Reddit isn’t profitable, despite having more than 50 million daily active users. In preparation for an IPO, CEO Steve Huffman put the platform’s API
They have TWO THOUSAND PEOPLE working at Reddit and Memmy for Lemmy is a superior product with how many people working on it?? 3?
Spez is an impossibly incompetent Elon Musk wannabe (the person who just flushed $44 BILLION down the toilet due to incompetence). He needs to be drawn and quartered tbh
I wouldn’t say it’s a better product, but it is quicky moving in that direction.
I’m so happy user funded and user controlled is a viable market strategy.
The official Reddit app is just a miserable experience. Take away the ads and bugs and I still don’t like it. Navigation, layout, voting are all inferior to Memmy already and the gap is only widening
It also works for operating systems ;)
Damn.
If you ask a computer engineer, they would say that’s what you get with and without a product/project manager.
The funny thing is… for me it wasn’t even the API changes, it was how Steve reacted to the community feedback. If you need to make your app profitable that’s fine by me, but don’t ignore your customers so bluntly. They could’ve easily worked politely with devs to find an agreeable API price, find alternative funding streams for those devs, etc. They did none of that, instead Steve acted like a jerk.
Honestly if they’d worked with the Apollo dev and he’d turned around and proposed something reasonable like $2 a month to continue using it I’d still be on Reddit.
Treating Reddit users like shit, treating devs who have made their whole business about making Reddit better like shit, fucking with unpaid mods, and finally, this weird manifest destiny attitude that Reddit will succeed despite all of the above turned me to the Fediverse.
Just make it part of reddit premium! Ugh, why wasn’t that the solution.
Stil frustrates me. Being fair about why the business side needs it and then giving a time frame to devs to integrate with premium calls would have been the best option.
There would have been some revolts because of it, but nothing like the last few weeks imo
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Good point! It was not a given, but right now it seems like Reddit’s choices (and related events at Twitter/Meta) have been driving new platforms to emerge. I’m still incredibly suprised by the adoption of Lemmy and Kbin and especially the quaility and diversity of available apps for the platforms. It’s just really cool to see what people can do when they care about communitites of people coming together.
This precisely. It wasn’t about charging for the API. It was about charging an exorbitant amount for the API, giving devs a tiny amount of time to come up with a solution, and then belittling the user and moderator communities.
I don’t want to be a part of a website that treats its own community with so much disdain and spite.
Switch to Lemmy! Federated social media is
All they had to do was charge relative to the value reddit is providing to said apps.
Instead they gave the “fuck you” price and now theyre not getting any money for their api.
He thought he was invincible . He truly had a loyal following. He unnecessarily fucked it up. He could of had it all; everyone was in support until he decided to do what he did
Yeah, we all see his extremely punchable face. Simultaneously blond and ginger and rat-like. It’s a big reason I’m off reddit.
Not that you’re wrong, but the rodent comparison, in light of reading this on Lemmy, gave me a chortle.
Not that you’re wrong, but the rodent comparison, in light of reading this on Lemmy, gave me a chortle.
The blatant astroturfing is what really icked me out. From day one of the API changes, it was clear that Reddit had spun up the spin machine and had begun to misrepresent the issues.
The main one was how they tried to push the “they just want the API for free”, “we’re entitled to charge for our services” narrative.
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That was super disingenuous and turned me off, too. Like you’re saying, Selig noted that by reddit’s stats, each user cost .12 cents a month and reddit was asking for $2.40. The 3rd party developers provide a service to reddit that reddit could have monetized through various arrangements, such as requiring their ads to be displayed, requiring premium as you said, or a profit sharing arrangement. 3rd party developers were not taking advantage of reddit or demanding free access… they objected to reddit pulling out the rug suddenly and then lying and misrepresenting everything about it.
This has been like going to a restaurant or working somewhere for 8 years and then you finally meet the owner and are WHAT? Fuck that.
It was the setup as well.
Conversations in January saying API and API T&C were not changing anytime soon (clarified to mean multiple years).
The change announced shortly after with 0 concrete details.
Then 6 weeks notice of the details to then implement the changes before costs incurred.6 weeks notice is fine for consumer stuff, but not business-to-business, and not at the scale of $20m.
Yes, I loved it when Christian Selig let Hoffman (fuck spez) know his lies were exposed because he (Christian) had recorded their conversation… and provided proof. Would love a video of Hoffman’s reaction.
Hoffman’s reaction
Care to share a link if you have it readily available? Otherwise I can hunt around for it :)
Not sure one even exists, but would love if it did.
There was one comment that really gave me the ‘holy shit, ick corporation’ reaction… in an article about reddit’s traffic going down, a reddit spokesperson said “we do not comment on incorrect statistics from third parties”. Like please, calm down, you’re not a lawyer for a politician on trial here.
I’d argue reddit lost their identity days ago. Several iconic communities and features died with the API slaughter. Now it’s just another link aggregator without the things that made reddit unique.
Yeah the risk has definitely already materialised. Reddit is forever changed even if it’s still alive.
Acutely maybe, but it began years ago. I remember as early as 2013 or so people were saying it was not what it had been before
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Reddit lost its identity a long time ago. It is no longer the place Aaron Schwartz made it to be.
Already gone. We Lemmy now.
Qapla’!
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Rewriting content is Spez’s specialty.
Too late? It already has. Where are the volunteers who contributed precious time to it?… im certainly gone.
Name checks out if you read it like Nelson
Too late for that already right? Just like imgur, correct?
I wish people would stop using imgur. It’s entirely unnecessary for posting single images. Also, I use noscript and the number of external websites imgur loads scripts from tripled sometime last year, and now it doesn’t even work to display a single image unless you enable who-knows-what sites (most sites, it’s easy to tell which ones are necessary - for imgur, it isn’t). Even worse it flashes the image and then it disappears without JS enabled for whatever domains it needs. So people using imgur is enabling all sorts of ad tech/privacy invasion companies to track whoever clicks on their photo, for no real reason.
Do you have a suggestion for an alternative?
I use https://postimages.org/, it is completily free and almost unlimited (not if you just spam) but idk about their privacy policy or the sites it loads
What’s the likelihood of them sticking around? There were plenty of image sharing sites before imgur but they were not reliable to last.
It looks promising by reading their FAQ but idk
Yeah imgur has gone from bad to worse and who-knows-what is using your data is so true.
I learned about catbox.moe recently. It’s pretty great. Simple interface, uploads up to 200mb, files are kept forever, and when you upload a picture, it gives you the actual direct link to the image; not like every other image hoster that gives you a link to the “image page”, then you have to right click on the image and copy the link address to actually get the direct link.
Only thing that sucks is it doesn’t strip exif data from the pictures uploaded, but not a huge deal since I just use it for memes and random pics anyway.
Thanks for heads up. Catbox is going to be hosting a lot more from me!
They’ve already lost their identity. The parties over, spez has turned it into corporate garbage no better than Instagram
Reddit isn’t profitable, despite having a billion dollars in advertising dollars coming in every year? And someone thinks that spez should remain in charge?
My gut reaction is that a multimedia website the size of reddit must be a juggernaut of server and hosting expenses.
Idk but in my opinion describing red*it as a juggernaut for hosting multimedia is a bit far fetched, since their own image / video hosting platform is pretty shit and most of the media content is actually hosted on other platforms.
Reddit bought imgur though, didn’t they? So that’s part of their expenses.
Imgur started out as a convenient way to host images for Reddit, but Reddit did everything they could to make sure Imgur didn’t stay that way. That’s why they introduced their shitty inhouse image hosting.
Imgur just kinda goes on by itself now, fairly successfully it seems.
When did reddit bought it? Wikipedia said owner is MediaLab AI, Inc.
Ok, I wasn’t sure, hence the question mark.
Oh I actually didn’t know that. That indeed changes my perception a little bit
I didn’t mean to imply they were good at it, just that the volumes of data involved are certainly not trivial.
Reddit basically lost any semblance of respect the community should have for it. You know, the people who give them all their content and do all their moderation for free.
Fuck 'em high.
Whatever they’ve lost, they still retain their hard-earned reputation as being a cesspit of trolls and bigots.
Some troll bigot racist xenophobe ablist literally downvoted my chungus post. Im so done with reddit.
reddit kept the_donald around for years after they helped organize a literal nazi rally. Because they helped organize a nazi rally. Don’t pretend reddit hasn’t earned it.
I hope lemmy remains unwelcoming to bigots.
The lost this a while back because they wanted to turn into a social media platform like twitter and facebook. It was originally set to oppose those things and we made memes about those platforms and then we ended up becoming one. Will reddit die? No, i dont think so. But just like Facebook i’ll just not use it.
This article is mostly useless. It states the problem, but doesn’t have anything new to add.
