Perfectly reasonable IMO. That said I’m still not going to use reddit again
Just sad that’s what the Internet has come to, microtransactions for using an app for a website that just aggregates links. Not to mention reddit has already gimped your third party access with the NSFW stuff and I’m sure more is on its way. Fuuuuuck off reddit
if you are mod of an subreddit you still get access to nsfw. also you can continue to use thirdparty apps. i still use joey for Reddit as an example. reddit still allows you to use them in secret if you’re a moderator.
Wait what?
I run the Patton Oswalt subreddit for some reason. It’s been around for years and has dozens of posts. Dozens.
How do I take advantage of this?
I guess the era of getting everything for free wasn’t entirely sustainable after all. Who would have thought.
We never got anything for free. That’s not how capitalism works my dude. We paid, and are still paying, with our data. Only now they want more
Many startup companies run mostly on VC money instead of actually making enough revenue.
Due to the way investor money works, you can keep your company running on VC money for many years. Making the company profitable in the early stages isn’t entirely necessary as long as the investors get their money back within a reasonable time period.
The idea is, that if you’re able to make your shiny new service very popular, that will be the valuable product you can eventually sell in a merger, IPO or whatever. In some cases like Skype, the intellectual property was also an important part of the deal; not just the userbase. After that, the new owners are free to enshitify the service as much as they like. It’s their problem to make the service actually profitable in the long run while the founders get to drive their Lamorghinis in Dubai.
That’s when the new owners really have to crank up the data leeching and ads, which will kick out a decent percentage of the previous users, but that’s ok as long as enough of them remain.
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The downvotes in our comments tell an interesting story. It seems that people don’t want to hear about the strange world of VC money.
Please tell me how it really is.
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You’re ignoring that the users and in many cases the mods were the ones adding value to Reddit. It’s a running joke that Reddit corporate is always working on things nobody asked for. Reddit has had 18 years to figure out how to figure out a profitable ad business and they’ve failed miserably. I think charging for api access to put up a barrier for people to continue to add value to the site they own is stupid and short sighted.
It’s absolutely sustainable- but once you aren’t satisfied with sustainability and want it to produce an ever growing profit, that’s when things start going sideways and eventually downhill.
Late stage capitalism in action
We never got anything for FREE.
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(Copied from my comment below for increased visibillity)
If Reddit wants to charge for their API, they need to consider compensating these “superusers” who bring in upvotes/comments, encourage content creation etc like Twitter X is doing.
As it stands, Reddit seems to be saying “we don’t want to be giving our content base for free to AI and scrapers etc” while ignoring the fact that as a platform, its not creating any of the content. They are hosting it and simultaneously saying everything is their intellectual peoperty that the recognize the value of without completing the analysis.
They want you to upload porn or whatever content and then turn around and charge you for the privelege, but also turn around and whine “only in our app” + you have to watch ads and commericials and there’s no way around this unless you pay us more and you still can’t use your preferred app and we own everything you submit.
Fuck that
Edit: Also, no anonymous posting (remember, they want YOUR billing details that they then can link to your real identity and use to further buikd and sell ad profiles to and track your ip etc). There’s no way for the superuser/highly engaged who don’t want Reddit knowing and selling knowledge of their interests even after they’ve been paid. Same problem with Youtube+. Pay so Google can learn far more deeply about you? Again, fuck that
Edit: Not even just superusers, every user. Set a price for posts, comments, upvotes, etc. That they got rid of awards points to the fact that they don’t give a shit about revenue. Its about selling out and gaining even deeper insight into redditors for more of that sweet ad revenue and their IPO
Edit: If its the monetization aspect, let them try accepting Monero. If they care that much purely for money, let people pay anonymously. But they won’t because they don’t want to be a content source. They want to be an advertising unicorn like Facebook or Google.
Edit: Not to put too fine a point on it, but re: porn and sexual content, Reddit is now essentially demanding that if you want to view porn on their platform, they want to know who you are so, by extension, they will know your sexual interests/fetishes/kinks and be able to still sell that to the lowest bidder. Think about that for a minute. Doesn’t that sound like what southern states in the US are trying to enact that even PORNHUB has come out against? Aren’t porn apps not even allowed on the Apple AppStore? Isn’t that why there’s no 4Chan 3rd party (or hell, even 1st party) apps?
Edit: TIL: Reddit is an AppStore approved porn app. Pornhub should be suing to join them. I trust Pornhub way more than I trust Reddit at this point. And I don’t trust Pornhub at all…
Edit: To clarify, its not the “i have to pay” thatts at issue, its that they want you to pay and derive zero benefit besides…I can’t even think about what they want you to actually pay for. Its only their app, so thats the issue. I don’t want to use their fucking awful app, I want Apollo. They burned the fuck out of that bridge so I’ll use them for free using loopholes and they’re way worse off than they started. Enough people do that and its game over, if they havent already fucked over any chance of their IPO succeeding. These are mortal wounds and the post-mortem is already written on the wall.
Excellent points. That being said, Reddit will never pay contributors. They have never had interest in quality of the content on the platform, only it’s engagement rate - the years of publishing subs like jailbait and The_Donald speak to that. Engagement, now that they’ve got a critical mass of users and 20 years worth of content, can be maintained with bots, sockpuppet accounts, and reposts (all of which have become the course du jour for the front page and /r/all since the API revolt began)… at least until they go IPO, after which it’s not their problem anymore.
The biggest problem with online publishing is that without that critical mass of readership, it’s very difficult to become profitable enough to pay your contributors. Reddit’s never gotten to this point, even with millions of users. It’s my hope that with contributors moving off of Reddit, we’ll see new publishing models appear that utilize some of the excellent ideas you’ve outlined above. I particularly like the suggestion of using Monero as a currency to ensure anonymity.
Tying voting to currency is an interesting idea, but I think that voting should be free, as my experience running forums is that only about 10% of your viewers will care enough to vote, and maybe 10% of those choose to post actual content. Putting a paywall in front of voting will kill engagement. However, limiting the number of free votes an account gets per day, then allowing people to buy more votes with currency, and earn currency for posting content could work very well if run correctly. The trick is balancing the actual profit you make off of the contribution with the need to pay your contributors, and here it becomes a question of determining the proper margins and payouts.
The other problem is that the only real revenue source outside of the users of the site is going to be Google Adwords or a similar platform (unless you go for ancillary streams of revenue, like attaching an e-commerce store to the site). If you charge for access to the content, you’re killing your engagement. I haven’t used Adwords for awhile now, but when I did the payouts were absolutely abysmal (like less than a penny per click). They were so bad that it wasn’t even worth dedicating the visual real estate to put up the ads.
Ultimately, this is the same challenge traditional publishing has had for a long time. It’s generally unprofitable unless you have a runaway hit or ancillary streams of revenue (like syndication deals with other media types) - most of the actual content almost never makes money, which is why so much of our traditional media is paid for by advertising and subsequently controlled by corporate interests.
I’m wasn’t averse to paying but the problem I have is without ownership of content and anonymity/privacy as well as abillity to use my app of choice (which they’re already letting mods do anyway), none of which Reddit wants to address.
It wants to own your content, make it so you accidentally click/tap on ads more than the actual content, and they likely want to sell all your clicks/taps/etc (== engagement) to ad companies) while claiming all the benefits and none of the liabillities for doing so.
Kagi is proving that people will pay for things that were traditionally “free” (search) provided they have privacy respected and that a profile isn’t being built to be used against them in the economic/legal sense. Reddit wants you to act like a Wikipedian but make money off it. Its completely one-sided and they’ve really gone out of their way to make the community of communities resent the fuck out of them.
They refused to bargain with Christian of Apollo in good faith and would have gotten away with it had it not been for his scrupulousness is documenting their interactions.
Sorry, the worst thing Reddit could have done to roll out changes was what we all watched unfold, and I want no part of any kind of business/community like that
This is like Victoria all over again * 1,000,000 Btw, does anyone know WHY or what the story was with Victoria the IAMA facillitator?
I totally hear you there and agree with you re: the business choices Spez made. Reddit lost a 20 year contributor when I walked away, and even if they rolled back all the changes, I won’t be returning.
I was more looking at applying your suggestions to a fresh publishing model, as your ideas intrigued me (having run a publishing forum in the days of the early internet). I want to have a space on the internet where content creators can keep ownership of their content and get adequately paid for publishing - I think properly run, it could become a vital hub for our cultural legacy (as Reddit was, albeit clumsily and destructively). The incoming revenue is the biggest challenge, which is why I focused on that element.
Some users will pay if you have a paywall, but only if you already have a substantial amount of content they want to access. This works for a search engine crawling pre-existing content, but not so well for a forum style site like Reddit, where most of the content creation is driven by engagement with other content. If you reduce the engagement rate (aka through a paywall), you’re actually reducing your incoming content in the long run (something we’re seeing on Reddit after the blackout).
I don’t know what the ultimate solution here is, but I really do like your payout concept with Monero. If I did build another publishing attempt, it’s something I’d try to implement if I could get the incoming revenue to support it.
They’re dreaming if they think any Redditor is going to want to transparently tie their IRL identity to their content.
Like MLK said but shoehorned into the current context: People want interact and be judged based on the quality of their content, rather than the knowledge of their character/identity which Reddit will absolutely fucking sell to the lowest bidder and infinitesimally so.
Bonus points: you know the moment they get a request from law enforcement, thats all becomes public knowledge and it takes far less than the entirety of most Redditors ourvre to convict them of any number of real or thought crimes.
Not exactly fertile knowledge-sharing grounds.
Agreed again. If I wanted folks IRL to know what I post, I’d be on Facebook. Reddit’s value to posters was its anonymity. Without it, there’s no reason to use it over its centralized competitors in the social media space.
I think you missed the mark a little bit on what voting is on a forum like this or reddit. Voting is crowd sourced content curation/moderation. Like content creation it brings value to a site, limiting it or making users pay for it seems counter to achieving a well curated community.
This entire thing is 1000% about making reddit less anonymous because that makes ad impressions worth more when there’s a better chance of linking a user to an identity.
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Interesting side effect is Reddit is basically penalizing voting, since if you vote on most comments you end up doubling or tripling your API usage. The best way to pay less for this app is to stop voting altogether.
Reddit’s advertising is based on user engagement, so they’re shooting themselves in the foot for a few pennies in comparison.
Its just end-to-end-retardation. All the rage lately
Why is Infinity for Reddit still working fine? The Verge hasn’t reported anything about it.
No one wants to jynx it.
In all seriousness though, I expect reddit just hasn’t yet started invoicing for API calls. Meanwhile, they haven’t actually cut off access, because they want something to be able to charge for. However they may struggle to argue that continued use of the existing API access constitutes an agreement to start paying for it.
So is Comet and Narwhal. Something weird went on with this whole thing. It seems like reddit wanted to kill the popular apps that were actually being used by people, but the smaller ones are fine.
Not sure about Comet but the Narwhal dev made some deal with reddit. They removed ads and nsfw content and are going to release a subscription based model I think.
Yeah, that’s what the dev says, but I haven’t seen any details on what that deal is. As for NSFW content, all you need to do to get around that is to be a mod of a NSFW sub. I created one, set it to private and have been able to see NSFW posts and subs for weeks in both apps with no problem. It has been weeks and both Comet and Narwhal still work with no issues, and they aren’t the only apps that are still functional.
The whole thing just feels weird after the dust has settled.
Yeah I agree, though I always thought Narwhal was the second most popular 3rd party iOS app behind Apollo. Maybe those apps still open agreed to exchange user data with reddit or something? I just went to the app store for Narwhal and the privacy policy goes to a link that says its no longer active. Maybe that is an oversight or maybe not? I haven’t had an active reddit login for a few years now but old.reddit… also still works for NSFW views with no login.
I mostly just browse a few fringe subs and check to see whats on the frontpage and r/all. The general content on those has been really bad lately. It feels like a mix of corporate approved news, repost bots, and writing prompts which is probably what it is.
you can still use most third-party apps. All you have to do is be a moderator in a subreddit. for some stupid reason reddit then allows you to still use them because they probably need all help they can get from mods.
Joey as an example still works fine, you nust have to use a older version and block their versions check.
if you are mod of an subreddit, reddit still lets you use thirdparty apps and nsfw. i still use joey for reddit as an example. they don’t tell you about it though.
I use both without an account. Relay is down to checking /r/all in the evening for a little bit and even that is already apparently at 48 calls, meaning I had to pay 2 bucks for just that casual scrolling alone. lol
Infinity is good because you can create a home feed with subscribed subs without having an account. I use that for news and Ukraine related stuff, as well as the odd game related sub. I was thinking of doing the custom api key thing but that requires an account and is kind of a hassle. I also doubt they keep that open for too long.
I am not a mod there haha.
you can just create a subreddit with your own name. boom, you’re a mod.
I’m not though
Just create your own subreddit, anyone can do it. Make it private and forget it exists
Why go to that much trouble, why even stay on Reddit?
This is making my stomach sick. What about Apollo, did Christian totally disable the old unupdated version or does it function still for mods and certain people who didn’t update?
most apps have auto update functions who require you to update. so normally they are all deactivated. but i have blocked the requests Joey does to it’s server for checking the version check and use an older version of the app so i can still use a older version. newer versions don’t let you do that anymore. so i guess Apollo is killed off completely.
Shhh!!!
Lol
Reddits giving a grace period to Infinity since it’s getting a subscription model developed, so they haven’t even started charging Infinity yet
Infinity is working on charging people, and the dev has been fronting the bill to keep their userbase before they roll out a billing system. Obviously, they didn’t have time to rollout a new version before the changes went into effect because Reddit gave them a month.
Ooh. Anyway, I don’t open Reddit much, only the freegamedeals sub. When Infinity becomes paid, I’ll stop using it. Lemmy ftw!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The costs of a subscription will go up based on a user’s daily average number of API calls, essentially meaning that the more things a person does in the app, the more they might have to pay.
Here is the full list, from developer DBrady’s post, which appears to include Google’s take of the subscription and Relay’s expected revenues:
In the newest release of Relay, DBrady says they also added the ability for users to see their average daily API calls.
The plan is for a subscription to roll out in two or three weeks from the time of their post and they expect to charge a monthly cost of $3 or $4.
“This won’t cover the cost of ‘super users’ who use the app all day, but, on average, it should allow me to pay the Reddit API bill,” the developer said.
Many subreddits and users protested against the switch to the paid API in-party because of its effect on the third-party app ecosystem.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Original thread on Reddit, has some interesting insight into people’s patterns of API usage.
It seems that voting is a huge part of API calls, so users who want to fit into a certain API call tier will want to curb their use of voting. But that means that even if 3rd-party apps survive there will be reduced engagement from power users with the voting system, raising the question why pay if you’re going to be marginalized. Needless to say, Reddit has not thought this through.
Also, the cut of the subscription money that makes it to the Relay developer is ridiculous. They’d need tens of thousands of active subscribers to make any meaningful money.
If they charge more for access, they’ll pay more for contributing, right…?
I have to warn that is is going to be harsh. Relay was my favorite app and I used it everyday for years. DBrady has sold out here in my mind by sucking up to Reddit - The authors of the other apps deliberately chose not to charge users a subscription and it has put us on a better path long term by taking influence away from Reddit and centralized social media. If Relay won’t flip to Lemmy or decentralized alternatives then I hope it fails.
Welp I was wondering why relay still worked. Fuck spez. Also quality has dropped drastically, but that’s not news
Loved relay to death. Now it’s dead too me :) not really a big deal though, it’s only a passage to Reddit which I have no desire to browse.
I missed the interface for a month, but got used to Voyager here. Now I’m indifferent.
I have no here feelings for the Dev, it’s his to do what he wants. I got my money’s worth it off relay pro, we can part amicably. I’ll not be paying a subscription to view Reddit.
If this is better then the official app, it could be an option
Who the fuck would still want to use Reddit, like wtf? Just leave that shitty site behind.
Reddit has royally pissed me off to the point where I never wanted to use them again.
But they have curated content which I just can’t find anywhere else.
I have tried. Lemmy is a pale alternative, which has some stuff I like.
But the sheer amount of content I like on Reddit is unmatched anywhere else.
Twitter can be okay with some topics, but has so much spam is ridiculous.
Lemmy has content, but a small amount in comparison.
9gag is a racist shit hole with occasiona bit ofl funny content.
Tides seems empty.
I dunno maybe I can reconfigure lemmy connect. It’s a pretty nifty app btw.
If you can recommend any other sites as good as Reddit be my guest.
Reddit it still better for more niche stuff and the feed in general has more content. But I’ve got the feeling that the amount of reposts and low effort stuff has been ramped up lately, I mean it was always there, but seems to have increased lately.
I still use it, although way less, and it’s only bearable because there’s still 3rd apps working and I have a shit ton of subs blocked
Which 3rd party apps are working?
I think all of them if you create a sub, so you get to be a mod. For now almost everything is working, but I’ve noticed lately that I can’t download some videos some times.
I really miss some of the small communities that just don’t exist here… But yes, fuck reddit, I’m not going back.
It shouldn’t be an option. Why should users pay to provide content for reddit?
If Reddit wants to charge for their API, they need to consider compensating these “superusers” who bring in upvotes/comments, encourage content creation etc like Twitter X is doing.
As it stands, Reddit seems to be saying “we don’t want to be giving our content base for free to AI and scrapers etc” while ignoring the fact that as a platform, its not creating any of the content. They are hosting it and simultaneously saying everything is their intellectual peoperty that the recognize the value of without completing the analysis.
They want you to upload porn or whatever content and then turn around and charge you for the privelege, but also turn around and whine “only in our app” + you have to watch ads and commericials and there’s no way around this unless you pay us more and you still can’t use your preferred app and we own everything you submit.
Fuck that
Edit: Also, no anonymous posting (remember, they want YOUR billing details that they then can link to your real identity and use to further buikd and sell ad profiles to and track your ip etc). There’s no way for the superuser/highly engaged who don’t want Reddit knowing and selling knowledge of their interests even after they’ve been paid. Same problem with Youtube+. Pay so Google can learn far more deeply about you? Again, fuck that
Edit: Not even just superusers, every user. Set a price for posts, comments, upvotes, etc. That they got rid of awards points to the fact that they don’t give a shit about revenue. Its about selling out and gaining even deeper insight into redditors for more of that sweet ad revenue and their IPO
Edit: If its the monetization aspect, let them try accepting Monero. If they care that much purely for money, let people pay anonymously. But they won’t because they don’t want to be a content source. They want to be an advertising unicorn like Facebook or Google.
Edit: Not to put too fine a point on it, but re: porn and sexual content, Reddit is now essentially demanding that if you want to view porn on their platform, they want to know who you are so, by extension, they will know your sexual interests/fetishes/kinks and be able to still sell that to the lowest bidder. Think about that for a minute. Doesn’t that sound like what southern states in the US are trying to enact that even PORNHUB has come out against? Aren’t porn apps not even allowed on the Apple AppStore? Isn’t that why there’s no 4Chan 3rd party (or hell, even 1st party) apps?
Edit: TIL: Reddit is an AppStore approved porn app. Pornhub should be suing to join them. I trust Pornhub way more than I trust Reddit at this point. And I don’t trust Pornhub at all…
Redreader still works for some reason.
It was specifically exempted from API fees due to it’s stronger accessibility tools and that it is open source and non-commercial.
Man, I was tempted to stay on reddit when RR got exempted. But, you know, “First they came for the proprietary clients. . .”
I am proud of QuantumBadger, though, for helming such an excellent no-nonsense app that even Spez couldn’t justify killing it.
Joey also still works. You have to use a older version and block the versions check though. Also you have to be a moderator on a subreddit. It’s stupid to pay a subscription to Relay if you can just use older third-party clients and block their versionscheck (otherwise they force you to update)
