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and when you try to rein in expenses to show less ads, the community begins to propose $10M buyouts and every refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API

and when you try to rein in expenses to show less ads, the community begins to propose $10M buyouts and every refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls.

imauser 3y ago
The developer has already clarified that Apollo was not the top user of the API. It was also confirmed by a Reddit employee.
nvy 3y ago
It's patently obvious that they're just trying to drive up ad impression numbers on the app to inflate their financials before IPO/acquisition.
- rapsey 3y ago
  Reddit is still not profitable.
  - libraryatnight 3y ago
    Maybe forums and digital commons shouldn't be.
    - ako 3y ago
      How do you suggest they survive long term if the continue to lose money?
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        Stop spending so much money developing features that are useless for adding value to the site; stop hiring devs to create new 'resume' features like counter-productive reverse-blocking and hire devs to fix modding tools. Stop spending money hosting videos and multimedia when your core value is text conversations. Don't make stupid decisions like destroying your most popular features (the AMA subreddit, the secret santa) because you are stupid. Fire your CEO who is doing all of these things. There is no reason reddit can't be profitable if they did these things. They don't need 100,000,000 users watching videos to bring in ad revenue. They need 10,000,000 users generating good content that ends up as top google results and they can find clever ways to monetize product tie-ins, annual meetups (those were a thing in a lot of cities a while ago), events, merch, and subscriptions. It isn't rocket science. The top stockholders just have to be satisfied to be millionaires instead of billionaires.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    It's not trying to be. They only care about the value of the equity, not about profitability. It'd pretty easy to be a profitable company with a $10 million turnover, but you're not going to be a unicorn this way. Founders and VC wants high return on their equity, and today being enormous without profitability is valued more than being reasonable and profitable.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      spez's comment "We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable." suggests a real concern about not being profitable. In fact, the whole ordeal reeks of panic – a last ditch attempt to right the ship before bankruptcy sets in. There was once an age where investors would buy in simply on the belief of unicornedness, but that ship sailed several months ago. Investors have become much more critical of tech businesses, showing substantially less interest in tech companies that aren't displaying strong fundamentals. A recent Fidelity report indicates Reddit's own valuation has dropped by 41% on that change in sentiment.
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        There's no reason to buy's spez's words, nor any other executives in any company for that matter, their job is to spread a narrative. In fact, if profitability was the goal, then he should have been ousted at this point, because he's been back for 8 years now without succeeding to make the company profitable. I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, profitability was just never the goal. Getting the biggest possible IPO is the goal, but the timing is actually very bad for them for the reason you mention and now they're trying as hard as they can, including by creating fake subreddits with translated old content for non-English speakers (at least French and German speakers).
        vxNsr 3y ago
        > I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, profitability was just never the goal. Just fyi, reddit rose around the same time as Facebook so it’s likely they share a similar governance model, where founders control an outsized part of the board/voting shares. Since Uber and wework semi-imploded investors are less forgiving of that sort of thing but legacy companies like Reddit likely still are run that way.
  - Rebelgecko 3y ago
    Profit depends on 2 things, revenue and expenses. Reddit has tripled their headcount over the last few years so they can focus on new features like NFTs. If they were concerned about sustainable profitability, IMO they should've kept their headcount around 500 people and tried to grow revenue without totally blowing up their costs.
    - sznio 3y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if reddit was profitable/at least broke even 8 years ago. Reddit needs 300 people max to run, and they got like 1500.
      - rcxdude 3y ago
        AFAIK they have never been profitable.
      - Nextgrid 3y ago
        Considering moderation and basically all community upkeep is relegated to unpaid volunteers, even 300 is a lot.
  - conradfr 3y ago
    If one of the most visited website/app in the world with highly cacheable and free content can't be profitable the internet is doomed. But did they try to be?
    - goykasi 3y ago
      How is reddit highly cacheable? Maybe old/infrequently accessed discussions are cacheable, but the live set is too dynamic. So there probably isnt much of a win there. The feeds are definitely not cacheable (except for maybe on a per user basis with a low ttl). Popular and all are never the same upon reload. And every user is going to have a different combination of subreddits. Those feeds have to be generated on the fly. Most of the data is too dynamic and ever-changing to cache effectively.
      - conradfr 3y ago
        https://medium.com/@sevebadajoz/exploring-cache-optimization-with-reddits-infrastructure-f5682325990d https://medium.com/@sevebadajoz/exploring-cache-optimization... Also a lot of their content is not "hot" and "commentable" anymore.
      - raverbashing 3y ago
        - Cache for unlogged users, have a less dynamic front page (let's say 10s cache), that would help a lot - Cache of most popular topics (again, even a 10s invalidation time) would help For the logged users you could do something more dynamic, for example, cache the front-page snippets of the main subs + add the ones for the user. And again cache that (unless the 'new reddit' makes this harder, to which I would say - well deserved! ;) )
mosen 3y ago
Spez?
onli 3y ago
This references the Apollo client discussion and is wrong on many levels. 1. They are not "reining in" expenses, they are purposely pricing out 3rd-party clients (which probably has the goal to show more ads, not less) 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. 3. There were no suggestions for reasonable optimizations of API calls. Apollo claims they already optimized whenever possible and whenever they were asked for it, and that client was specifically not listed in an earlier discussion about ineffective API usage. Reported measurements confirm that, the official API uses more calls. Regardless, later Reddit made this accusation, showing that they are not truthful in this discussion. Your pro-reddit position is not reasonable.
- miroljub 3y ago
  > 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. If something loses me 20M$ per year and I have an option to buy it for 10M$ or kill it for 0$, I would choose the latter without much thinking. And that seems to be exactly what Reddit is doing. And that is something that any client using a third-party platform should expect that will happen eventually.
  - dgb23 3y ago
    The “without much thinking” part is likely the mistake here.
  - onli 3y ago
    That sounds completely reasonable - if you assume the users currently on Apollo 1) Can't be made to pay, directly with a price for the app or micropayments or indirectly via ads 2) Would move to the official app if Apollo shut down and 3) Don't bring in posts and comments with which other users engage, raising money that way. Sounds to me that shutting it down is the one sure way to lose money, but I also don't trust that the reddit team had made that calculation properly. This all seems like a short term profit or like a power play to me.
matkoniecz 3y ago
> refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls [citation needed] (and not from someone known for lying and editing comments made by other people using their root access)
Mindwipe 3y ago
The community is not proposing $10 million dollar buyouts. That is literally a joke that if the API has the value Reddit claims (which it doesn't) then they are defacto putting those sorts of valuations on the app. Reddit already bought a third party app with Alien Blue, and they ruined it so badly that they had to close it down and start again. Nobody wants Reddit in charge of the third party clients, they have awful UI designers and a user hostile UX team. The whole point of a third party client is that it has to actually design a UI that it's users like, or it dies.

and when you try to rein in expenses to show less ads, the community begins to propose $10M buyouts and every refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls.

imauser 3y ago

The developer has already clarified that Apollo was not the top user of the API. It was also confirmed by a Reddit employee.

nvy 3y ago

It's patently obvious that they're just trying to drive up ad impression numbers on the app to inflate their financials before IPO/acquisition.

rapsey 3y ago
Reddit is still not profitable.
- libraryatnight 3y ago
  Maybe forums and digital commons shouldn't be.
  - ako 3y ago
    How do you suggest they survive long term if the continue to lose money?
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      Stop spending so much money developing features that are useless for adding value to the site; stop hiring devs to create new 'resume' features like counter-productive reverse-blocking and hire devs to fix modding tools. Stop spending money hosting videos and multimedia when your core value is text conversations. Don't make stupid decisions like destroying your most popular features (the AMA subreddit, the secret santa) because you are stupid. Fire your CEO who is doing all of these things. There is no reason reddit can't be profitable if they did these things. They don't need 100,000,000 users watching videos to bring in ad revenue. They need 10,000,000 users generating good content that ends up as top google results and they can find clever ways to monetize product tie-ins, annual meetups (those were a thing in a lot of cities a while ago), events, merch, and subscriptions. It isn't rocket science. The top stockholders just have to be satisfied to be millionaires instead of billionaires.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  It's not trying to be. They only care about the value of the equity, not about profitability. It'd pretty easy to be a profitable company with a $10 million turnover, but you're not going to be a unicorn this way. Founders and VC wants high return on their equity, and today being enormous without profitability is valued more than being reasonable and profitable.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    spez's comment "We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable." suggests a real concern about not being profitable. In fact, the whole ordeal reeks of panic – a last ditch attempt to right the ship before bankruptcy sets in. There was once an age where investors would buy in simply on the belief of unicornedness, but that ship sailed several months ago. Investors have become much more critical of tech businesses, showing substantially less interest in tech companies that aren't displaying strong fundamentals. A recent Fidelity report indicates Reddit's own valuation has dropped by 41% on that change in sentiment.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      There's no reason to buy's spez's words, nor any other executives in any company for that matter, their job is to spread a narrative. In fact, if profitability was the goal, then he should have been ousted at this point, because he's been back for 8 years now without succeeding to make the company profitable. I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, profitability was just never the goal. Getting the biggest possible IPO is the goal, but the timing is actually very bad for them for the reason you mention and now they're trying as hard as they can, including by creating fake subreddits with translated old content for non-English speakers (at least French and German speakers).
      - vxNsr 3y ago
        > I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, profitability was just never the goal. Just fyi, reddit rose around the same time as Facebook so it’s likely they share a similar governance model, where founders control an outsized part of the board/voting shares. Since Uber and wework semi-imploded investors are less forgiving of that sort of thing but legacy companies like Reddit likely still are run that way.
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  Profit depends on 2 things, revenue and expenses. Reddit has tripled their headcount over the last few years so they can focus on new features like NFTs. If they were concerned about sustainable profitability, IMO they should've kept their headcount around 500 people and tried to grow revenue without totally blowing up their costs.
  - sznio 3y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if reddit was profitable/at least broke even 8 years ago. Reddit needs 300 people max to run, and they got like 1500.
    - rcxdude 3y ago
      AFAIK they have never been profitable.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      Considering moderation and basically all community upkeep is relegated to unpaid volunteers, even 300 is a lot.
- conradfr 3y ago
  If one of the most visited website/app in the world with highly cacheable and free content can't be profitable the internet is doomed. But did they try to be?
  - goykasi 3y ago
    How is reddit highly cacheable? Maybe old/infrequently accessed discussions are cacheable, but the live set is too dynamic. So there probably isnt much of a win there. The feeds are definitely not cacheable (except for maybe on a per user basis with a low ttl). Popular and all are never the same upon reload. And every user is going to have a different combination of subreddits. Those feeds have to be generated on the fly. Most of the data is too dynamic and ever-changing to cache effectively.
    - conradfr 3y ago
      https://medium.com/@sevebadajoz/exploring-cache-optimization-with-reddits-infrastructure-f5682325990d https://medium.com/@sevebadajoz/exploring-cache-optimization... Also a lot of their content is not "hot" and "commentable" anymore.
    - raverbashing 3y ago
      - Cache for unlogged users, have a less dynamic front page (let's say 10s cache), that would help a lot - Cache of most popular topics (again, even a 10s invalidation time) would help For the logged users you could do something more dynamic, for example, cache the front-page snippets of the main subs + add the ones for the user. And again cache that (unless the 'new reddit' makes this harder, to which I would say - well deserved! ;) )

mosen 3y ago

Spez?

onli 3y ago

This references the Apollo client discussion and is wrong on many levels. 1. They are not "reining in" expenses, they are purposely pricing out 3rd-party clients (which probably has the goal to show more ads, not less) 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. 3. There were no suggestions for reasonable optimizations of API calls. Apollo claims they already optimized whenever possible and whenever they were asked for it, and that client was specifically not listed in an earlier discussion about ineffective API usage. Reported measurements confirm that, the official API uses more calls. Regardless, later Reddit made this accusation, showing that they are not truthful in this discussion. Your pro-reddit position is not reasonable.

miroljub 3y ago
> 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. If something loses me 20M$ per year and I have an option to buy it for 10M$ or kill it for 0$, I would choose the latter without much thinking. And that seems to be exactly what Reddit is doing. And that is something that any client using a third-party platform should expect that will happen eventually.
- dgb23 3y ago
  The “without much thinking” part is likely the mistake here.
- onli 3y ago
  That sounds completely reasonable - if you assume the users currently on Apollo 1) Can't be made to pay, directly with a price for the app or micropayments or indirectly via ads 2) Would move to the official app if Apollo shut down and 3) Don't bring in posts and comments with which other users engage, raising money that way. Sounds to me that shutting it down is the one sure way to lose money, but I also don't trust that the reddit team had made that calculation properly. This all seems like a short term profit or like a power play to me.

matkoniecz 3y ago

> refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls [citation needed] (and not from someone known for lying and editing comments made by other people using their root access)

Mindwipe 3y ago

The community is not proposing $10 million dollar buyouts. That is literally a joke that if the API has the value Reddit claims (which it doesn't) then they are defacto putting those sorts of valuations on the app. Reddit already bought a third party app with Alien Blue, and they ruined it so badly that they had to close it down and start again. Nobody wants Reddit in charge of the third party clients, they have awful UI designers and a user hostile UX team. The whole point of a third party client is that it has to actually design a UI that it's users like, or it dies.