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The reality is that Apollo doesn't serve intrusive ads, and thus, every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue. Unfortunately,

The reality is that Apollo doesn't serve intrusive ads, and thus, every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue. Unfortunately, reddit is in that late stage monetization step where they need to prove they are capable of big revenue to justify a high IPO share price. One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg. So far, reddit has been very careful raising the temperature so as to not scare the frog before it's dead.

m-p-3 3y ago
in my opinion, a good middle ground would be to make third-party apps only usable if you're subscribed to Reddit Premium. That way you don't give the data freely, you could make each API keys provided to the user with limits that won't impact normal navigation but would cripple automated data capture, and you'd solve the issue where third-party apps aren't fed ads by sustaining the platform through subscription.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  I remain shocked this wasn't Musk's approach with Twitter; make API access part of Twitter Blue.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    Considering Twitter Blue isn't ad-free, not that surprised. I'd rather have ad-free paid option than what I get currently with Blue.
    - babypuncher 3y ago
      What even is the point of Blue? We already know that the "verification" it provides is functionally worthless. These days it seems like anyone with a blue checkmark is just asking to get made fun of.
      - bmarquez 3y ago
        Blue seems to be a "less likely to be a bot" badge. Considering that I've seen ChatGPT-type comments in various subreddits, I expect paid social media like Twitter Blue, Reddit Premium and Discord Nitro being pushed even more in the future.
        ceejayoz 3y ago
        > Blue seems to be a "less likely to be a bot" badge. It's not working. https://imgur.com/a/6blpTqF https://imgur.com/a/6blpTqF
        babypuncher 3y ago
        Bots ponying up for the gold checkmark. Man what a disaster Twitter has turned into.
      - hombre_fatal 3y ago
        Longer tweets + edit button seem like decent features for power users though not for the average lurker. Yet it seems like half of the reply guys have the blue badge.
      - tracker1 3y ago
        Main thing is supporting the platform. Second is the longer posts without having to do split threads. I think the "edit" implementation and the delayed posting is very broken to say the least. As to making fun of someone willing to pay to support a given system, I'm not sure that's at all productive. At that point, should probably not even be using said system in the first place. That doesn't mean I agree with every decision, or every direction, but do find it's a bit better than before overall.
    - LightBug1 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - to11mtm 3y ago
    My guess is that keeping API access behind a paywall is a money maker for a few specific client sets; the ones that immediately come to mind are Trading Companies (both traditional and crypto,) marketing companies (analyze trends/etc,) as well as large orgs with some form of reputation to uphold (i.e. large enough where just one person manning the account is not feasible.)
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      Firehose access has been behind a paid wall for about a decade now (initially via Gnip, which they acquired). You'd have rate limits on Twitter Blue API access intended to support normal single-user activity.
- zouhair 3y ago
  I am paying too many subscriptions to care. I'll just stop using Reddit on mobile, most kids are on TikTok anyway. So they are just alienating younger users.
superfrank 3y ago
> One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg. I think a critical part of the Digg exodus was that most people already saw Reddit as a clear #2 in the space. When Digg fucked up, there was an obvious place for everyone to migrate to. I don't see that right now. Facebook isn't cool anymore, Twitter has a large number of people who won't use it because of Elon, Mastodon isn't mature enough to gain casual users. Bascially, the problem I see is that if people leave reddit, there isn't an obvious place for them to go? TikTok maybe? I just don't see an Pepsi to Reddit's Coke.
- Etrnl_President 3y ago
  [dead]
- elpool2 3y ago
  The key thing reddit has is subreddits. Maybe they could be implemented using BlueSky's custom feeds?
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Mh, it feels like there has been little to no innovation and competition between companies about social media that are primarily text-based. Mastodon is in essence a decentralized Twitter. All new social networks seem to be about media other than text. The only text-centric new entry that comes to mind is Substack, but that's not really a social network product. Maybe it's time for a new innovator?
  - nkjnlknlk 3y ago
    seems that text-based social media are not profitable (enough).
- tracker1 3y ago
  Single interest web-bbs systems is a definite option. Can always self-host discourse open-source. There's also many other options, including the Lamernews (HN clone) app.
- 3y ago
ProAm 3y ago
Why would they IPO? Just take the money you make now and be happy. They need to pay back the VC money they stupidly took very late, but it's not like they need to fund future dev? Another bad redesign? Many people use these alternative apps because the UI on Reddit is pretty bad. They should force ads into the api stream and just call it a day. These 3rd party developers are doing the work for you that the reddit employees cannot figure out on their own.
robotnikman 3y ago
Yep, Reddit has reached the enshittification stage as a company
- atraac 3y ago
  Pretty sure they reached that stage long time ago when they redesigned their UI into an unusable, slow mess of an interface that noone asked for.
  - robotnikman 3y ago
    True. I guess it started around 2015 then.
xavdid 3y ago
> every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue That's maybe true as a first-order effect. But, for the ads that everyone else sees to be worth anything, the site has to be worth visiting at all. If your most dedicated/prolific users mainly post/comment using third party apps, then making their experience worse will reduce the quality of the site overall (even if you start getting revenue on behalf of those dedicated users). It strikes me as a very shortsighted move.
- packetlost 3y ago
  Short-sighted is presumably what they want: pump and dump onto the public market so early investors and founders get their payday and ride off into the sunset on bags of money while "the market" eats the losses and the slow (or maybe fast and painful) demise carries on for the next 3-10 years.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  This is exactly what we've seen on Twitter. The already low bar for quality took a nosedive once they started ruining blue checkmarks and banning third party apps. 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.
  - crimsontech 3y ago
    I haven’t used twitter since they blocked access to 3rd party apps. Twitter, Reddit and HN are sites I really only use on my mobile through 3rd party apps along with Omnivore to save interesting articles to read later. For me, Reddit and Twitter are simply not worth visiting using mobile web or first party apps because the ratio of crap I don’t want to see (ads and promoted content) is too high vs the content I came to see. YouTube is going the same way, I use multiple adblock rules to hide “shorts”, “people also searched for”, and “people also watched”. I pay for YouTube premium but feel like a mug for paying for a service which tries to force feed me content I don’t want. I’m on the brink of cancelling the subscription.
jamilton 3y ago
Is the math that the dev did broadly accurate? If it is, it seems they could safely charge 10-19x less and get more revenue per-user than they do from ads alone... assuming that even a 10x lower cost would be affordable for third-party clients, which isn't a given.
- aembleton 3y ago
  Those users might be worth 10x as much as the average user though.
  - solarkraft 3y ago
    They're heavy users, but something tells me that they're also likely to block ads.
    - noitpmeder 3y ago
      I think it's more about the fact that the users are paying for the service. The % of reddit's userbase that has enough disposable income to subscribe is a very very very high value slice for advertisers.
kypro 3y ago
> every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue. This isn't true if they're charging for API access. At best it's a question of whether the lost ad revenue is being compensated for by API revenue. If you want to attribute an ulterior motive here I'm guessing it's more about control. They want their users to use Reddit as they want them to use Reddit, or at least they'd like to reserve the right to that power.
- lldb 3y ago
  I think I saw somewhere the average user generates $0.12/month in ad revenue for Reddit. The proposed API rate is over 10x that.
marcod 3y ago
I was just thinking of how when Digg died, Reddit was there for us. Onto the next best thing!
gnt_thr 3y ago
>The reality is that Apollo doesn't serve intrusive ads Because they aren't having to pay for hosting. The only way to replace reddit is with a distributed system like aether: https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/ Or if you absolutely want a centralized system, something community run like ao3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own But given the absolute hostility and hate _users_ of reddit give those two sites for not banning everything they find offensive a site like reddit is just not possible any more.
spyder 3y ago
Even without ads the users that post content (or manage their subreddit) through third-party apps are still valuable for Reddit. Sure they are a smaller percentage, but that small percentage is more valuable than a regular ad watching user.
theogravity 3y ago
I moved to Apollo a month ago and paid for Pro because the Reddit app kept feeding me the same ad over and over, and it was a really annoying ad at that. Nothing I did including reporting it using various labels / downvoting it would remove it completely from my stream. I will not be using the Reddit app unless they do something about annoying / intrusive ads on their app. I'm fine with ads, just stop showing the ones to me I don't want to keep seeing.
- xenolith234 3y ago
  I know exactly which ad you're talking about, and it's STILL around in my feed when I access via the web.
newsclues 3y ago
"One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg" To burn capital on another platform before the next exodus? We need to figure out sustainable online communities.
fluidcruft 3y ago
Of course, the flip side to that is that I would assume TikTok and Instagram or Twitter type content is not as valuable for LLM training. I think it's the big long form posts that you get on Reddit with explanations and tutorials and advice that have value. And I don't think a lot of that value has much to do with the direction Reddit has been going with its redesign. If they viewed their core product as creating high quality rich textual content for input into LLM, they would do many, many things differently and probably spend more time improving the moderator tools to improve curation.
x86x87 3y ago
a few options for Reddit: 1/ just buy Apollo. show ads 2/ do a special deal with Apollo where they somehow incorporate ads into the app 3/ API access with Reddit Premium. Apollo can now carry on as normal for premium users & charges "free" users 4/ learn to build a freaking app - people didn't end up using Apollo because of the high quality of the Reddit mobile app. Personally I rarely use Reddit in a browser and if 3rd party apps were to go away that would be the end of Reddit for me.
- jimmySixDOF 3y ago
  Yes. I like that idea about API keys like how OpenAI is doing it so the user can plug in their billing account into whatever 3rd Party service you find interesting (and may have a totally separate financial relationship with) so the user is basically paying Reddit. They could possibly implement this already as users connect their accounts to the app when it's setup. At the end of the day its the same thing Reddit is being compensated for off site data access but somehow it feels more organic and under my control as a user vs this kind of rent seeking ransom negotiations for a hostage user base.

m-p-3 3y ago

in my opinion, a good middle ground would be to make third-party apps only usable if you're subscribed to Reddit Premium. That way you don't give the data freely, you could make each API keys provided to the user with limits that won't impact normal navigation but would cripple automated data capture, and you'd solve the issue where third-party apps aren't fed ads by sustaining the platform through subscription.

ceejayoz 3y ago
I remain shocked this wasn't Musk's approach with Twitter; make API access part of Twitter Blue.
- tracker1 3y ago
  Considering Twitter Blue isn't ad-free, not that surprised. I'd rather have ad-free paid option than what I get currently with Blue.
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    What even is the point of Blue? We already know that the "verification" it provides is functionally worthless. These days it seems like anyone with a blue checkmark is just asking to get made fun of.
    - bmarquez 3y ago
      Blue seems to be a "less likely to be a bot" badge. Considering that I've seen ChatGPT-type comments in various subreddits, I expect paid social media like Twitter Blue, Reddit Premium and Discord Nitro being pushed even more in the future.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        > Blue seems to be a "less likely to be a bot" badge. It's not working. https://imgur.com/a/6blpTqF https://imgur.com/a/6blpTqF
        babypuncher 3y ago
        Bots ponying up for the gold checkmark. Man what a disaster Twitter has turned into.
    - hombre_fatal 3y ago
      Longer tweets + edit button seem like decent features for power users though not for the average lurker. Yet it seems like half of the reply guys have the blue badge.
    - tracker1 3y ago
      Main thing is supporting the platform. Second is the longer posts without having to do split threads. I think the "edit" implementation and the delayed posting is very broken to say the least. As to making fun of someone willing to pay to support a given system, I'm not sure that's at all productive. At that point, should probably not even be using said system in the first place. That doesn't mean I agree with every decision, or every direction, but do find it's a bit better than before overall.
  - LightBug1 3y ago
    [flagged]
- to11mtm 3y ago
  My guess is that keeping API access behind a paywall is a money maker for a few specific client sets; the ones that immediately come to mind are Trading Companies (both traditional and crypto,) marketing companies (analyze trends/etc,) as well as large orgs with some form of reputation to uphold (i.e. large enough where just one person manning the account is not feasible.)
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Firehose access has been behind a paid wall for about a decade now (initially via Gnip, which they acquired). You'd have rate limits on Twitter Blue API access intended to support normal single-user activity.
zouhair 3y ago
I am paying too many subscriptions to care. I'll just stop using Reddit on mobile, most kids are on TikTok anyway. So they are just alienating younger users.

superfrank 3y ago

> One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg. I think a critical part of the Digg exodus was that most people already saw Reddit as a clear #2 in the space. When Digg fucked up, there was an obvious place for everyone to migrate to. I don't see that right now. Facebook isn't cool anymore, Twitter has a large number of people who won't use it because of Elon, Mastodon isn't mature enough to gain casual users. Bascially, the problem I see is that if people leave reddit, there isn't an obvious place for them to go? TikTok maybe? I just don't see an Pepsi to Reddit's Coke.

Etrnl_President 3y ago
[dead]
elpool2 3y ago
The key thing reddit has is subreddits. Maybe they could be implemented using BlueSky's custom feeds?
ajmurmann 3y ago
Mh, it feels like there has been little to no innovation and competition between companies about social media that are primarily text-based. Mastodon is in essence a decentralized Twitter. All new social networks seem to be about media other than text. The only text-centric new entry that comes to mind is Substack, but that's not really a social network product. Maybe it's time for a new innovator?
- nkjnlknlk 3y ago
  seems that text-based social media are not profitable (enough).
tracker1 3y ago
Single interest web-bbs systems is a definite option. Can always self-host discourse open-source. There's also many other options, including the Lamernews (HN clone) app.
3y ago

ProAm 3y ago

Why would they IPO? Just take the money you make now and be happy. They need to pay back the VC money they stupidly took very late, but it's not like they need to fund future dev? Another bad redesign? Many people use these alternative apps because the UI on Reddit is pretty bad. They should force ads into the api stream and just call it a day. These 3rd party developers are doing the work for you that the reddit employees cannot figure out on their own.

robotnikman 3y ago

Yep, Reddit has reached the enshittification stage as a company

atraac 3y ago
Pretty sure they reached that stage long time ago when they redesigned their UI into an unusable, slow mess of an interface that noone asked for.
- robotnikman 3y ago
  True. I guess it started around 2015 then.

xavdid 3y ago

> every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue That's maybe true as a first-order effect. But, for the ads that everyone else sees to be worth anything, the site has to be worth visiting at all. If your most dedicated/prolific users mainly post/comment using third party apps, then making their experience worse will reduce the quality of the site overall (even if you start getting revenue on behalf of those dedicated users). It strikes me as a very shortsighted move.

packetlost 3y ago
Short-sighted is presumably what they want: pump and dump onto the public market so early investors and founders get their payday and ride off into the sunset on bags of money while "the market" eats the losses and the slow (or maybe fast and painful) demise carries on for the next 3-10 years.
babypuncher 3y ago
This is exactly what we've seen on Twitter. The already low bar for quality took a nosedive once they started ruining blue checkmarks and banning third party apps. 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.
- crimsontech 3y ago
  I haven’t used twitter since they blocked access to 3rd party apps. Twitter, Reddit and HN are sites I really only use on my mobile through 3rd party apps along with Omnivore to save interesting articles to read later. For me, Reddit and Twitter are simply not worth visiting using mobile web or first party apps because the ratio of crap I don’t want to see (ads and promoted content) is too high vs the content I came to see. YouTube is going the same way, I use multiple adblock rules to hide “shorts”, “people also searched for”, and “people also watched”. I pay for YouTube premium but feel like a mug for paying for a service which tries to force feed me content I don’t want. I’m on the brink of cancelling the subscription.

jamilton 3y ago

Is the math that the dev did broadly accurate? If it is, it seems they could safely charge 10-19x less and get more revenue per-user than they do from ads alone... assuming that even a 10x lower cost would be affordable for third-party clients, which isn't a given.

aembleton 3y ago
Those users might be worth 10x as much as the average user though.
- solarkraft 3y ago
  They're heavy users, but something tells me that they're also likely to block ads.
  - noitpmeder 3y ago
    I think it's more about the fact that the users are paying for the service. The % of reddit's userbase that has enough disposable income to subscribe is a very very very high value slice for advertisers.

kypro 3y ago

> every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue. This isn't true if they're charging for API access. At best it's a question of whether the lost ad revenue is being compensated for by API revenue. If you want to attribute an ulterior motive here I'm guessing it's more about control. They want their users to use Reddit as they want them to use Reddit, or at least they'd like to reserve the right to that power.

lldb 3y ago
I think I saw somewhere the average user generates $0.12/month in ad revenue for Reddit. The proposed API rate is over 10x that.

marcod 3y ago

I was just thinking of how when Digg died, Reddit was there for us. Onto the next best thing!

gnt_thr 3y ago

>The reality is that Apollo doesn't serve intrusive ads Because they aren't having to pay for hosting. The only way to replace reddit is with a distributed system like aether: https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/ Or if you absolutely want a centralized system, something community run like ao3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own But given the absolute hostility and hate _users_ of reddit give those two sites for not banning everything they find offensive a site like reddit is just not possible any more.

spyder 3y ago

Even without ads the users that post content (or manage their subreddit) through third-party apps are still valuable for Reddit. Sure they are a smaller percentage, but that small percentage is more valuable than a regular ad watching user.

theogravity 3y ago

I moved to Apollo a month ago and paid for Pro because the Reddit app kept feeding me the same ad over and over, and it was a really annoying ad at that. Nothing I did including reporting it using various labels / downvoting it would remove it completely from my stream. I will not be using the Reddit app unless they do something about annoying / intrusive ads on their app. I'm fine with ads, just stop showing the ones to me I don't want to keep seeing.

xenolith234 3y ago
I know exactly which ad you're talking about, and it's STILL around in my feed when I access via the web.

newsclues 3y ago

"One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg" To burn capital on another platform before the next exodus? We need to figure out sustainable online communities.

fluidcruft 3y ago

Of course, the flip side to that is that I would assume TikTok and Instagram or Twitter type content is not as valuable for LLM training. I think it's the big long form posts that you get on Reddit with explanations and tutorials and advice that have value. And I don't think a lot of that value has much to do with the direction Reddit has been going with its redesign. If they viewed their core product as creating high quality rich textual content for input into LLM, they would do many, many things differently and probably spend more time improving the moderator tools to improve curation.

x86x87 3y ago

a few options for Reddit: 1/ just buy Apollo. show ads 2/ do a special deal with Apollo where they somehow incorporate ads into the app 3/ API access with Reddit Premium. Apollo can now carry on as normal for premium users & charges "free" users 4/ learn to build a freaking app - people didn't end up using Apollo because of the high quality of the Reddit mobile app. Personally I rarely use Reddit in a browser and if 3rd party apps were to go away that would be the end of Reddit for me.

jimmySixDOF 3y ago
Yes. I like that idea about API keys like how OpenAI is doing it so the user can plug in their billing account into whatever 3rd Party service you find interesting (and may have a totally separate financial relationship with) so the user is basically paying Reddit. They could possibly implement this already as users connect their accounts to the app when it's setup. At the end of the day its the same thing Reddit is being compensated for off site data access but somehow it feels more organic and under my control as a user vs this kind of rent seeking ransom negotiations for a hostage user base.