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When I look at those numbers I think “Apollo was made by 1 dude with some occasional help from another person. Reddit is throwing half its budget and 200+ bodies at its app and site, and it’s a fucking disaster.”
Different goals. The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.
I guarantee you a good chunk of that R&D money is for making ads more profitable and other monetization.
To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.
I said it before on Reddit and I will say it again here—
If Reddit has asked me for a premium subscription to use my favourite third-party app, I would have fucking paid.
Just bad business all around
I don’t know the right price point, but 1 dollar a month probably would have worked for most people. It just wasn’t enough because they probably can make more than 1 by spoon feeding you ads now.
I’d go as far as 5 dollars a month, which is more than the buck thirty they make off users right now.
Active users would, I probably would too. Problem is most apps would struggle to even get new users with that system.
100% I did pay for the premium version of Apollo and I absolutely would have paid about £20 a month for access.
It was the #1 most used app on all my devices.
Recently I stumbled on Relay, still going strong with a subscription model (because API fees).
That said, I refuse to return to that platform.
You can patch old third-party apps with ReVanced. That being said, they are unmaintained and will still eventually break.
The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.
Spot fucking on.
Ever have a good app? Something you like using but it’s by a corporation but that’s ok, because it’s a good app and does what you want? And then they start adding more features to it, and it slows down, and it’s more annoying and it keeps offering services you don’t want, and it changes and it morphs and it becomes a shit app.
Hell I’ve watched Whisk become something I liked using to something worthless now it’s Samsung food… Switched to using CopyMeThat which actually also gets me recipes from sites that you can’t just read the recipes from, and that’s ALL it does (well recipe book/shopping cart/meal planning, which is what it’s designed for.)
I’m just sick of “How do we make more money” instead of just being an app that does what it says. Gaming is going down the same hole, sadly.
Always going to upvote someone talking about CopyMeThat. Been a premium member for over a decade, it was a game changer for us.
I also quit whisk when it became samsung food. Does CopyMeThat let you have shared lists with other people?
It does have a “Community” aspect, but honestly I think it’s quite weak on that. however if you have someone you know and their recipes are public you can see them, but not in any organized sense.
Dang, the shared grocery list and meal planning was the best part of it.
My wife and I just share our account which has worked perfect though I’m really the one who cooks so the recipe list becomes mine as well.
That sounds nice, I’ll try that out
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I get your point and you’re not wrong, technically . Technically that is what Reddit is trying to do but you need to remember that this is Reddit. They fucking suuuuuck at everything.
I remember years ago a disaffected ex employee wrote something about what it’s like to work the and in just remember thinking to myself: “Imagine going in to work and they call an important meeting, all hands, to discuss “brigading” and then, without an ounce of irony they proceed to sternly discuss this important topic.”
Just imagine those little snot nosed shots puffed up with so much self importance discussing how these “brigades” are destroying their “bastion of free speech”.
I thought I was going to pule in my own mouth again just typing this.
We just have to look at how much the CEO and COO paid themselves last year to know the whole thing is just a huge grift.
The comparison is even more apt when you remember that the official Reddit app also used to be the most popular and great 3rd-party app called AlienBlue, which was purchased from 1 guy and rebranded a decade ago.
It’s pretty clear that the reason why the official Reddit app isn’t good is because a good experience for their users isn’t their goal.
The fact that the app is still so bad after so much time has gone by indicates that it is the desired product that the company wants to offer. And after realizing that they were still losing users to better competitors, their solution was to destroy the ability to compete in the first place rather than improve the product.
They like the app as-is, with all of the terrible performance and UX that goes along with it. The reason behind that is because they’re getting user engagement metrics and other telemetry data, more control over ad delivery and the content users see (including astroturfed sponsored Reddit content), and more monetization.
Third party apps, like Apollo and AlienBlue before it, cared about providing a good user experience. It just happens that users typically prefer experiences that aren’t trying to capitalize their every interaction, and companies take that personally.
I’ve started using Geddit, a 3rd party app that doesn’t use the Reddit API. And it’s still better than the app they develop in-house.
I rarely visit Reddit, but when searching for something niche there always seems to be a few threads over there sadly.
Yeah I paid for alien blue pro or whatever it was called. Then they killed the app and gave me a year of Reddit premium (my memory is shit, idk the proper name). After a month or so I switched to Apollo, Reddit’s app was just so shit. I left when Apollo died and now only use dystopia (an app designed for blind users) for the infrequent times I visit Reddit. No adds. It’s almost read only. But it’s ideal for visiting niche subs that aren’t on lemmy without giving Reddit clicks/seeing ads.
Alien Blue wasn’t rebranded. They bought it, called it the official app (with the name Alien Blue) for a little while, then launched their own app and stopped supporting AB.
Oh I see; I knew they stopped supporting it after a while but I thought the official app was a descendent of that codebase
If it was, it might actually be useable
a good experience for their users isn’t their goal
They are in tension with the more pressing goal of extracting revenue. But how do you extract revenue from a site that’s mostly just “user content” + “ads” in an era when ad revenue is plummeting?
Maybe if they increase the prices on Reddit Gold?
They got rid of Reddit Gold and other awards. It’s now “super upvotes” or something to that effect.
You can also see this with the old website being much better than the new one and apparently there’s an even newer one that people who like the old new one generally hate.
Another difference was I was willing to pay for Apollo, whereas I don’t want to spend a dime on Reddit.
Seriously. Reddit is a glorified link sharing service with comments looking for a 6+ billion valuation. Christian and a couple backend devs could recreate it all in a weekend.
Reddit is hopeful that AI training is their golden ticket but in all reality they’ll only ever have one large buyer. OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc, don’t want something that Gemini already bought.
With all that out of the way, I don’t see very many companies lining up to license a far left-leaning dataset that had all non-echo chamber discussion banned. I mean, look at how much trouble Google got in with an objectively racist Gemini that forced them to turn off human image generation.
Depends on the sub. The news, technology, and politics subs are 99% link sharing. The subs around DIY stuff, health, etc are often people sharing personal experience and advice. The latter is likely the most valuable thing for AI to crawl.
What could have been done to increase the valuation higher and maintain goodwill with the community:
- Cut CEO pay by 90%
- Pay mods as employees, think of the GM/guide structure of early mmos where you start as a volunteer for a free sub but can work your way up
- Subscriptions to remove ads
- Push ads in API for third party apps to host your ads, remove for subscribed users
- Profit sharing from ads and subs with top content creators
It baffles me they didn’t take the obvious approach of offering apps/API access for Premium users, only turning it into a billable thing for LLMs. They’re not going to pay for the API, they will scrape the site. Your users will! That’s a great source of revenue that can last as long as reddit does.
But no, they wanted that LLM money.
Just imagine having a website that makes no money, and you get paid so much to run it that if you got a 90% pay cut and quit after a year you’d still be set for life.
Mods could be paid on a bounty system with salary or clocked hourly higher-tier mods to oversee moderation to prevent scamming. The higher tier mods would be paid more based on traffic with that ad profit sharing model.
Or maintain a flat general rate across the board for all mods … make it a liveable wage so that it is worth it to everyone.
This way, moderating can’t be monetized or gamed to drive nonsense content just to drive up the income of a small group of people. If you award moderation with even more money … then the whole system eventually becomes generating whatever content, bots and artificial popularity just to make money … rather than in just maintaining an equal well paid workforce that all work to maintain the service as it is and let the users develop the content based on actual interests and popularity.
But what do I know … the world is just set up to make money and no amount of common sense will ever be implemented if the whole system is perpetually set up to just award those that can make as much money as possible no matter what.
The bounty mods that are incentivized to act are kept in-check by the salary mods who have a base pay determined by number of bounty mods(which is determined by user metrics) with volume bonuses. The salary mods primary responsibility is oversight and only have incentive to increase traffic, which can be kept in-check by bot limits per active users so the mods can’t botfarm base pay or bonuses via traffic metrics.
Bounty mods would be established community members supplementing income, salary mods would be would be established members of the community who had a solid track record as a bounty mod.
Just having low-level mods paid a living wage creates waste or overwork as they either get paid to do almost nothing or have to have multiple subs they maintain, which means less focus. If they have a certain number of subs that they have to maintain, they may not have the interest or knowledge of their subs to effectively mod them.
Higher-tier mods would have the same issues but at a higher pay scale, workload, and cost. Not having a higher-tier mod would mean no oversight for the actions of mods except outside of the sub community with people who don’t have an active involvement and understanding of that sub community.
That leaves the actual company to act as oversight and investigate suspicious activity within a sub’s numbers which indicates some malfeasance. If the numbers aren’t genuine, then that harms the profitability of the company because they are paying more for a salary mod and bounty mod than they rightfully deserve.
What you don’t know is how a sustainable and effective business or people work. You can’t expect everybody to be honest and hard working withithout adequate compensation driving that and you need limits to keep bad actors in-check or flagged for removal. You can’t pay people to do less than the value their labor creates and you cant pay people more than the value they creates, that is inviable due to turnover and unsustainability respectively. An unsustainable business leaves the company to derrive sustainable income via alternative revenue outside of their core business like selling user data and rampant ads, which is harmful to the users(See: Reddit).
Or maintain a flat general rate across the board for all mods … make it a liveable wage so that it is worth it to everyone.
Within a few years almost all of reddit’s mods would be from China or other 3rd world country.
Revert to the source code of about 10 years ago and get rid of most programmers. The only positive change in the last 10 years is the ability of users to ban people from harassing you.
Allow all subs to identify other subs they are similar too, and link all that information together so that users who don’t like how sub is moderated can find an official list of alternative subs.
Allow only temporary bans, not permanent bans from mods. Admins can still give permanent bans for bad faith or dishonest actors and should do so for foreign governments trying to influence other countries.
Allow subs to optionally require flair identifying citizenships and if you are found to be dishonest you can get site ban.
Get rid of certain pieces of automod functionality that subtract value for the users of the site.
Future penny stock.
I think it’s worth less than that. But “reddit gold stock” doesn’t roll off the tongue as well.
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Only if the the accurate bot population is never disclosed. If people found out how much of Reddit is bots, the value would drop.
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Oh just Forbes totally destroying Reddit.
Dude does NOT like reddit. I wonder which app he liked?
Great article and very thorough, if you have interest in the subject, I’d say it’s a must read, despite the source. And I 100% agree that reddit would be a very risky stock to buy, with more chance of becoming worthless than actually make you money.
This is completely disregarding my personal opinion that reddit quality has deteriorated for years, because sometimes even poor quality can be a great money maker, when it has achieved market dominance or critical mass in its segment, and no doubt reddit has done that.
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I’ve never shorted a stock before, but this is looking like a solid play.
Extremely well written and put together. Still, as harsh as it is, I think the author was still not harsh enough.
Return Of
It never left, bro.
It’s a hard call on Reddit.
This article seems to leave out the reality that Reddit’s big win is data and an in built machine learning capability in what is good quality. For future AI and LLMs it’s actually a treasure trove of information that will only rise in value.
Realistically it’s had massively bad PR and issues but people still use it over Lemmy and many others, and Lemmy/others aren’t going to overcome it any time soon (if ever). So it doesn’t seem like it’s going to go away at end of day, and it’s still one of the best sources of information on the internet available.
At end of day it’s stocks so it’s coin flips all the way. No one beats the market consistently over time that doesn’t also utilise insider information.
Ditch reddit, join lemmy!
“[moderators] may be able to leverage their influence within those communities to change the dynamics of the discourse within the communities or to disrupt the normal operation of their communities or other communities on our platform.”
And they can give you rando-bans out of nowhere, suddenly cutting you off from your topic of interest and exposing serious flaws with the entire site.
sounds like a ripe opportunity for YOLO Stock Option Puts
They know WSB can tank their stock and there’s sweet fuck all they can do about it lol.
From the article:
Reddit earns an Unattractive Stock Rating.
Of course it does, have you seen the average redditor?
Is Reddit a crypto?
or a Ponzi scheme
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It’s crazy. Used to be almost a lifestyle. Now it is just another failed social media project.
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Lemny is cool, but it is kind of a circle jerk. 30-50 year old middle class tech-job left-leaning males are probably 2/3 of most servers atm.
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