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Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functi

Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase their revenue, they're doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened. Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.

RhodesianHunter 3y ago
Reddit has seemed rudderless for a long time. Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all. Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.
- martin8412 3y ago
  A lot of subreddits blanket ban you if you've posted in other subreddits that the mods don't like.
  - RhodesianHunter 3y ago
    Reddit Admin itself will blanket ban accounts in entire sub-threads with no recourse or explanation. Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy, but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant? Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.
    - delfinom 3y ago
      >Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. Worse, they use browser fingerprinting AND IP.
      - waboremo 3y ago
        Yeah they track quite a lot of bits of data for users. It's the very reason why most new users are found bemoaning how annoying it is to start posting on reddit. It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser fingerprint info, search terms, information from their partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit, what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes and so on. Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots, people harassing you, completely unrelated comments, report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much data.
      - alam2000 3y ago
        [dead]
  - SlimyHog 3y ago
    I got banned from some subreddit that I've never visited for making fun of someone in /r/conservative, just because I posted there.
  - bri3d 3y ago
    This is has always been an interesting aspect of Reddit. On the one hand, this is fine: Reddit is supposed to be a collection of independently moderated sub-communities with their own rules and administration. On the other hand, you have a unified identity and content history across those communities, so it's a lot easier for one community to take action based on your history in another, which is a strange dynamic. I actually think Facebook Groups are onto something with the way post history and profiles work: each Facebook Group a user posts in creates a separate sub-profile for that user which is specific to the Group. Users in that Group can see a user's post history in that Group, and that user's "main" profile depending on their privacy settings, but a user can't walk "across" to see a user's post history in other Groups unless they search from that other Group. I feel like per-subreddit post histories along with a global user profile would help move Reddit more towards the "sub-community" vision if that's the direction they want to go. The issues Reddit have are: * Cross-stalking, as discussed above. * Content discovery. This is the same problem every user-generated content platform has. What sub-communities get surfaced on the logged-out front page? Cross-pollinated to existing users? Every type of content will be objectionable to someone, so deciding what to show is always going to be a lightning-rod issue with advertiser dollars at stake. * Global moderation. What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? What happens when that user is completely banned (do all of their old posts disappear?) Should large-scale content moderation like spam be handled at a platform or a community level?
    - barking_biscuit 3y ago
      > What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? explicit deepfakes
  - delecti 3y ago
    Not to victim-blame, but which subreddits? I pop into new subreddits from time to time, and I don't know that I've ever been banned from a subreddit in my accounts 14+ year history. I'm also less sympathetic if the bans were because you posted somewhere like the_donald (I can't think of a more timely controversial sub) vs somewhere innocuous like r/gaming or r/technology.
    - JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
      Ikr. I feel like there's lots of problematic folks? doing a lot of heckin wrongthink out there in the current climate? and its making me feel like so unsafe?
      - delecti 3y ago
        A moderator's job is to keep their subreddit a functioning community. It seems entirely reasonable to me that they might notice a pattern and cast a wide net to save themselves a lot of hassle.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- granshaw 3y ago
  Far from it. They have great recent user growth and everybody is appending “Reddit” to the end of their google searches in the quest for non-gamed search results
  - RhodesianHunter 3y ago
    I didn't say anything about user growth. I said their ads platform is trash, which is evident to anyone who has attempted to use it.
    - granshaw 3y ago
      Fair enough. I did notice the distinction when rereading your comment
  - vGPU 3y ago
    Primarily because google has become completely useless. I get more accurate search results with Yandex, Brave, and bing, in that order. That’s how bad it is. And I hate Yandex. They’re always making me do captcha challenges.
  - asdff 3y ago
    It's not a sustainable position though. Advertisers aren't idiots, the market will adjust as it makes sense to adjust. You already have bot accounts flooding certain keywords on reddit with product placement. If everyone ends up on reddit, that's where the SEO spam crap you see today will follow them. If everyones on twitter, it goes there. If everyone goes to mastodon, so be it, there be the bots. It almost doesn't matter what the service is exactly, once it hits a critical mass it gets enshittified just because of the business opportunity it presents.
- flutas 3y ago
  > Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate. I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy, and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting a 3 day ban. I'm out.
  - nifoc 3y ago
    I used to have a (long) list of posts/comments that they refused to remove after I reported them. Most of these were (at least to me) _very_ obvious cases of being against the TOS (and the law). I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered my email. I truly believe they just don't care.
    - pierat 3y ago
      Whereas I had 3 accounts permanently suspended for calling someone an idiot on /r/idiotsincars for "harassing speech". I have other accounts, but they took out 1 old account and a squatted account. Like, really? For using the term "idiot" on a subreddit with that very word? I have here, Masto, and a few other places that at least have mostly sane policies. All I know is that reddit is definitely on the decline. And this whole API debacle is going to be their own Digg V4 moment.
      - waboremo 3y ago
        There is no sane middle ground on most of reddit. There are subs where you'll get reprimanded far quicker for "annoying mods" by bothering to report anything, and then there are the other subs that are so uptight and intense that your comments can only be fluff anything else gets slapped down for one of the vague rules it has. Good luck debating subreddit mods for their vague rules, you'll just annoy them and admins do not care in the slightest to resolve these petty things. They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for everyone involved. Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling absolutely dead.
- numpad0 3y ago
  None of those social media are rudderless, just that, money’s circulating in hyperspace and the lower dimension slice of those just has to be mostly consistent on time axis. We are looking at a cross section at ballast deck of a ship.
mnd999 3y ago
They don't want people training LLMs with their data without paying for it. Blame the AI bros for stealing all their data.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  It's not "their" data in the same way that last mile network access isn't "their" (telco's) pipes. If value in a platform comes from third parties choosing to use the service, and those third parties are free to use alternatives, then platforms should be very careful about how greedy they get in exploiting their users. Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    > Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use. OpenAI should start a clone, make it nice, and train their LLMs off of it. If discussion boards have immense future value from hosting humans interacting, clearly the cost of hosting them is worth it.
  - mnd999 3y ago
    Maybe, legally it probably is their data but your point still correct, they only have it because people choose to give it to them. But it doesn’t matter what is, it matters what they think and they’ve got AI cash fomo.
    - renlo 3y ago
      It is their data but your copyrighted work :P Seems to me this is more them trying to push ads on people; apps like Apollo do not serve ads (or, as a long time user of Apollo, I've never seen them). I think this has been a long time in the works, before all of the LLM buzz.
    - tivert 3y ago
      > But it doesn’t matter what is, it matters what they think and they’ve got AI cash fomo. Aren't they closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out? Literally all their data from 2005 to March 2023 is still available via torrent.
cheshire137 3y ago
What I don’t get is they acquired Alien Blue, which was an amazing app, yet the official Reddit app is nowhere near the quality that AB had years ago.
- Spoom 3y ago
  They're not optimizing for quality.
raydev 3y ago
> If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them. Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them. If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features. Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party clients, but to appease advertisers Reddit has to make guarantees around visibility. It's not enough to check if third parties are calling the correct API, they will actually need to regularly audit all third party clients. It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Exactly. Same reason why Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. don't have alternative clients. Nothing unusual. Reddit is proceeding along the well-trodden path to monetization optimization.
  - rvz 3y ago
    Yes. I don't see how this is a problem. It is their service which is subject to change at anytime. Either make money and pay for access to the API or shutdown. Realistically, it was only a matter of time. Also predicted here: [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447084
    - pierat 3y ago
      > Either make money and pay for access to the API or shutdown. I agree. And I think people should also keep in mind that OSes also have APIs as well, and should be wary of systems that try to prevent user freedom. Then again, I've been running Linux for ages now. And I don't have to worry about anti-user garbageware on a forced update coming my way, or updates that de-feature my system.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
nightpool 3y ago
You cannot just "change the APIs" to inject ads—ads require a lot of external verifiable measurement and have specific requirements over display and placement that third-party apps can't provide. Injecting ads into existing third-party apps would mean putting specific requirements for measurement SDKs (binary third-party code from trusted adstech vendors) and developing a lot of new APIs for reporting that that third-party developers would have to implement
emodendroket 3y ago
Think like someone who wants to run a business to make money and has no interest in the site as a community for a moment. Why would you ever elect to have no control over the site's presentation?
yojo 3y ago
Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Which is honestly kind of stunning. Reddit is presumably much less than that, but they might be reasonably gunning for a number better than Pinterest, with an ARPU of ~$1.50[1]. To put the pricing post into the same context, we're talking $7.50 per Apollo user/quarter, which is closer to what Facebook makes per user than Pinterest. That said, presumably 3rd party client users are especially active and would skew higher ARPU than the average Redditor, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were more likely to live in developed countries. I dunno. I started running the numbers expecting to be outraged, but the cost doesn't seem crazy far from what Reddit could conceivably hope to earn off these users. I doubt Reddit is monetizing anywhere near that well right now, but if they're pricing the API in a forward-looking way, rather than planning to ratchet it up every quarter inline with monetization efforts, it could make sense. 0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average-revenue-per-user-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average... 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/995251/pinterest-quarterly-revenue-per-user-arpu-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/995251/pinterest-quarter...
- donmcronald 3y ago
  > Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that? My first though was that maybe 1% of users buy something in a given year, but that's $24k to acquire a customer and is so far from reality that my perspective must be way off.
  - treis 3y ago
    Our CAC is higher than $240. Lots of services are. When you start thinking about a customer being worth multiples of their revenue (not even profit) it makes a lot of sense. Also, online advertising can lead to in store sales. When you look at those dollars people spend a couple orders of magnitude more than $240 on stuff every year.
  - 3y ago
t_sawyer 3y ago
Reddit wants to make money on the backs of their unpaid mods. I really don’t like them, but: Reddit has a ton of infrastructure costs they need to cover due to the centralization of these communities. I do not like telegram or discord communities due to history issues. Same with Facebook. Reddit posts popping up on Google searches is really great. I really wish we could go back to forums. The thing Reddit gave us was a central place to find communities as well as a unified login and feed. I feel like an aggregator of forums could help with finding communities. Forums that support oauth and rss would help bridge the gap of unified login and a central feed. The nice thing about forums is that their infra costs only need to scale with their community.
hosh 3y ago
They are probably pricing this for people who want to use Reddit data to train their AI.
- capableweb 3y ago
  In that case, wouldn't they whitelist 3rd party client apps then? At least on a case by case basis, and at least the biggest ones Apollo and co
Klonoar 3y ago
> and why the Digg exodus happened They may suspect they're larger than Digg ever was, and can simply weather that storm. They may be right, to be honest.
jeron 3y ago
I don’t know if they’re trying to eliminate access but rather make more money/push people towards their own client

RhodesianHunter 3y ago

Reddit has seemed rudderless for a long time. Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all. Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.

martin8412 3y ago
A lot of subreddits blanket ban you if you've posted in other subreddits that the mods don't like.
- RhodesianHunter 3y ago
  Reddit Admin itself will blanket ban accounts in entire sub-threads with no recourse or explanation. Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy, but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant? Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.
  - delfinom 3y ago
    >Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. Worse, they use browser fingerprinting AND IP.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      Yeah they track quite a lot of bits of data for users. It's the very reason why most new users are found bemoaning how annoying it is to start posting on reddit. It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser fingerprint info, search terms, information from their partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit, what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes and so on. Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots, people harassing you, completely unrelated comments, report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much data.
    - alam2000 3y ago
      [dead]
- SlimyHog 3y ago
  I got banned from some subreddit that I've never visited for making fun of someone in /r/conservative, just because I posted there.
- bri3d 3y ago
  This is has always been an interesting aspect of Reddit. On the one hand, this is fine: Reddit is supposed to be a collection of independently moderated sub-communities with their own rules and administration. On the other hand, you have a unified identity and content history across those communities, so it's a lot easier for one community to take action based on your history in another, which is a strange dynamic. I actually think Facebook Groups are onto something with the way post history and profiles work: each Facebook Group a user posts in creates a separate sub-profile for that user which is specific to the Group. Users in that Group can see a user's post history in that Group, and that user's "main" profile depending on their privacy settings, but a user can't walk "across" to see a user's post history in other Groups unless they search from that other Group. I feel like per-subreddit post histories along with a global user profile would help move Reddit more towards the "sub-community" vision if that's the direction they want to go. The issues Reddit have are: * Cross-stalking, as discussed above. * Content discovery. This is the same problem every user-generated content platform has. What sub-communities get surfaced on the logged-out front page? Cross-pollinated to existing users? Every type of content will be objectionable to someone, so deciding what to show is always going to be a lightning-rod issue with advertiser dollars at stake. * Global moderation. What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? What happens when that user is completely banned (do all of their old posts disappear?) Should large-scale content moderation like spam be handled at a platform or a community level?
  - barking_biscuit 3y ago
    > What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? explicit deepfakes
- delecti 3y ago
  Not to victim-blame, but which subreddits? I pop into new subreddits from time to time, and I don't know that I've ever been banned from a subreddit in my accounts 14+ year history. I'm also less sympathetic if the bans were because you posted somewhere like the_donald (I can't think of a more timely controversial sub) vs somewhere innocuous like r/gaming or r/technology.
  - JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
    Ikr. I feel like there's lots of problematic folks? doing a lot of heckin wrongthink out there in the current climate? and its making me feel like so unsafe?
    - delecti 3y ago
      A moderator's job is to keep their subreddit a functioning community. It seems entirely reasonable to me that they might notice a pattern and cast a wide net to save themselves a lot of hassle.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
granshaw 3y ago
Far from it. They have great recent user growth and everybody is appending “Reddit” to the end of their google searches in the quest for non-gamed search results
- RhodesianHunter 3y ago
  I didn't say anything about user growth. I said their ads platform is trash, which is evident to anyone who has attempted to use it.
  - granshaw 3y ago
    Fair enough. I did notice the distinction when rereading your comment
- vGPU 3y ago
  Primarily because google has become completely useless. I get more accurate search results with Yandex, Brave, and bing, in that order. That’s how bad it is. And I hate Yandex. They’re always making me do captcha challenges.
- asdff 3y ago
  It's not a sustainable position though. Advertisers aren't idiots, the market will adjust as it makes sense to adjust. You already have bot accounts flooding certain keywords on reddit with product placement. If everyone ends up on reddit, that's where the SEO spam crap you see today will follow them. If everyones on twitter, it goes there. If everyone goes to mastodon, so be it, there be the bots. It almost doesn't matter what the service is exactly, once it hits a critical mass it gets enshittified just because of the business opportunity it presents.
flutas 3y ago
> Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate. I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy, and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting a 3 day ban. I'm out.
- nifoc 3y ago
  I used to have a (long) list of posts/comments that they refused to remove after I reported them. Most of these were (at least to me) _very_ obvious cases of being against the TOS (and the law). I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered my email. I truly believe they just don't care.
  - pierat 3y ago
    Whereas I had 3 accounts permanently suspended for calling someone an idiot on /r/idiotsincars for "harassing speech". I have other accounts, but they took out 1 old account and a squatted account. Like, really? For using the term "idiot" on a subreddit with that very word? I have here, Masto, and a few other places that at least have mostly sane policies. All I know is that reddit is definitely on the decline. And this whole API debacle is going to be their own Digg V4 moment.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      There is no sane middle ground on most of reddit. There are subs where you'll get reprimanded far quicker for "annoying mods" by bothering to report anything, and then there are the other subs that are so uptight and intense that your comments can only be fluff anything else gets slapped down for one of the vague rules it has. Good luck debating subreddit mods for their vague rules, you'll just annoy them and admins do not care in the slightest to resolve these petty things. They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for everyone involved. Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling absolutely dead.
numpad0 3y ago
None of those social media are rudderless, just that, money’s circulating in hyperspace and the lower dimension slice of those just has to be mostly consistent on time axis. We are looking at a cross section at ballast deck of a ship.

mnd999 3y ago

They don't want people training LLMs with their data without paying for it. Blame the AI bros for stealing all their data.

ethbr0 3y ago
It's not "their" data in the same way that last mile network access isn't "their" (telco's) pipes. If value in a platform comes from third parties choosing to use the service, and those third parties are free to use alternatives, then platforms should be very careful about how greedy they get in exploiting their users. Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  > Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use. OpenAI should start a clone, make it nice, and train their LLMs off of it. If discussion boards have immense future value from hosting humans interacting, clearly the cost of hosting them is worth it.
- mnd999 3y ago
  Maybe, legally it probably is their data but your point still correct, they only have it because people choose to give it to them. But it doesn’t matter what is, it matters what they think and they’ve got AI cash fomo.
  - renlo 3y ago
    It is their data but your copyrighted work :P Seems to me this is more them trying to push ads on people; apps like Apollo do not serve ads (or, as a long time user of Apollo, I've never seen them). I think this has been a long time in the works, before all of the LLM buzz.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > But it doesn’t matter what is, it matters what they think and they’ve got AI cash fomo. Aren't they closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out? Literally all their data from 2005 to March 2023 is still available via torrent.

cheshire137 3y ago

What I don’t get is they acquired Alien Blue, which was an amazing app, yet the official Reddit app is nowhere near the quality that AB had years ago.

Spoom 3y ago
They're not optimizing for quality.

raydev 3y ago

> If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them. Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them. If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features. Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party clients, but to appease advertisers Reddit has to make guarantees around visibility. It's not enough to check if third parties are calling the correct API, they will actually need to regularly audit all third party clients. It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.

paulddraper 3y ago
Exactly. Same reason why Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. don't have alternative clients. Nothing unusual. Reddit is proceeding along the well-trodden path to monetization optimization.
- rvz 3y ago
  Yes. I don't see how this is a problem. It is their service which is subject to change at anytime. Either make money and pay for access to the API or shutdown. Realistically, it was only a matter of time. Also predicted here: [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447084
  - pierat 3y ago
    > Either make money and pay for access to the API or shutdown. I agree. And I think people should also keep in mind that OSes also have APIs as well, and should be wary of systems that try to prevent user freedom. Then again, I've been running Linux for ages now. And I don't have to worry about anti-user garbageware on a forced update coming my way, or updates that de-feature my system.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

nightpool 3y ago

You cannot just "change the APIs" to inject ads—ads require a lot of external verifiable measurement and have specific requirements over display and placement that third-party apps can't provide. Injecting ads into existing third-party apps would mean putting specific requirements for measurement SDKs (binary third-party code from trusted adstech vendors) and developing a lot of new APIs for reporting that that third-party developers would have to implement

emodendroket 3y ago

Think like someone who wants to run a business to make money and has no interest in the site as a community for a moment. Why would you ever elect to have no control over the site's presentation?

yojo 3y ago

Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Which is honestly kind of stunning. Reddit is presumably much less than that, but they might be reasonably gunning for a number better than Pinterest, with an ARPU of ~$1.50[1]. To put the pricing post into the same context, we're talking $7.50 per Apollo user/quarter, which is closer to what Facebook makes per user than Pinterest. That said, presumably 3rd party client users are especially active and would skew higher ARPU than the average Redditor, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were more likely to live in developed countries. I dunno. I started running the numbers expecting to be outraged, but the cost doesn't seem crazy far from what Reddit could conceivably hope to earn off these users. I doubt Reddit is monetizing anywhere near that well right now, but if they're pricing the API in a forward-looking way, rather than planning to ratchet it up every quarter inline with monetization efforts, it could make sense. 0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average-revenue-per-user-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average... 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/995251/pinterest-quarterly-revenue-per-user-arpu-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/995251/pinterest-quarter...

donmcronald 3y ago
> Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that? My first though was that maybe 1% of users buy something in a given year, but that's $24k to acquire a customer and is so far from reality that my perspective must be way off.
- treis 3y ago
  Our CAC is higher than $240. Lots of services are. When you start thinking about a customer being worth multiples of their revenue (not even profit) it makes a lot of sense. Also, online advertising can lead to in store sales. When you look at those dollars people spend a couple orders of magnitude more than $240 on stuff every year.
- 3y ago

t_sawyer 3y ago

Reddit wants to make money on the backs of their unpaid mods. I really don’t like them, but: Reddit has a ton of infrastructure costs they need to cover due to the centralization of these communities. I do not like telegram or discord communities due to history issues. Same with Facebook. Reddit posts popping up on Google searches is really great. I really wish we could go back to forums. The thing Reddit gave us was a central place to find communities as well as a unified login and feed. I feel like an aggregator of forums could help with finding communities. Forums that support oauth and rss would help bridge the gap of unified login and a central feed. The nice thing about forums is that their infra costs only need to scale with their community.

hosh 3y ago

They are probably pricing this for people who want to use Reddit data to train their AI.

capableweb 3y ago
In that case, wouldn't they whitelist 3rd party client apps then? At least on a case by case basis, and at least the biggest ones Apollo and co

Klonoar 3y ago

> and why the Digg exodus happened They may suspect they're larger than Digg ever was, and can simply weather that storm. They may be right, to be honest.

jeron 3y ago

I don’t know if they’re trying to eliminate access but rather make more money/push people towards their own client