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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2345 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 9, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This is probably the best place to discuss the latest in the ongoing drama of the Reddit API changes. Short version is that Reddit's APIs used to be free, but they are rolling out a new scheme where they charge pretty substantially for them. The prices are high enough to make pretty much all of the third-party Reddit phone apps non-viable. This has made a lot of people quite upset, as the "official" app is reportedly significantly worse and is lacking a lot of moderator tools that many mods use to run their subreddits. There's a big "blackout" planned for June 12-14th in protest, where the mods of a bunch of subs will turn them private and users are encouraged to not use Reddit at all.

So lots of users are mad and claim that they're going to delete their accounts and/or stop using Reddit at all. It's not clear how many people overall are actually prepared to follow through on this long term. Personally I'm doubtful that it's enough to significantly hurt Reddit.

The developers of all the major independent mobile apps (Apollo, RedditIsFun, Sync, Relay, etc) say they're going to delete their API keys the day before charges start accruing, which will disable all of their installed apps at once. Apparently if they don't, they'll get a pretty hefty bill at the end of next month for everything all of the current users have been doing. Ouch. The Apollo link has a pretty long writeup of the dev's experience where he makes a good case that Reddit doesn't seem to have much interest in working with third-party app developers.

Probably the most significant part is the mod objections. Apparently a lot of mods of big subs do most of their modding on mobile using one of the third-party apps, and they say the mod tooling on the official app is so much worse that they won't be able to do their work. Every reddit sub relies on volunteer mods to keep them free of spam and abuse, and none of them are paid anything, so making their work more difficult will be very noticeable. If many mods follow through on this, it could be very significant indeed.

I wouldn't care so much if not for due to the decline of the rest of the internet; Reddit has become a useful and very valuable repository of knowledge and discussion by actual humans. Preserving the utility of the platform is actually fairly important to me for that reason. And the changes to API access and crackdown on third-party apps is worrying because of how awful the actual official Reddit user tools are. Topic search is bad and comment search is nonexistent; prior to the disabling of API access you had to use something like https://camas.unddit.com/ if you actually wanted to search for something specific. Moderation is often opaque and censorious, and third-party tools like reveddit or unddit allowed you to see the comments and actions the mods/admins didn't want you to see.

Reddit is an imperfect and often frustrating website, but it's also a customizeable one that functions as one of the last remaining places where large numbers of humans come together to have online, organic conversations. Changes like this threaten, without exaggeration, its usefulness to humanity.

I have no reddit account, but if people are looking at alternatives, is it worth it for those of us who do to put up things directing them here?

With an accurate description, of course, since we would want people who fit.

Edit:Would the best place be a post in /r/RedditAlternatives, or one of the app-specific subreddits? We need to keep attracting users over time to make sure we don't gradually die, this seems like an unusually good opportunity.

I agree with the sibling - have you seen the quality of discourse on the average Reddit sub? We definitely don't want to be the next stop for the average Redditor. Growth is good, but we want a relative trickle of users who at least seem likely to be capable of obeying our rules, not a flood of people who want to post memes and cheap dunks.

I... mean... do we want to be reddit? Do we want more redditors?

You should probably post in places on reddit where people you want to join are present, not where everyone is, unless we want TheMotte to grow into a giant cluster of distinct interconnected interest groups that replaces Reddit.

TheMotte really isn't an alternative to reddit except for people exclusively using reddit for Motte adj subs.

Fair point, I meant with a fairly strong deterrent attached to whatever advertisement. (And we'd presumably have to stamp out fires here for a little anyway.)

21 days ago I got this message from Reddit when it auto-renewed my annual subscription:

Hi VecGS,

Thanks for being a Reddit Premium member!

Your yearly Reddit Premium subscription has been successfully renewed and you’ve been charged $29.99 (USD).*

You should expect a fresh delivery of 700 Reddit Coins every month.

If you have any questions about your subscription, feel free to contact us or check out the Reddit Premium FAQs.

Don’t forget, your subscription automatically renews each year. That means you can cancel your subscription at any time from your Subscription Settings. Just make sure you cancel at least 24 hours before your subscription period ends to avoid getting charged for the next year. You won’t be refunded for any remaining time on your subscription.

That $30 per year cost eliminates ads for me. That's around $2.50 a month. That's far smaller than the bill that the Apollo creator would be getting for my usage when I'm on mobile. I'm pretty sure that sets up a very convenient upper bound for what Reddit's costs are. Even with that, I would expect they make a profit on me.

This is nothing but a clear attempt to kill 3rd party apps in my opinion.

The provable lying that the CEO is doing is leaving a very bad taste in my mouth.

I guess it was a good run while it lasted.

I'm confused. I must be missing something. They're charging for the use of the API and you say that Christian Selig gets more than that. So how is it a problem for him? Why can't he just pay the fee?

It's the other way around. Reddit was getting that much directly from me. I paid for Apollo years ago, which was far less than the new charges that Reddit would be charging Christian on an ongoing basis. Overall, his bill would wind up being around $20MM a year based on historical usage. That's far less than the money he's ever made on it.

I was establishing an upper bound for Reddit's average annual customer value.

That's far smaller than the bill that the Apollo creator would be getting for my usage when I'm on mobile.

Reddit's been saying that under their current pricing model the average Apollo user would incur about $2.50/month in API charges, and that Apollo is a particularly inefficient user of the API, with other applications like RIF incurring about a dollar per month per user in API charges.

However, it's not really clear what an "average" user is. Maybe it's diluted by a bunch of users who only use it for a few minutes per day.

At least, they claimed Apollo is inefficient. I'd like to see some specifics of that, since I'm skeptical. I have written a few Reddit bots, and while the API is weird in some ways, it's pretty straightforward, and I don't see how it's possible to be significantly more or less efficient while doing the same fundamental task. I'm inclined to believe that it's just users of different activity levels until proven otherwise.

Maybe it's diluted by a bunch of users who only use it for a few minutes per day.

I strongly suspect this is it. API requests are measured in exact numbers, so a reddit addict that spends 10 hours a day scrolling on Apollo will rack up roughly an OOM more request cost than a causal user that spends an hour or less scrolling on RIF. I'd hazard a guess that heavier users may prefer a different interface than casual users.

I'm coming around to the idea that the free+advertising model was the internet's original sin. A site like Reddit, maybe the largest and second most trusted repository of human text on the internet, apparently can't make money.

Reddit must look at third party clients scraping "their" data (especially LLMs training on it), using "their" site, then reselling it at an actual profit and feel like they should get a cut. Meanwhile the mods have a good argument that they're providing much of the value, and of course it's ultimately the users' generating the content in the end.

I wonder how the net would have evolved if something like Brave's basic attention token was around back in the day, with users paying in proportion to what they consume, with mods being compensated and ultimately the site not being beholden to advertisers like it is now.

I'm also surprised that there's nobody who has been able to implement true 'microtransactions' where you can pay a few cents to view a piece of content once, rather than having to subscribe to a full service you may or may not use.

Like I would pay for news articles if I there was an ability to pay 25 cents per article with 1-2 clicks.

I can imagine a version of Reddit where the 'main' subs were free to access but if you wanted to subscribe to the niche subs you could pay like a buck to unlock them for a month. Or maybe even less for a 'day pass.'

Of course, that won't stop someone from scraping the content to publish elsewhere or use to train up an LLM.

I can’t agree enough, advertising has ruined so much in the last few decades.

I think more websites should've tried harder to monetize around a subscription model in the style of Spotify and Netflix. The trouble is finding some meaningful way to make an actually better experience beyond no ads, which is no easy task, but I think if they focused a team on it they could do it. Personally I think a feature that could be worth paying for is better search and sort tools.

This discussion could probably fit just fine in the main thread.

I can say that I'm personally glad we have already moved off of reddit. I hope more communities are able to make a similar jump. It is maybe past time for the internet to fracture into a million pieces once again. The mass centralization wave of the last decade and a half has had many downsides.

I hope more communities are able to make a similar jump.

I doubt it. There's a real sense of learned helplessness.

Even subs like stupidpol that are totally hostile to the admins and identity politics of reddit - including some of the issues that spurred a desire on TheMotte to leave - appear just totally fatalistic.

Other places exist. I’m on mastodon, hubski, and saidit. They’re certainly smaller than Reddit, but I think it’s a decent way to get better communities, even if you’re somewhat beholden to whoever runs those sites.

I mean running your own website is a lot of work, and totally unpaid. We are super lucky to have admin’s that are willing to take on the burden.

Yeah, fair. I shouldn't have sounded disdainful, this sub probably had a disproportionate number of IT-interested people compared to other subs

I'm not sure it's that much work on top of what sub mods already do, but you do need at least a few trusted users with strong technical skills and a strong enough community for a critical mass of posters to be willing to continue their activity on a new site. We are indeed fortunate enough to have both.

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