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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38489 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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As much as I dislike Reddit's own apps myself, I understand their position. If Reddit has a large userbase whom they aren't making money off of because these users are using third-party apps that fuck up their monetization strategies, then I don't see how Reddit has any obligation to facilitate this kind of evasion. All they're saying is that if you want to do something that costs us money then at least reimburse us for the privilege. I understand the concerns of mods but this is a red herring for the overall argument, since most people making this argument aren't mods but merely want to use the argument to keep the status quo intact. If the mod thing was really the concern then a workaround similar to the Pushshift workaround should satisfy everybody, where mods get special access to use tool that help them moderate their subs only. But I doubt such a compromise would satisfy most people.

The problem is that the pricing is way beyond the cost of allowing TPAs. Here's the creator of Apollo explaining it:

As for the pricing, despite claims that it would be based in reality, it seems anything but. Less than 2 years ago they said they crossed $100M in quarterly revenue for the first time ever, if we assume despite the economic downturn that they've managed to do that every single quarter now, and for your best quarter, you've doubled it to $200M. Let's also be generous and go far, far above industry estimates and say you made another $50M in Reddit Premium subscriptions. That's $550M in revenue per year, let's say an even $600M. In 2019, they said they hit 430 million monthly active users, and to also be generous, let's say they haven't added a single active user since then (if we do revenue-per-user calculations, the more users, the less revenue each user would contribute). So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. These own numbers they've given are also seemingly inline with industry estimates as well.

For Apollo, the average user uses 344 requests daily, or 10.6K monthly. With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue.

In other words, Reddit has to pay $0.12 per user per month, Apollo would be charged $2.50 per user per month.

The creator was willing to negotiate pricing, he believes like you do that Reddit should not sustain a loss with TPAs. But this is far beyond that in the opposite direction. What's worse is that the CEO of Reddit accused him of making a threat in a call, only to have the recording of that call be shown to have nothing of the sort in it. There are ways Reddit could have monetized more of itself, but this was greedy.

the CEO of Reddit accused him of making a threat in a call, only to have the recording of that call be shown to have nothing of the sort in it

Wait, this was the "recording and leaking a private phone call" complaint? It wasn't "private" in the sense of "I don't want to talk about it", it was "private" in the sense of "I want to talk slander about it and not be proven wrong"?

That's my understanding, yeah. Supposedly, Huffman is in Cali (which is a 2-party consent state), but the Apollo dev is in Canada which is 1-party.

Isn’t that Reddit’s argument. Are current revenue per user is way too low precisely because people use these APIs and therefore this is why we are doing it? Thus using historic rev per customer seems off unless I am missing something.

According to the industry, Reddit's users are the least valuable of any social network. Some of that is attributable to the fact that the official Reddit app and New Reddit are designed for showing more ads and infinite scrolling. But people who use TPAs may sometimes use those because they dislike the focus on ads (the deceptiveness of hiding promoted posts is what really grinds my gears).

No one is saying that Reddit shouldn't try to stay in the black if it allows TPAs to exist. The complaint is the speed and absurd pricing of the new system.

According to the industry, Reddit's users are the least valuable of any social network.

As far as headlines go, that's a great one lol

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