855
‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
855 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
60062 readers
3367 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I personally had no problem with them charging for API access, the rate was my bigger issue. I suspect they were basing it off of the money and hype behind the large language models that were previously training using their data for free rather than the relatively few 3rd party app users. I don't get how there weren't more people using them considering how bad the official Android app is, but there's no way it was substantially impacting their bottom line.
Charging comparable rates or even 2-3x what they would get from users of the official app seeing ads also wouldn't be an issue to me, paying to support software is generally good as it aligns user and developer interests. But with 20x higher rates than they'd get from the user using the official app that couldn't genuinely be the case.
They have wanted to kill third party apps for a long time. Reddit's issue is that it badly wants to market "through the API" by charging for bespoke viral marketing campaigns. Simple stuff like just giving shill accounts free gold and elevated thread positions and stuff. Or on the upper end, engineering whole features like the Thanos Snap thing. That's why they spend so much time doing the cheesy little April fools games - these are tech demonstrators for their ad engineering team. The problem is that nobody is paying for this kind of marketing without telemetry to show that it's working, and third party apps really threw a wrench into that equation (in addition to the more traditional ad model).
That's a big part of where they are getting their ridiculous valuation from - their ad impression value is probably super low because their users are pseudonymous, and because the API breaks ad tracking. I suspect their equation is simply "this would be our revenue if we got Facebook rates for ad impressions."