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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2378 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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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.

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