No, they're just flailing.

The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subreddit would go a long way provided whoever buys that power must go out of their way to plausibly deny that.

And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money- Twitter was fairly valued in the tens of billions for a very good reason- but much like Twitter, that sort of thing sells "at a loss" because having the kind of content which enforcement of ideological conformity upon is meaningful necessarily means major companies won't want to put their products next to that content. Reddit is not a product that can generate a concrete return on investment, which is partially why it can survive operating at a net loss for a long, long time; capital directly funds political power.

Cheap capital drying up means money is tighter- so financiers are getting harder to come by- and if you're in straits that dire and don't want to downsize you have to look for other sources of revenue. In Reddit's case, this will completely kill their main product, but they have a mental block that prevents them from dealing with that honestly so they might be screwed.

>Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks)

Mastodon has the same kind problem that Reddit does but massively amplified- server operators have power over user networks (the same thing happens on Reddit with bots) which is a no-go for honest communication.

HN has about 5M unique monthly users depending on how you count them.

You’re describing Reddit ten years ago. There’s not really a “typical Reddit user” at this point it’s so big. All kinds of people are on it and most of them are not techies with a particular ideological bent.

So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users.

The API side could moderate their own content and restrict access to UIs that play nice and the UIs could refuse to surface content from API sides that suck.

The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.

I have to heavily disagree with this. Reddit content is way better in both quality and quantity. The only thing worse is maybe the Signal to noise ratio, and even that is questionable. For example, askHistorians is a gem. Many subreddits are very useful. Moreover, for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. Not once have I needed it to find useful content on hacker news.

The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.

TBH, 4chan these days are nowhere near the days when it was known as the boogieman of the internet. Still stuck with language that wouldn't last 10 seconds on Twitter or even Reddit, but we're not talking about a doxxing/harassment hub anymore. Or at least, no more a hub for that than Twitter/Reddit.

What? Id say max 50k

Is there a chance it’s getting better?

and yes, I've used content moderation AIs in the past (like Google's Perspective API) and they're not really usable. OpenAI moderation endpoint, embeddings classification, or even just gpt3.5-turbo would work marvelously.

Even $1 per month is enough to keep a lot of the outrage junkies out and you can use the revenue to pay for moderation of the smaller group of power users that remain.

The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all submissions and comments that conflict with the narrative being pushed by the establishment.

Hacker News is great because many of the comments are substantive, thought-provoking and don't read like State Department press releases or obvious corporate astroturfing.

Most web development is downloading. Social networks have massive uploading and frequent changes.

Twitter literally invented microservices because of this.

Now with Reddit trying to shutdown Apollo and other 3rd party clients with this pricing move I can see myself never using Reddit, their official client sucks a lot (it's unfortunate they bought Alien Blue just to kill it, which gave Apollo the chance to rise from those ashes), if Apollo dies... I will simply not use Reddit as much, the only other way I can use Reddit right now is through old.reddit.com, that sucks on mobile browsers without RES.

It seems I will soon experience a repeat of Digg with Reddit, slowly use it less and less because the experience is broken until the moment I forget it exists.

Create post -> share url -> instant chatroom based around the topic -> live chat with anyone on the net in seconds (hopefully have fun). Open to feedback :)

This is their real motivation. You can’t fight that honestly. Greed is good for these folks.

This not expensive or a hard problem. You grab a bunch of servers, you set them up properly, and then you write your app properly.

No resume-driven bullshit; no hype-driven bullshit; no “we need to be galaxy scale now” bullshit. No email notifications, besides basic “thanks for registering, here is your login” and “here’s a password reset link.” No cloud-based bullshit. Don’t use fucking python. Use a real systems language to eek out as much performance as you can from the hardware. Actually understand databases and how your specific databases work. Use Postgres unless you have a very good reason not to.

Just a few thousand dollars a month, and a brief reprieve from short-term mania to actually think, and you too can literally serve 1 billion pages a day.

Why does everyone run into problems with this? Because they have personal hang-ups and delude themselves (or simply don’t care). This path has been tread numerous times before. The mistakes have been made thousands of times. The people who made those mistakes are available to help you out (for the right price, or if you’re good enough company).

I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material.

Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem.

I thought Tapatalk is more like a generic mobile client addon to forum wares than being a forum itself. I remember that nagging banner when I was on XDA years ago...

Nothing online is forever unless you attact the data hoarders.

A) there is demand for functionality that depends on semi-real-time data, e.g. a prompt like “explain {recent_trending_topic} to me and describe its evolution” where the return could be useful in various contexts;

B) the degradation of search experience and the explosion of chat interfaces seem to indicate “the future of search is chat” and the number of Google searches prefixed or suffixed with “Reddit” make it obvious that LLM-powered chat models with search functionality will want to query Reddit extensively, and in the example prompt above, the tree of queries generated to fulfill a single prompt could be sizeable;

C) improvements to fine-tuning pipelines make it more and more feasible to use real-time data in the context of LLMs, such as a “trending summary” function that could cache many potentially related queries from Reddit, Twitter, etc and use them to fine-tune a model which would serve a response to my example prompt

Then rotate between accounts and put a random time between requests. Restrict certain accounts to browse within certain hours/timezones. Load pages as usual and just scrape data from the page rather than via api.

However, I believe in a company's right to charge whatever they want for their services. But I also believe in the right for people to choose not to use that service and for freer alternatives to spring up.

Just like Tumblr, Reddit seem intent on killing themselves, although these days I'm not so sure. When Elon took over Twitter everyone was saying that all the users would leave and it would die. This is not the case, human nature means that people seek familiarity and will cling on, hmm.

This is already the case. See the oceans of crap SEO optimized "food recipe sites". It's unbearable.

So sad that, BBC back in 199ps and 2000s, there were so many random sites to visit with interesting things. Search engines were of actual use.

Now, it's basically facebook, reddit, pinterest, instagram, stackoverflow , and a couple of counted others, depending on what you like. And EVERYTHING is monetized.

The WWW of today is terrible.

Now

> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society.

You can see Reddit as a landlord, owning the land (or website) that the value grows on. They don't contribute value themselves, instead they make money by charging rent to everyone who wishes to grow value on their land.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Do you mean at least one? Because there are many "credible" ones, unless I misunderstand what you mean by credible.

Tell me you only use iOS without telling me you only use iOS...

Ooof. I mean, if you're only an iOS user, maybe?

For the longest time Reddit was predominantly the latter group of power users but in recent years Reddit has had a mass influx of the former casual group of users. I think the bet that Reddit is making is that the latter group is much smaller than the former and cutting off API access won't make a significant difference. But if they are wrong, this could well be the end of Reddit, going just like Digg went. It will likely still exist, but as a shell of it's former self.

And those NSFW posts are far from just porn. It's frequently news (especially related to war), the "vice" subreddits (cigars, guns), mental health subreddits, ect.

Also, 4x of Apollo Ultra is probably not enough. After the Appstore takes its cut and the dev pays himself, you're not left with enough money to pay for the API access of the power users you're now inevitably left with. Powerusers, who, again, can't access 40% of posts on your app.

Obviously Discord is chat focused so not a one-to-one replacement but I am not sure that the younger generations will care.

Plus there is the possibility of discord adding a Reddit/forum like feature, since they already have the mindshare.

Discord blows for asynchronous conversations. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the replacement.

Thats really easy for Reddit to measure. Why are you assuming they haven't?

It strikes me as a very shortsighted move.

If you stop assuming that Reddit is run by idiots, and you consider the likely probability that they've modelled this stuff in some depth, it's easy to believe that your initial assumption is wrong, and that the users are on 1st party apps (or will be if others shut down), and that many will stay and continue to post rather than leave or stop posting.

Your premise is based wholly on the belief that you know more about Reddit users than Reddit does. That seems dubious to me.

Twitter still maintains a critical mass of users and corporate accounts, but all the most talented creators (at least the ones I followed) have reduced their Twitter usage substantially or moved on completely.

Eventually new readers will stop showing up because there is no worthwhile content.

So they are just alienating younger users.

It's a low brow dismissal, I know, but between the posts and the comments, Reddit has gone to total shit. Also to note that the average age has remained the same, so it's really hard to talk about anything serious when the majority are 18 yo US middle class white males.

And the only rebuttal I hear is "oh, I'm on /r/askhistorians and it's good here." The exception that proves the rule.

May it all come crashing down so we can build something anew. They're just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic at this point.

There are political undertones in nearly every subreddit. But depending on which sub you are visiting, you can be downvoted or even banned for not having the "accepted" viewpoint. There's no place to have balanced discussion anymore, and that's one of the things that used to make reddit enjoyable.

Creating more siloed echo chambers isn't a fix, it's the problem.

No wonder, seeing what the political news are there at the last 3 years.

It's pretty funny how these two quotes express similar sentiment (NIMBYism, in-group protectionism, deep-seated fear of disruption) yet are often placed on opposite ends of the spectrum (anti-gentrification vs. anti-immigration).

This is already happening across the board.

I think moderation on Reddit had the effect of cleaning out centrists as well, since it was a comment that got you banned from reddit and not your political position (e.g. a post which was positive towards a trump policy would get you caught up in the post-2016 moderation sweep).

You can see the effect on Indians. Quora was popular with Indians because it was intellectual and centrist in the western political spectrum, from a culture that has the right-wing as being Hindu-leaning and the left-wing as being Muslim-leaning. Indians are absent from Reddit comparatively.

substack is where all the online right wingers who aren't unhinged reside imo

The purpose of an API is the agreement, more than the access. You can always reverse engineer something, but your users won't be too happy when things randomly stop working, whenever reddit chooses.

Now the only way to access site Y is by a) routing all your data through some third party server, or b) installing a native application which has way more access to your machine than the web app would.

Some days you gotta wonder if anyone on the web committees has any interest in end-users.

- It's a very niche thing to charge for, and merely charging for something means having to support it, so you can be underwater on support costs alone

- Users on third-party clients are resistant to enshittification

The business model of any Internet platform is to reintermediate: find a transaction that is being done direct-to-consumer, create a platform for that transaction, and get everyone on both ends of the transaction to use your platform yourself. You get people hooked to your platform by shifting your surpluses around, until everyone's hooked and you can skim 30% for yourself. But you can't really do this if a good chunk of your users have third-party clients.

This is usually phrased as "third-party clients don't show ads", but it extends way broader than that. If it was just ads, you could just charge $x.99/mo and make it profitable. But there's plenty of other ways to make money off users that isn't ads. For example, you might want to open a new vertical on your site to attract new creators. Think like Facebook's "pivot to video", how every social network added Stories, or YouTube Shorts. Those sorts of strategic moves are very unlikely to be properly supported by third-party clients, because nobody actually wants Twitter to become Snapchat. So your most valuable power users would be paying you money in order to... become less valuable users!

If social media businesses worked how they said they worked, then yes, this would actually be a good idea. But it isn't. Platform capitalism is entirely a game of butting yourself in to every transaction and extracting a few pennies off the top of everything.

So like OAuth? IIRC Twitter used that with all the 3rd party clients. I think the problem is that 3rd party clients filters out ad posts one way or the other. Your other point still stands though, just charge the user API access.

If you do that, I'm going to make a client that uses a rotating set of accounts and masquerades as a different client. I am then going to make content available through my client for free, and I'm going to put ads on it so that I can make money. With some small number of accounts, I will serve perhaps x1000 users and you can't do anything about it.

In time, perhaps I will lock the users into my platform. They will talk about how the community on Reddit doesn't understand Reneit and how all the memes come from Reneit. If I win, I'll be Reddit over Digg. If I lose I'll be Imgur.

So go ahead. You'll be Invision to Tapatalk and you will die.

On the user side you need to:

- pay the service a recurring fee

- pay the client probably a recurring fee (x2 or x3 if you use multiple clients on different platform)

- mix and match the above and manage when it falls out of sync

It's totally possible, but how many users are willing to go that route ? Weather apps could be an example of that with the pluggable data sources, but that's to me a crazy small niche.

1. SPA that you can run on your phone or desktop

2. Centralized User Management, need some way to block known bad actors

3. Signing posts / comments

4. Distribution of posts and comments over DHT?

5. Hosting images, videos and lengthy text posts on torrents

6. A whack ton of content moderation software to somehow make decentralized moderation work.

7. Image recognition for gore / CP that inevitably will get spammed

This would enable people to help host the subreddits they are subscribed to, but murder battery life on mobile unfortunately.

Content and advertising cannot be separated by IP and the site content is basically an application that is difficult to parse.

Imagine one has 10 request for thread {X} every second (probably a massive under estimation of the actual traffic). If you cache that single thread with a lifetime of a second you have instantly cut out 90% of your API usage for that thread.

Obviously the final benefit depends on what the actual distribution of {users} per {threads} per {time} -- but if your goal is to shave redundant API requests than it definitely makes sense, especially if the alternative is untenable in terms of cost.

I think most people going out their way to pay for an alternative Reddit client have a beef with Reddit in the first place, and it's the client that keeps them on the platform.

Would they be happy with Reddit alternatives ? who knows. But they'd probably give a fair shake at it to see if it fits their needs, and not just dismiss it at first glance. Also would such a service be profitable ? depends if service such a minuscule group is done efficiently enough to keep the running costs low.

IMO Apollo users probably aren't on Reddit for the mainstream stuff, Mastodon or Bluesky could probably take that role. Niche communities could probably move on to smaller services and their users would follow.

PS: Voat was positively horrible, but I'd argue the circumstances that led to its conception where wildly different. This time we hopefully wouldn't have some "free speach" narrative baked into it, except for the NSFW bits perhaps.

I would happily pay for Apollo on its own backend, and more than happily see ads.

All I am asking for is the Apollo apps front end, this app is the only thing that makes Reddit or a site like Reddit usable for me.

However, of all of the Reddit alternatives that have popped up and failed, this one seems promising because there is a broad base of users that are all angry at once. In the past, it has always been fringe groups that have been banned and sought another site. Because of that, the subject matter of the new site always had challenges getting site hosts and advertisers on board. This is different. Having power users hurts on ad revenue but potentially helps on site quality. I don't know what will happen but this is a uniquely promising opportunity. We'll see how it goes.