10x safety factor, there’s no way shutting down third-party apps has a meaningful effect on the volume of content posted to Reddit.
> Well, I, for one, don't fucking care about third party apps (which make money mind you)
Those third party apps are central to how the entire content works, they're absolutely critical for the moderators that try valiantly to diver the tide of pure excrement of content that floods in to the various subreddits.
That content you want to be able to see would be buried and gone, or never put there in the first place if it wasn't for third party apps that are crucial to moderators doing their work. Reddit has consistently done an awful job on quality moderation tooling. They really don't seem to give a shit, and just do the absolute bare minimum. The only reason it has managed to survive in the state it is is because others have voluntarily picked up the slack and built the tooling Reddit hasn't bothered to build.
Just because you don't see it or use it doesn't mean it's not central to what you get to experience. Think bigger, beyond your direct experience and consider how that directly impacts you.
> If the reddit app actually had the moderation tools they've been promising for years, I doubt the moderator outcry would be anywhere near this bad.
If the reddit app was any good, the 3rd party ones wouldn't even exist.
All their problems are because their users prefer to pay a 3rd party than to use the recommended, official app they keep pushing into them.
Instead of all this confusion, if they just made their app work on the high-latency that is common on mobile networks, they would get much better results. (No need to even make their video work.)
Reddit users have Reddit to lose. A site that gives them hours of entertainment, allows them to access support groups, find out tips and tricks, get advice, and much more. It'll cost tens of millions a month to host another. Who has that?
VCs will get their money one way or another. Either they get their way with this and monetise users who previously were not monetised. Or they make profit other ways.
> and burning the 3rd party moderation
This here shows how out of touch you are with the reality of things. Third party moderation tools are staying. They're beneficial to Reddit, of course they're going to keep giving them free access.
>If the apps paid a reasonable rate with respect to what is reasonable to app developers, Reddit would still go bankrupt.
I know reddit was never profitable, but I'm not convinced Reddit is so short on money that they can't last to 2024. They'd probably do major layoffs like so much of the tech industry has this deal and lighten that load. From what I heard, Reddit employs 2000 workers and I can't imagine they need that many to keep the site operational (For reference, Twitter had ~4k employees pre-pandemic, and peaked at 7500 employees... I'm not convinced that Reddit's site complexity is a quarter of the largest site in the world, despite reddit having plenty of traffic as a top site itself).
> I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair
I don't. I agree with you on the lifetime Apollo access. That was dumb. But $2.5/user/month is crazy for Reddit. Facebook incurs around $2/user/month in costs. I'm sorry, but there's just no comparison in terms of the platform features, stability, performance, and infrastructure. With 430 million monthly active users, either Reddit is valuing their cost at $12.9 billion annually (pro rata), or they're adding a very healthy profit margin to that charge. It's clearly the latter.
> Instead they went with the move that is obviously intended to kill third party apps, and face major backlash from its most devoted users in a self own
It seems that the Reddit executive team has decided that killing third-party apps is in its best interest regardless of the probably-to-some-degree-expected backlash. I think Christian's and your conclusion, that Reddit intends for the new pricing to be prohibitive, which indicates that it "is obviously intended to kill third party apps," is fair.
> Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart
It's really dumb if the point is to keep all the third party applications that made your platform popular. It's much smarter if the point is to kill them all in favor of your first party app, that you are promising your VC investors will have tremendous growth leading up to an IPO, and you don't want your site to look like the bad guy by killing all the third party apps.
They just handled it poorly. If the reddit app actually had the moderation tools they've been promising for years, I doubt the moderator outcry would be anywhere near this bad.
And if you watch you'll notice, even during the blackout, reddit's messaging is all about the things you can still do besides use the third party apps. They're making the API still free for moderation bots. They're working with apps that provide accessibility tools for reddit. They're working with the services moderators use for moderation. They're appealing to the moderators. They've made no mentions of working with: Apollo, BaconReader, or RedditIsFun. The point was to kill the third party apps.
> Also pretty damning they can’t make a profit where others can off their data lol
I agree that Reddit's failure to convert their enormous reach into profit is a failure, I don't agree that this particular thing is damning. I'll bet if you pooled the revenue of every third party app it still wouldn't begin to cover Reddit's overall costs.
YouTube and Twitch are different beast all together due to their costs. They also do revenue sharing for the content users provide, something reddit is not doing.
> I feel like Reddit is getting attacked despite being the company that is trying the hardest to make this work.
If they are genuinely trying to make this work, why did they only give 30 days notice for third party devs to figure this out? Seems to me their goal was to kill third party apps and that they have already succeeded.
> The standard approach is just to ban apps that compete with the in-house app.
Sure, but something being the norm doesn’t mean people like it. With reddit being how it was for so long and having a genuinely terrible default app, it’s no wonder they are getting flamed as much as they are. The way they have handled this on the PR side doesn’t help.
I think if reddit wanted this to actually work, the smart move would have been to allow users to pay for API access and use their token through the app of their choice. This would be more viable than the per-app basis they went with, which puts all the third party devs in an incredibly tough spot and effectively forced them all to shut down.
> I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or something like RES, you are more than likely a power user.
I've seen this repeated elsewhere but I've seen zero actual evidence of it.
And the counterpoint is quite easy: that people use these apps/extensions for a better viewing experience. Because on the creation side, typing into a text box or pasting a link is just typing into a text box. The apps/extensions are great for consuming.
Quick Google searches reveal that Reddit has something between 0.5 and 1.5 billion monthly users, while the Apollo app has 1.5 million monthly users. That's nothing.
The bigger question seems to be around moderators who use power moderation tools. Will Reddit keep allowing moderation tools? If not, will they improve their own? If they lose moderators, are there other moderators willing to take their place, or will they start investing in more ML-based moderation, etc.?
Seems like entirely through bad management. The choices made, from mostly serving links and text to hosting image and video which ballooned operating costs to expanding their workforce from 700 to 2000 while having no proyect worth putting that many people to work on.
> Reddit finally finds a way to possibly become profitable
Says who? Their API changes would not make them profitable. The changes, price and timeline show that the intent is to kill 3rd party ecosystem, not profitability.
> scumbags focused on profit?
Reddit is the only social media that has unpaid mods. Facebook pays people to keep conversation civil, reddit wants you to do that work for free while they release NFT profile pics.
people are not angry at reddit for wanting to be profitable, people are angry because there have been 10 years of mismanagement, 0 mod support, aggresive anti user choices and the few tools that people use to make the website not want to pluck your eyes out being pulled under them with 0 recourse
> and apps which go down are those who built little businesses on something reddit provided for free while not contributing back
Holy shit. Reddit's only content is provided by the users. The users of their APIs generate/moderate a non-trivial amount of content that gives anyone a reason to visit Reddit. Suggesting the API users aren't "giving back" is just ludicrous.
> Why do you assume Redditors won’t just use the mainline mobile app? Honest question and I don’t mean personally why you won’t, but the average user that looks and clicks on ads on Reddit?
I'm sure that's what reddit is counting on, and it's probably true.
The issue is that subreddit moderators are not normal users, and work entirely for free. They don't get paid, and are vital to maintaining the health and tone of each subreddit.
And unlike e.g. content creators on twitter, they have nothing tying them to the platform. They don't benefit financially, even indirectly, from the arrangement. They're working for some combination of a sense of (altruism/community responsibility) and (satisfaction/egotism). That's a setup that practically encourages them to jump ship in this situation.
I'm sure that won't immediately hurt the extremely large, general subs which reddit would actively support regardless, but it could do a lot of damage to everything else. In a vacuum the remaining platform (a small percentage of valuable subs) might be exactly what reddit wants! But if a competing network of forums starts up, it might be able to eat reddit in exactly the same way reddit ate digg.
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.
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