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One surviving Reddit app plans to charge based on how much you use it
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Technology
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(Copied from my comment below for increased visibillity)
If Reddit wants to charge for their API, they need to consider compensating these "superusers" who bring in upvotes/comments, encourage content creation etc like Twitter X is doing.
As it stands, Reddit seems to be saying "we don't want to be giving our content base for free to AI and scrapers etc" while ignoring the fact that as a platform, its not creating any of the content. They are hosting it and simultaneously saying everything is their intellectual peoperty that the recognize the value of without completing the analysis.
They want you to upload porn or whatever content and then turn around and charge you for the privelege, but also turn around and whine "only in our app" + you have to watch ads and commericials and there's no way around this unless you pay us more and you still can't use your preferred app and we own everything you submit.
Fuck that
Edit: Also, no anonymous posting (remember, they want YOUR billing details that they then can link to your real identity and use to further buikd and sell ad profiles to and track your ip etc). There's no way for the superuser/highly engaged who don't want Reddit knowing and selling knowledge of their interests even after they've been paid. Same problem with Youtube+. Pay so Google can learn far more deeply about you? Again, fuck that
Edit: Not even just superusers, every user. Set a price for posts, comments, upvotes, etc. That they got rid of awards points to the fact that they don't give a shit about revenue. Its about selling out and gaining even deeper insight into redditors for more of that sweet ad revenue and their IPO
Edit: If its the monetization aspect, let them try accepting Monero. If they care that much purely for money, let people pay anonymously. But they won't because they don't want to be a content source. They want to be an advertising unicorn like Facebook or Google.
Edit: Not to put too fine a point on it, but re: porn and sexual content, Reddit is now essentially demanding that if you want to view porn on their platform, they want to know who you are so, by extension, they will know your sexual interests/fetishes/kinks and be able to still sell that to the lowest bidder. Think about that for a minute. Doesn't that sound like what southern states in the US are trying to enact that even PORNHUB has come out against? Aren't porn apps not even allowed on the Apple AppStore? Isn't that why there's no 4Chan 3rd party (or hell, even 1st party) apps?
Edit: TIL: Reddit is an AppStore approved porn app. Pornhub should be suing to join them. I trust Pornhub way more than I trust Reddit at this point. And I don't trust Pornhub at all...
Edit: To clarify, its not the "i have to pay" thatts at issue, its that they want you to pay and derive zero benefit besides...I can't even think about what they want you to actually pay for. Its only their app, so thats the issue. I don't want to use their fucking awful app, I want Apollo. They burned the fuck out of that bridge so I'll use them for free using loopholes and they're way worse off than they started. Enough people do that and its game over, if they havent already fucked over any chance of their IPO succeeding. These are mortal wounds and the post-mortem is already written on the wall.
Excellent points. That being said, Reddit will never pay contributors. They have never had interest in quality of the content on the platform, only it's engagement rate - the years of publishing subs like jailbait and The_Donald speak to that. Engagement, now that they've got a critical mass of users and 20 years worth of content, can be maintained with bots, sockpuppet accounts, and reposts (all of which have become the course du jour for the front page and /r/all since the API revolt began)... at least until they go IPO, after which it's not their problem anymore.
The biggest problem with online publishing is that without that critical mass of readership, it's very difficult to become profitable enough to pay your contributors. Reddit's never gotten to this point, even with millions of users. It's my hope that with contributors moving off of Reddit, we'll see new publishing models appear that utilize some of the excellent ideas you've outlined above. I particularly like the suggestion of using Monero as a currency to ensure anonymity.
Tying voting to currency is an interesting idea, but I think that voting should be free, as my experience running forums is that only about 10% of your viewers will care enough to vote, and maybe 10% of those choose to post actual content. Putting a paywall in front of voting will kill engagement. However, limiting the number of free votes an account gets per day, then allowing people to buy more votes with currency, and earn currency for posting content could work very well if run correctly. The trick is balancing the actual profit you make off of the contribution with the need to pay your contributors, and here it becomes a question of determining the proper margins and payouts.
The other problem is that the only real revenue source outside of the users of the site is going to be Google Adwords or a similar platform (unless you go for ancillary streams of revenue, like attaching an e-commerce store to the site). If you charge for access to the content, you're killing your engagement. I haven't used Adwords for awhile now, but when I did the payouts were absolutely abysmal (like less than a penny per click). They were so bad that it wasn't even worth dedicating the visual real estate to put up the ads.
Ultimately, this is the same challenge traditional publishing has had for a long time. It's generally unprofitable unless you have a runaway hit or ancillary streams of revenue (like syndication deals with other media types) - most of the actual content almost never makes money, which is why so much of our traditional media is paid for by advertising and subsequently controlled by corporate interests.
I'm wasn't averse to paying but the problem I have is without ownership of content and anonymity/privacy as well as abillity to use my app of choice (which they're already letting mods do anyway), none of which Reddit wants to address.
It wants to own your content, make it so you accidentally click/tap on ads more than the actual content, and they likely want to sell all your clicks/taps/etc (== engagement) to ad companies) while claiming all the benefits and none of the liabillities for doing so.
Kagi is proving that people will pay for things that were traditionally "free" (search) provided they have privacy respected and that a profile isn't being built to be used against them in the economic/legal sense. Reddit wants you to act like a Wikipedian but make money off it. Its completely one-sided and they've really gone out of their way to make the community of communities resent the fuck out of them.
They refused to bargain with Christian of Apollo in good faith and would have gotten away with it had it not been for his scrupulousness is documenting their interactions.
Sorry, the worst thing Reddit could have done to roll out changes was what we all watched unfold, and I want no part of any kind of business/community like that
This is like Victoria all over again * 1,000,000 Btw, does anyone know WHY or what the story was with Victoria the IAMA facillitator?
I totally hear you there and agree with you re: the business choices Spez made. Reddit lost a 20 year contributor when I walked away, and even if they rolled back all the changes, I won't be returning.
I was more looking at applying your suggestions to a fresh publishing model, as your ideas intrigued me (having run a publishing forum in the days of the early internet). I want to have a space on the internet where content creators can keep ownership of their content and get adequately paid for publishing - I think properly run, it could become a vital hub for our cultural legacy (as Reddit was, albeit clumsily and destructively). The incoming revenue is the biggest challenge, which is why I focused on that element.
Some users will pay if you have a paywall, but only if you already have a substantial amount of content they want to access. This works for a search engine crawling pre-existing content, but not so well for a forum style site like Reddit, where most of the content creation is driven by engagement with other content. If you reduce the engagement rate (aka through a paywall), you're actually reducing your incoming content in the long run (something we're seeing on Reddit after the blackout).
I don't know what the ultimate solution here is, but I really do like your payout concept with Monero. If I did build another publishing attempt, it's something I'd try to implement if I could get the incoming revenue to support it.
They're dreaming if they think any Redditor is going to want to transparently tie their IRL identity to their content.
Like MLK said but shoehorned into the current context: People want interact and be judged based on the quality of their content, rather than the knowledge of their character/identity which Reddit will absolutely fucking sell to the lowest bidder and infinitesimally so.
Bonus points: you know the moment they get a request from law enforcement, thats all becomes public knowledge and it takes far less than the entirety of most Redditors ourvre to convict them of any number of real or thought crimes.
Not exactly fertile knowledge-sharing grounds.
Agreed again. If I wanted folks IRL to know what I post, I'd be on Facebook. Reddit's value to posters was its anonymity. Without it, there's no reason to use it over its centralized competitors in the social media space.
I think you missed the mark a little bit on what voting is on a forum like this or reddit. Voting is crowd sourced content curation/moderation. Like content creation it brings value to a site, limiting it or making users pay for it seems counter to achieving a well curated community.
This entire thing is 1000% about making reddit less anonymous because that makes ad impressions worth more when there's a better chance of linking a user to an identity.