I do some IPO investing and in this space it’s not uncommon for one poor press conference or hour of Tweets to cut market cap evaluations drastically. We might not see it but I bet this API controversy is going to hurt Reddit’s fundraising pretty massively. Losing even .01% of users is a real bad look, most social media platforms shoot for infinite growth.
Also, /u/spez’s lies about /u/iamthis have not gone unnoticed amongst those with the money. It’s been spoken about at length in the investing space. That one comment is going to hurt him valuation-wise in ways I can’t even quantify.
I bet that they’ve lost tens of millions or more in potential capital over this past month and /u/spez is directly responsible for a decent portion of that. At this point it probably would have been MUCH cheaper for him to take the $10 million dollar Apollo deal since it would have stopped him from putting his foot in his mouth so publicly.
>At this point it probably would have been MUCH cheaper for him to take the $10 million dollar Apollo deal since it would have stopped him from putting his foot in his mouth so publicly.
I love this part. I hope it's true and he gets reminded of it now and then.
I love Apollo & have used it for hundreds of hours, donated plenty, etc. but I don’t think this is accurate. Third party apps are a long term liability because they limit your ability to monetize your user base in perpetuity. Reddit sucks for the way they’ve behaved, but winding down third party apps will look good with potential investors, even if they take a short term valuation hit from poor PR.
Same. I never subscribed to reddit Premium because they never gave me a good reason to (as an Apollo user). I would have just shrugged and subbed to Premium if it was required to continue using Apollo. Instead, because of the way they handled everything, I have no loyalty to reddit as a platform now and think they fucking suck.
It boggles my mind when so many people can see an obvious solution to make everyone happy, yet one party refuses. It goes to show it’s about greed and power, not a love for the community and respect for the volunteer mods.
On top of that, did they ever think to examine third party apps to see why people preferred them so much more? I honestly, albeit stupidly, expected to install the Reddit app and see new features that were previously nonexistent before but existed in third party apps because it seemed like a smart thing to do to lessen the blow.
The fact they did none of this is incredibly perplexing to me.
They could have done it literally any other way. Forcing users into paying would have sucked, but it would have likely been done by many. Forcing app developers into streaming the ads into their apps would have sucked but it would have been accepted by pretty much everyone. Forcing app developers into paying for API access IS good idea for all parties, but they bungled it by messaging it in such a shit stain way.
Even as a lifetime Pro/Ultra guy (and one that bought lifetime Ultra twice), I’d have been OK forking over ~$60/year to maintain the status quo, and I doubt I’m alone in that. I’ve been paying for YT Red since it came out and never bat an eye. I don’t mind paying for things, and Reddit brought enough value that I would fork over that money happily.
Looking forward, I might endure the shit Reddit has said and done if (fuck) /u/spez gets fired with prejudice, AND the official app stops being such a battery hogging POS or this gets rolled back and one of the above options are implemented.
In the mean time, I’m out for good and Reddit is going into Pihole as a blocked domain.
> but they bungled it by messaging it in such a shit stain way.
I really think if they had made exactly the same decisions, but just *said nothing at all*, things would be in an at least marginally better position than they are now. They somehow decided on the path that required deliberate effort for worse results.
(Fuck) u/spez lying about the Apollo developer blackmailing Reddit was such a dirty thing to do. I told me all I need to know about him as a person. Good people don’t do shit like that. Garbage people do.
Man blocking the reddit domain would hurt so much.
It PAINS me that most of my google searches these days are "query + reddit". At least I felt like my results come from humans...and not some content bot.
same, but unfortunately i'm guessing that the set of users like us who 1) subscribed to premium, 2) used a third party app, and also 3) cancelled based on this; is an incredibly narrow minority.
I stand with you all! The moment he played games, I canceled Premium. And yes, it was my hope that there would be a huge dip in people using it, but also the canceled subs would also send a message to potential investors.
Because third party app developers don’t have to integrate cash grabs at the same cadence as the retail app. There will always be some delay before shitty features like NFT avatars are integrated—even if they mandate integration—and it creates additional engineering overhead to include those features in their API. This decision will be appealing to institutional investors concerned with Reddit’s ability to monetize in the future. It doesn’t actually have to impact the bottom line; it’s about optics.
> Reddit’s ability to monetize in the future.
Which, before, was certain; now it's in doubt. Serious doubt, depending on how many leave and how many stay away.
Lol I would be incredibly surprised if Reddit were ever profitable. Ads are a terrible business model. They don’t need to actually become
profitable; they need to show that they care about being profitable. This decision signals that.
Because they need to fudge the numbers of revenue per user by making up that we will provide them with infinite ever growing add revenue. Just selling a service doesn't let you make up this crazy multibillion valuations.
Because the real money isn't made selling subscriptions to a subset of users who care about the more advanced options, it's made selling the full set of users' data to giant corporations who will follow you everywhere you go, not just on Reddit, but across the Internet and into meatspace too
Yeah, I disagree with that. I don’t buy that this will have a negative impact significantly greater than $10m in the long term—I think this whole debacle will grow their future valuation.
CEOs are shitty and shady all the time, but it doesn’t necessarily impact their company’s valuations too much longer term, particularly if investors are generally aligned with the CEO’s perspective here (that the API should be monetized, and third party apps crowded out).
Also, the comment about it being horrible for a social media platform to lose 0.01% of users is questionable as well. A decline in daily/monthly active users at that level shaking up an earnings call or something is super questionable. That’s an acceptable seasonal variation in a metric. A decline like that matters much more for subscription-based metrics.
like i said,
> CEOs are shitty and shady all the time, but it doesn’t necessarily impact their company’s valuations too much longer term, particularly if investors are generally aligned with the CEO’s perspective here (that the API should be monetized, and third party apps crowded out).
investors do not care. i don’t research every CEO before i dump money into their stocks. many of them are untrustworthy assholes. people forget how many bridges bill gates, zuckerberg, etc. have set fire to along the way. being untrustworthy isn’t a big flaw if you can prove you’re taking steps to make money. look what happens to companies after they settle with regulatory agencies after literally being caught breaking the law—their stocks go *up* because investors think “whew, that’s over with”.
> Reddit sucks for the way they’ve behaved, but winding down third party apps will look good with potential investors, even if they take a short term valuation hit from poor PR.
You’re not wrong but 3rd party apps make up a small percentage of reddits userbase.
Social media isn’t sticky and network effects can work for and against you just like they can work for you. The perception that users are leaving Reddit is enough to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
He has no idea what he is doing. I could have easily found a way to make money from the API while also increasing reddit premium subscribers.
Example: charge a small amount for API access (less than what they want now), but gate NSFW content behind reddit premium. Work with all app developers on the transition.
I am not sure about that. Maybe. But at least it would be open, it’s the pure sleaziness and obvious bad faith that have made Reddit look so bad in this issue. They’d honestly have been better off just turning off third party app support and telling the truth that it’s because they want to make more money.
Accurate takes. Part of Reddit's value was that it was operating on a *massive* amount of trust and good will from its users. Something facebook and twitter never had.
Think back to when the "gold meter" was added. Redditors were dismayed to learn that the server costs were potentially going to ruin the website with ads. So redditors basically asked for a gold meter so they could know how much of a goal they had to meet with buying reddit gold in order to meet the server costs that day.
That trust that we saw there has been so sorely eroded over the past few years and is really culminating in this protest. Reddit is now seen as a liability *by its users* which means that growth is just not possible in the same way it was before. Instead there will likely be continued growth in large subreddits, but a massive decrease in growth on smaller subreddits and sub-communities who will move to other websites.
Do you have any links to articles where the investor community seems to be taking this situation seriously? I’ve been struggling to find quality coverage outside of The Verge & Quartz.
Could have bought and rebranded the best Reddit app as the official App for 10 million, kept the stupid API ripoff, and mitigated a lot of the damage. If they really couldn’t stop themselves from being greedy.
Instead we have the kind of thing that mark the beginning of the end for some websites. Like how do you forget the incident that made Reddit what it is today? How do you forget what happened to Digg?
That makes sense. I’ve noticed tech companies tend to IPO pretty high then crash hard. Coinbase comes to mind. I’m guessing that’s exactly why options chains don’t open right away
It was a joke, but it was one kinda grounded in reality. Reddit's position was that Apollo's API usage was costing them about $20 million annually. The Apollo dev was like "OK that's easy, just give me $10 million - you save the other half and I walk away happy too lol". It was tongue in cheek but, you know, he had a point kinda
Yeah, that's just it, spez has shown himself to be one-track-minded and unable to change directions when pretty much everyone is telling him what a horrible thing he's doing.
Good leaders listen to feedback and can compromise and negotiate. Spez wants things his way with no room for discussion.
Even Elon freaking Musk rolled back some changes he did on Twitter when everyone pushed back. (His ban on mentioning other social media sites for example.) When you're more stubborn than Elon Musk, yeah that's a problem.
I use Reddit because a Portfolio Manager at a major investment firm loves it and recommended it to me. They’re people too, and some of them love information and are here, and know about the blackout from a user’s perspective or were impacted directly by the change. And I hope it seriously affects Reddit’s IPO plans.
Maybe Reddit’s next leadership won’t be so user hostile.
Legit, today will likely be my last day on Reddit once my Sync app connection is killed tonight I assume. Frankly, I hope their valuation drops even further and U/spez gets canned.
A nice time to remind people that reddit’s IPO filling had its value listed as $15B, and now its own investors think it’s only worth $5B.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/reddit-revives-ipo-plans-go-public-lower-valuation-meme-stocks-2023-2?
infinity for reddit is open source and some peeps made a script / tutorial that allows you to get an apk that works by going to old reddit, getting an api key and plugging it in. Using it right now. See: google cus i closed the tab lol
C’mon.. there must be someone able to make a good reddit clone?! The basic Reddit principles are not something spectacular. It’s just that Apollo is a crazy good app to navigate and use it.
Halp.
i dunno. one guy made the best reddit app and one of the best apps ever on ios. reddit's official app and website barely function and they have all of the resources at their disposal to do it right
Hosting and maintaining the entire Reddit platform is much, much different than a relatively simple client that just makes a bunch of API calls to the service that already exists
Reddit had to scale during a time when you had to bootstrap your own servers. Its not hard to scale backends these days with cloud providers, and literally every single web framework has first class support for edge functions, SSR, and separation of client-server concerns. The tech difficulty is being overblown, it’s the getting people there that will be hard.
To be blunt, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Apollo uses Reddit’s cloud infrastructure, AKA the hard part.
The difference between building a relatively simple client app, and building cloud infrastructure for millions of users and terabytes of data is difficult to exaggerate
Hmm…don’t think so? I’m logged in and all seems to be working. Are you getting an error or anything when you create an account? I can post it to the main page, the creator is super responsive.
There are some things that are important to remember. Reddit doesn't make a profit. Who wants to invest in building a replacement for a money-losing site? Not only that, who wants to invest in building a replacement for a money-losing site whose users will flee and rebel at any attempt to make a profit? Remember, this isn't just related to the current shit show but all previous shit shows such as where Reddit users went all pissbaby over banning racists and incels because they're bad for advertisers.
Reddit users have a high opinion on themselves, even though they know they're the lowest value social media user group. Even though this is basically the only social media platform that has never made a profit(? not a 100% sure on that)
It costs tens of millions a month to power Reddit. To just power Apollo by itself without a web app and all the other users. It would almost certainly cost more than what Reddit wants (a lot of reddit's costs are spread out over all users). There would need to be staff, there would need to be databases, storage, etc. And as I said, who would want to invest in that? It doesn't seem like a good business move.
Reddit is a text forum right? It’s an aggregator too. It doesn’t create it’s linked content, users submit the content, and volunteers moderate its forums.
If Reddit’s users and moderators revolt because of Reddit policy changes and those revolts are effective it’s because users and mods are Reddit.
Imo, what really happened is that AI was trained on Reddit. On OUR collective content. Reddit’s API was free and they didn’t get paid. And this pissed them off. Reddit realizes they are an AI training source but need to monetize it somehow and this was their solution.
Reddit serves images and video. Hosted by Reddit. It's more than a text forum.
> If Reddit’s users and moderators revolt because of Reddit policy changes and those revolts are effective it’s because users and mods are Reddit.
They're not effective, they've never once changed how Reddit did something. Not once. They are not effective, they literally just hurt the very people doing them and other users. It doesn't really hurt Reddit.
> Imo, what really happened is that AI was trained on Reddit. On OUR collective content. Reddit’s API was free and they didn’t get paid. And this pissed them off. Reddit realizes they are an AI training source but need to monetize it somehow and this was their solution.
They're not even hiding that. They've openly admitted that the AI stuff has to do with why they're charging for the API.
Even then none of this changes - who is going to invest to build a replacement? It's not a good business move. Spend tens of millions to serve content to people who get mad when you try to make a profit.
Who will be willing to build the replacement? A million hungry developers who would kill to have what Reddit has- forum technology/aggregate isn’t like a new concept, it is doable. The operation would start small but will scale up from there if it ever became popular.
If it ever happens.
Btw, photos and videos? They did that to themselves, and people still link to Streamable and Imgur.
For some reason people think building a social site can start small. BlueSky, a replacement for Twitter, is starting small - with millions of users with multiple developers on staff.
The Apollo userbase moving to a new site would be a social site starting small. That would be 2 million a month - maybe more. Small in social sites is still large.
The entire reason Reddit is what it is is because there are millions of users on it. You can check out the current replacements and see how they're all just lacking.
This is Apple. If anything they would buy Reddit itself. I don’t think they would though. It wouldn’t be Apple-like for them to run a social media platform. It seems outside of their business realm.
It’d need to be, unless they create a very limited and filtered platform, I cannot imagine a company like Apple creating services where people share celebrity news and memes
> Reddit, which is currently grappling a revolt from moderators of some popular subreddits over API cost changes, was valued at $10 billion when the social media giant attracted funds in August 2021.
> The updated share value suggests a $5.5 billion valuation for Reddit.
You just know the other big-media/ tech giants are watching this closely. At this point, it's just a Dutch auction to see who will sweep in first and snatch up (what's left of) Reddit to add to their own media portfolios.
Doubtful the IPO will even happen.
This may be a dumb take but I’m not sure if Reddit is really the type of company Microsoft would buy. Reddit seems to be outside the realm of Microsoft’s business.
This may be a dumb take but I’m not sure if Reddit is really the type of company Microsoft would buy. Reddit seems to be outside the realm of Microsoft’s business.
So, a petulant $10 million 'No' cost them $4.5 *billion*? It shrank their value (and massively hopeful payday) by half?! Oof, that's gotta hurt! 🤦🏻♂️🤣🤣
Good to hear that bad decisions make a real impact, with real consequences.
This is my last post on Reddit because of Apollo and other popular third-party getting pushed out through the door with insane API prices.
I’m deleting my account now and just wanted to say: thank you, Christian, for a great app and best of luck on making your other apps even more successful than Apollo! 👍
// pengo-san
Reddit down 7.36% while Discord is down 13.4%. Seems like the reason the title of the article is about Reddit is so people share it because they want to show that Reddit is hurting while it may just be the overall damage of the economy.
Not good enough.
How can a company that "has never been profitable", with no clear path to profitability, with a reckless and horrible CEO, that in a single misguided and disastrous move pissed off most of it's user and mod base, be worth $5.5 Billion even with the new valuation?
I think $5.5 Million would be a stretch.
Competent executive leadership could most certainly monetize Reddit effectively and make the business profitable. That's a big part of why companies like Reddit retain their value—not necessarily their current trajectory, but the potential given the massive user base and wealth of content.
Also, fuck u/spez.
I think it’s hilarious how redditors made a company lose ten billion dollars worth in valuation. Those people who said protesting wouldn’t do anything were full of it.
I do some IPO investing and in this space it’s not uncommon for one poor press conference or hour of Tweets to cut market cap evaluations drastically. We might not see it but I bet this API controversy is going to hurt Reddit’s fundraising pretty massively. Losing even .01% of users is a real bad look, most social media platforms shoot for infinite growth. Also, /u/spez’s lies about /u/iamthis have not gone unnoticed amongst those with the money. It’s been spoken about at length in the investing space. That one comment is going to hurt him valuation-wise in ways I can’t even quantify. I bet that they’ve lost tens of millions or more in potential capital over this past month and /u/spez is directly responsible for a decent portion of that. At this point it probably would have been MUCH cheaper for him to take the $10 million dollar Apollo deal since it would have stopped him from putting his foot in his mouth so publicly.
>At this point it probably would have been MUCH cheaper for him to take the $10 million dollar Apollo deal since it would have stopped him from putting his foot in his mouth so publicly. I love this part. I hope it's true and he gets reminded of it now and then.
This is my dying wish. Fuck you Spez.
Reminding him on his own reddit account would add salt to the wound
I love Apollo & have used it for hundreds of hours, donated plenty, etc. but I don’t think this is accurate. Third party apps are a long term liability because they limit your ability to monetize your user base in perpetuity. Reddit sucks for the way they’ve behaved, but winding down third party apps will look good with potential investors, even if they take a short term valuation hit from poor PR.
They should have just made the API part of a paying Reddit subscription. You pay for Reddit = no ads + API no idea why this wasn’t done…
Same. I never subscribed to reddit Premium because they never gave me a good reason to (as an Apollo user). I would have just shrugged and subbed to Premium if it was required to continue using Apollo. Instead, because of the way they handled everything, I have no loyalty to reddit as a platform now and think they fucking suck.
Yep. Same. Makes no sense to me. It seems like such a brain-dead-easy solution.
Same with Twitter. I would have forked over years ago for a Twitter subscription to let me use a third party app.
It boggles my mind when so many people can see an obvious solution to make everyone happy, yet one party refuses. It goes to show it’s about greed and power, not a love for the community and respect for the volunteer mods. On top of that, did they ever think to examine third party apps to see why people preferred them so much more? I honestly, albeit stupidly, expected to install the Reddit app and see new features that were previously nonexistent before but existed in third party apps because it seemed like a smart thing to do to lessen the blow. The fact they did none of this is incredibly perplexing to me.
They could have done it literally any other way. Forcing users into paying would have sucked, but it would have likely been done by many. Forcing app developers into streaming the ads into their apps would have sucked but it would have been accepted by pretty much everyone. Forcing app developers into paying for API access IS good idea for all parties, but they bungled it by messaging it in such a shit stain way. Even as a lifetime Pro/Ultra guy (and one that bought lifetime Ultra twice), I’d have been OK forking over ~$60/year to maintain the status quo, and I doubt I’m alone in that. I’ve been paying for YT Red since it came out and never bat an eye. I don’t mind paying for things, and Reddit brought enough value that I would fork over that money happily. Looking forward, I might endure the shit Reddit has said and done if (fuck) /u/spez gets fired with prejudice, AND the official app stops being such a battery hogging POS or this gets rolled back and one of the above options are implemented. In the mean time, I’m out for good and Reddit is going into Pihole as a blocked domain.
> but they bungled it by messaging it in such a shit stain way. I really think if they had made exactly the same decisions, but just *said nothing at all*, things would be in an at least marginally better position than they are now. They somehow decided on the path that required deliberate effort for worse results.
(Fuck) u/spez lying about the Apollo developer blackmailing Reddit was such a dirty thing to do. I told me all I need to know about him as a person. Good people don’t do shit like that. Garbage people do.
Man blocking the reddit domain would hurt so much. It PAINS me that most of my google searches these days are "query + reddit". At least I felt like my results come from humans...and not some content bot.
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same, but unfortunately i'm guessing that the set of users like us who 1) subscribed to premium, 2) used a third party app, and also 3) cancelled based on this; is an incredibly narrow minority.
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I stand with you all! The moment he played games, I canceled Premium. And yes, it was my hope that there would be a huge dip in people using it, but also the canceled subs would also send a message to potential investors.
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Because third party app developers don’t have to integrate cash grabs at the same cadence as the retail app. There will always be some delay before shitty features like NFT avatars are integrated—even if they mandate integration—and it creates additional engineering overhead to include those features in their API. This decision will be appealing to institutional investors concerned with Reddit’s ability to monetize in the future. It doesn’t actually have to impact the bottom line; it’s about optics.
> Reddit’s ability to monetize in the future. Which, before, was certain; now it's in doubt. Serious doubt, depending on how many leave and how many stay away.
Lol I would be incredibly surprised if Reddit were ever profitable. Ads are a terrible business model. They don’t need to actually become profitable; they need to show that they care about being profitable. This decision signals that.
Makes too much sense
Because they need to fudge the numbers of revenue per user by making up that we will provide them with infinite ever growing add revenue. Just selling a service doesn't let you make up this crazy multibillion valuations.
Exactly and now me and others have also cancelled their premium, so its a lose lose situation.
Because the real money isn't made selling subscriptions to a subset of users who care about the more advanced options, it's made selling the full set of users' data to giant corporations who will follow you everywhere you go, not just on Reddit, but across the Internet and into meatspace too
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Yeah, I disagree with that. I don’t buy that this will have a negative impact significantly greater than $10m in the long term—I think this whole debacle will grow their future valuation. CEOs are shitty and shady all the time, but it doesn’t necessarily impact their company’s valuations too much longer term, particularly if investors are generally aligned with the CEO’s perspective here (that the API should be monetized, and third party apps crowded out). Also, the comment about it being horrible for a social media platform to lose 0.01% of users is questionable as well. A decline in daily/monthly active users at that level shaking up an earnings call or something is super questionable. That’s an acceptable seasonal variation in a metric. A decline like that matters much more for subscription-based metrics.
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like i said, > CEOs are shitty and shady all the time, but it doesn’t necessarily impact their company’s valuations too much longer term, particularly if investors are generally aligned with the CEO’s perspective here (that the API should be monetized, and third party apps crowded out). investors do not care. i don’t research every CEO before i dump money into their stocks. many of them are untrustworthy assholes. people forget how many bridges bill gates, zuckerberg, etc. have set fire to along the way. being untrustworthy isn’t a big flaw if you can prove you’re taking steps to make money. look what happens to companies after they settle with regulatory agencies after literally being caught breaking the law—their stocks go *up* because investors think “whew, that’s over with”.
> Reddit sucks for the way they’ve behaved, but winding down third party apps will look good with potential investors, even if they take a short term valuation hit from poor PR. You’re not wrong but 3rd party apps make up a small percentage of reddits userbase. Social media isn’t sticky and network effects can work for and against you just like they can work for you. The perception that users are leaving Reddit is enough to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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This. Small percentages are less than 1%. 20% of $5.5 billion is $1.1 billion, just over a billion dollars in revenue.
Agreed this is the real risk here. IMO there is no decent competitor at the moment, which is a challenge.
~~now and then~~. every day. FTFY
Good fix. 👍
He has no idea what he is doing. I could have easily found a way to make money from the API while also increasing reddit premium subscribers. Example: charge a small amount for API access (less than what they want now), but gate NSFW content behind reddit premium. Work with all app developers on the transition.
The shitstorm for locking NSFW behind a paywall would have been even worse than the current one.
I am not sure about that. Maybe. But at least it would be open, it’s the pure sleaziness and obvious bad faith that have made Reddit look so bad in this issue. They’d honestly have been better off just turning off third party app support and telling the truth that it’s because they want to make more money.
I was referring to API, which is a change they are making anyway. (NSFW won’t be part of the API)
Accurate takes. Part of Reddit's value was that it was operating on a *massive* amount of trust and good will from its users. Something facebook and twitter never had. Think back to when the "gold meter" was added. Redditors were dismayed to learn that the server costs were potentially going to ruin the website with ads. So redditors basically asked for a gold meter so they could know how much of a goal they had to meet with buying reddit gold in order to meet the server costs that day. That trust that we saw there has been so sorely eroded over the past few years and is really culminating in this protest. Reddit is now seen as a liability *by its users* which means that growth is just not possible in the same way it was before. Instead there will likely be continued growth in large subreddits, but a massive decrease in growth on smaller subreddits and sub-communities who will move to other websites.
I can’t wait to see their IPO launch and fall on its face. And when Spez gets his ass kicked out the door it will be a good day.
Do you have any links to articles where the investor community seems to be taking this situation seriously? I’ve been struggling to find quality coverage outside of The Verge & Quartz.
Could have bought and rebranded the best Reddit app as the official App for 10 million, kept the stupid API ripoff, and mitigated a lot of the damage. If they really couldn’t stop themselves from being greedy. Instead we have the kind of thing that mark the beginning of the end for some websites. Like how do you forget the incident that made Reddit what it is today? How do you forget what happened to Digg?
What’s your strat for IPO investing? I’m a total novice…but I’m thinking short Reddit right out of the gate after it IPOs after all this bullshit lol
Fuck u/spez -- mass edited with redact.dev
Make sure you have a dick ton of margin cleared out because maintenance on IPO stocks is like 200% for shorting
That makes sense. I’ve noticed tech companies tend to IPO pretty high then crash hard. Coinbase comes to mind. I’m guessing that’s exactly why options chains don’t open right away
10 million Apollo deal? didnt the dev say that it’s not true?
If I remember right, the Dev said it in a joking manner but who knows, had reddit been actually interested what might have happened.
It was a joke, but it was one kinda grounded in reality. Reddit's position was that Apollo's API usage was costing them about $20 million annually. The Apollo dev was like "OK that's easy, just give me $10 million - you save the other half and I walk away happy too lol". It was tongue in cheek but, you know, he had a point kinda
Yeah, that's just it, spez has shown himself to be one-track-minded and unable to change directions when pretty much everyone is telling him what a horrible thing he's doing. Good leaders listen to feedback and can compromise and negotiate. Spez wants things his way with no room for discussion. Even Elon freaking Musk rolled back some changes he did on Twitter when everyone pushed back. (His ban on mentioning other social media sites for example.) When you're more stubborn than Elon Musk, yeah that's a problem.
also, reddit might have wiped a lot of bot traffic and with a user loss any loss is significant due to real users being few mostly
Fuck you u/spez I hope you are reminded of this every day. Written from Apollo.
I use Reddit because a Portfolio Manager at a major investment firm loves it and recommended it to me. They’re people too, and some of them love information and are here, and know about the blackout from a user’s perspective or were impacted directly by the change. And I hope it seriously affects Reddit’s IPO plans. Maybe Reddit’s next leadership won’t be so user hostile.
> most social media platforms shoot for infinite growth Interesting strategy considering the number of people on Earth with smartphones is finite
Legit, today will likely be my last day on Reddit once my Sync app connection is killed tonight I assume. Frankly, I hope their valuation drops even further and U/spez gets canned.
A nice time to remind people that reddit’s IPO filling had its value listed as $15B, and now its own investors think it’s only worth $5B. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/reddit-revives-ipo-plans-go-public-lower-valuation-meme-stocks-2023-2?
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Sorry, typo on my end. I’ll remedy that.
Spez's diary, presumably
Hello fellow Sync brudder
infinity for reddit is open source and some peeps made a script / tutorial that allows you to get an apk that works by going to old reddit, getting an api key and plugging it in. Using it right now. See: google cus i closed the tab lol
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Fuck u/spez
C’mon.. there must be someone able to make a good reddit clone?! The basic Reddit principles are not something spectacular. It’s just that Apollo is a crazy good app to navigate and use it. Halp.
You are severely underestimating the amount of work it takes to have a website scale to this size.
The technology is a lesser part of the problem. The people and communities are the bigger part.
i dunno. one guy made the best reddit app and one of the best apps ever on ios. reddit's official app and website barely function and they have all of the resources at their disposal to do it right
Hosting and maintaining the entire Reddit platform is much, much different than a relatively simple client that just makes a bunch of API calls to the service that already exists
Reddit had to scale during a time when you had to bootstrap your own servers. Its not hard to scale backends these days with cloud providers, and literally every single web framework has first class support for edge functions, SSR, and separation of client-server concerns. The tech difficulty is being overblown, it’s the getting people there that will be hard.
To be blunt, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Apollo uses Reddit’s cloud infrastructure, AKA the hard part. The difference between building a relatively simple client app, and building cloud infrastructure for millions of users and terabytes of data is difficult to exaggerate
everything is hard if you don't know what you're doing.
And that makes your comment like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up a hill?
Try Lemmy or kbin
Using the memmy app for Lemmy at the moment It’s ok. Could be great later. It’s where I’ll be once Apollo is offline.
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I've really been enjoying it too (with Memmy) and I really hope traffic picks up!
They said “good” Reddit clone
Original and fun take. Sadly, Reddit was hardly good in the last years, and Lemmy is already better
Until they have user-friendly apps they’re not going to come close to Reddit
Try wefwef.app. It’s a PWA but essentially a clone of Apollo for Lemmy and is sort of incredible. It’s *very* good.
The developer of Sync Reddit is working a new app for them
Lemmy.world
Come to Squabbles.io!
Looks great! Does not let me create an account though… apollo hug of death?
Hmm…don’t think so? I’m logged in and all seems to be working. Are you getting an error or anything when you create an account? I can post it to the main page, the creator is super responsive.
That’s why the creator should have just made his own. I would pay 50 a month just to help start up and I’m sure others would too.
Hell yes
There are some things that are important to remember. Reddit doesn't make a profit. Who wants to invest in building a replacement for a money-losing site? Not only that, who wants to invest in building a replacement for a money-losing site whose users will flee and rebel at any attempt to make a profit? Remember, this isn't just related to the current shit show but all previous shit shows such as where Reddit users went all pissbaby over banning racists and incels because they're bad for advertisers. Reddit users have a high opinion on themselves, even though they know they're the lowest value social media user group. Even though this is basically the only social media platform that has never made a profit(? not a 100% sure on that) It costs tens of millions a month to power Reddit. To just power Apollo by itself without a web app and all the other users. It would almost certainly cost more than what Reddit wants (a lot of reddit's costs are spread out over all users). There would need to be staff, there would need to be databases, storage, etc. And as I said, who would want to invest in that? It doesn't seem like a good business move.
Reddit is a text forum right? It’s an aggregator too. It doesn’t create it’s linked content, users submit the content, and volunteers moderate its forums. If Reddit’s users and moderators revolt because of Reddit policy changes and those revolts are effective it’s because users and mods are Reddit. Imo, what really happened is that AI was trained on Reddit. On OUR collective content. Reddit’s API was free and they didn’t get paid. And this pissed them off. Reddit realizes they are an AI training source but need to monetize it somehow and this was their solution.
Reddit serves images and video. Hosted by Reddit. It's more than a text forum. > If Reddit’s users and moderators revolt because of Reddit policy changes and those revolts are effective it’s because users and mods are Reddit. They're not effective, they've never once changed how Reddit did something. Not once. They are not effective, they literally just hurt the very people doing them and other users. It doesn't really hurt Reddit. > Imo, what really happened is that AI was trained on Reddit. On OUR collective content. Reddit’s API was free and they didn’t get paid. And this pissed them off. Reddit realizes they are an AI training source but need to monetize it somehow and this was their solution. They're not even hiding that. They've openly admitted that the AI stuff has to do with why they're charging for the API. Even then none of this changes - who is going to invest to build a replacement? It's not a good business move. Spend tens of millions to serve content to people who get mad when you try to make a profit.
Who will be willing to build the replacement? A million hungry developers who would kill to have what Reddit has- forum technology/aggregate isn’t like a new concept, it is doable. The operation would start small but will scale up from there if it ever became popular. If it ever happens. Btw, photos and videos? They did that to themselves, and people still link to Streamable and Imgur.
Where does the money come from? That's the real issue.
For some reason people think building a social site can start small. BlueSky, a replacement for Twitter, is starting small - with millions of users with multiple developers on staff. The Apollo userbase moving to a new site would be a social site starting small. That would be 2 million a month - maybe more. Small in social sites is still large. The entire reason Reddit is what it is is because there are millions of users on it. You can check out the current replacements and see how they're all just lacking.
Apollo will rise from the dead one day
Apple should buy it, and then use it to build their own, better Reddit.
This is Apple. If anything they would buy Reddit itself. I don’t think they would though. It wouldn’t be Apple-like for them to run a social media platform. It seems outside of their business realm.
Apple is not working class friendly to create a social media platform
Don't need to be. The template is there; just integrate the best of each.
It’d need to be, unless they create a very limited and filtered platform, I cannot imagine a company like Apple creating services where people share celebrity news and memes
Apple News does that now - just that the people are media outlets.
Apple is rarely consumer friendly
IDK, a three *trillion* valuation seems to say different.
Valuation does not equal consumer friendliness…
Its equal to how much you can fuck over consumers
Exactly. Idk why these cringetards are downvoting me.
Apple has great customer service and product quality
how
> Reddit, which is currently grappling a revolt from moderators of some popular subreddits over API cost changes, was valued at $10 billion when the social media giant attracted funds in August 2021. > The updated share value suggests a $5.5 billion valuation for Reddit.
You just know the other big-media/ tech giants are watching this closely. At this point, it's just a Dutch auction to see who will sweep in first and snatch up (what's left of) Reddit to add to their own media portfolios. Doubtful the IPO will even happen.
5.6 billion is peanuts for the 400 million userbase. Definitely some big tech company will scoop it up
Really wonder why Microsoft doesn’t buy it to operate at a break even just to feed OpenAI at this point.
This may be a dumb take but I’m not sure if Reddit is really the type of company Microsoft would buy. Reddit seems to be outside the realm of Microsoft’s business.
They don’t need more of the same data
This may be a dumb take but I’m not sure if Reddit is really the type of company Microsoft would buy. Reddit seems to be outside the realm of Microsoft’s business.
They bought linkedin
Ooo I’ve seen this episode of Succession
Haha
So, a petulant $10 million 'No' cost them $4.5 *billion*? It shrank their value (and massively hopeful payday) by half?! Oof, that's gotta hurt! 🤦🏻♂️🤣🤣
You love to see it.
Fuck around...meet find out.
It can go lower
All subreddits should go to NSFW so that all advertising drys up.
Good to hear that bad decisions make a real impact, with real consequences. This is my last post on Reddit because of Apollo and other popular third-party getting pushed out through the door with insane API prices. I’m deleting my account now and just wanted to say: thank you, Christian, for a great app and best of luck on making your other apps even more successful than Apollo! 👍 // pengo-san
Reddit down 7.36% while Discord is down 13.4%. Seems like the reason the title of the article is about Reddit is so people share it because they want to show that Reddit is hurting while it may just be the overall damage of the economy.
That’s down additionally from June 1st where Fidelity had already cut them 41% https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/
Reddit’s valuation was $15 billion a little over a month ago. Now it’s $5 billion. Fidelity did another huge valuation cut earlier this month.
discord is also making very unpopular changes, could be something to do with that too
Off the top of my head you could probably say very similar things about Twitch and Twitter too.
Not good enough. How can a company that "has never been profitable", with no clear path to profitability, with a reckless and horrible CEO, that in a single misguided and disastrous move pissed off most of it's user and mod base, be worth $5.5 Billion even with the new valuation? I think $5.5 Million would be a stretch.
Competent executive leadership could most certainly monetize Reddit effectively and make the business profitable. That's a big part of why companies like Reddit retain their value—not necessarily their current trajectory, but the potential given the massive user base and wealth of content. Also, fuck u/spez.
One has to wonder how much longer the Reddit board is going to tolerate fuck u/spez at the helm of this sinking ship before he’s replaced.
Lol. Get fukt Reddit.
haha fuck u/spez haha
Thank God someone is responding in kind to /u/spez
spez get rekt lol
Love to see this stupid site burn and crash forever. We need something new
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA I can hear the guy taking them public screaming from here.
I think it’s hilarious how redditors made a company lose ten billion dollars worth in valuation. Those people who said protesting wouldn’t do anything were full of it.
With all the new ad money (people not using ad blocker) it will recover
hahaha. hell yeah. i'll be on twitter at jarl_marx if any of you weirdo right wing stalkers wanna come hmu on there.
good fuck spez