Hey all, I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined. Apollo made 7 billion...
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I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language.
About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market.
Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and stealing ad revenue.
Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs launched its own forum reusing the client's name. It exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular message board among the youth.
The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to it.
I hope to see Apollo go down this route.
Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard as reddit going to paid awards and memberships.
One more thought: Keep the Apollo UI or whatever thing the users are most familiar with. Most of them do not care if it is fediverse or open source or backed by web-scale k8s, they only want it to just work (tm) good enough to post things on it. Eat the lunch you prepared yourself.
By armchairhacker 2023-05-3122:5112 reply This is such a good idea even without Reddit's monetization and potentially blocking NSFW content. To me it seems obvious. It's also something that's actually likely to succeed and within the community's control, unlike getting Reddit to change their stance. Like, there's nothing stopping this from developing right now.
- "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users are more than enough, especially considering most of them are power users. I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit.
- "Making a social network is hard." Yes, but it's not too hard. Scaling is hard, but we're not scaling to Reddit's size (100+ million); and Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks). HN runs on 2 servers and uses a LISP dialect (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); even though HN is text-only and Apollo would have images or videos, I'm 100% certain there are enough dedicated Reddit users who can make this a reality.
- Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)
There's absolutely going to be an exodus if Reddit does anything non-negligible, the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care.
>the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care
No, they're just flailing.
The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subreddit would go a long way provided whoever buys that power must go out of their way to plausibly deny that.
And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money- Twitter was fairly valued in the tens of billions for a very good reason- but much like Twitter, that sort of thing sells "at a loss" because having the kind of content which enforcement of ideological conformity upon is meaningful necessarily means major companies won't want to put their products next to that content. Reddit is not a product that can generate a concrete return on investment, which is partially why it can survive operating at a net loss for a long, long time; capital directly funds political power.
Cheap capital drying up means money is tighter- so financiers are getting harder to come by- and if you're in straits that dire and don't want to downsize you have to look for other sources of revenue. In Reddit's case, this will completely kill their main product, but they have a mental block that prevents them from dealing with that honestly so they might be screwed.
>Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks)
Mastodon has the same kind problem that Reddit does but massively amplified- server operators have power over user networks (the same thing happens on Reddit with bots) which is a no-go for honest communication.
I’m sorry, who is buying “ideological conformity” for it to be worth so much? Everything you’ve said sounds great but I’m trying to dig under the surface and I’m honestly confused.
Reddit’s product is ad-supported message boards. It has a high valuation because it gets an incredible number of eyeballs every day and investors want to monetise them. Reddit is flailing because those users aren’t as monetisable as investors hoped. I don’t think it’s a whole lot more complicated than that, not everything has to be a political conspiracy theory.
By lacy_tinpot 2023-06-0121:091 reply There are plenty buying conformity. Especially those that see it as a political tool.
Again, what does that statement actually mean? What does it mean to “buy conformity”? Who is doing it?
This thread feels full of vague insinuations that some powerful political lobby is paying to use Reddit to manipulate opinions or something but no actual detail.
By lacy_tinpot 2023-06-0122:351 reply Are we arguing whether astroturfing is a real thing?
By georgebcrawford 2023-06-0211:39 Perhaps you should have used that term instead.
By emodendroket 2023-06-017:302 reply I think Twitter and Reddit are somewhat disadvantaged here in knowing less about their users than Facebook or Google do.
Why do you believe Reddit (or Twitter) knows less about its users? Users on Reddit literally self select into interest groups by visiting, (and with 100% confidence) subscribing to a subreddit. Someone not interested in surfing is not going to subscribe to r/surfing. But someone who casually browses r/surfing, or subscribes to r/surfing is very likely to have, at least casual, interest in it.
Twitter is similiar in that you’re self selecting who to follow, and who to engage with. Things you engage with have hashtags, have observable topics and categories that they generally post about, etc. If you’ve ever looked at the categories that you’re in after doing a Twitter data dump, you can see they know a _ton_ about you. What I don’t remember seeing in there is “confidence,” but it might just be that those numbers aren’t surfaced to users, or that it’s encoded in the ordering (and I don’t remember it).
The point is, Twitter and Reddit have largely the same types of signal that Facebook does, but certainly way less than Google. Facebook’s user engagement might be higher, but I’m willing to bet that the number of people using Facebook to follow their friends, and not random businesses and other accounts is greater, thus limiting confidence in understanding about someone’s preferences. What I mean is that my friends might never post about politics, and I might not follow political figures, or other talking heads, that suggest my affiliation…
In Google’s case, they drop a “pixel,” for tracking purposes, on 75% of the web (inflated estimate for effect), and analyze every accessible page on the internet with the goal of understanding what it says. As a result, they have far greater reach in what they can and do know about you…
By emodendroket 2023-06-0115:05 Facebook and Google a real name and some demographic data and encourage people to upload hundreds or thousands of photos of themselves and their friends, making it easier to tie all their Web activity to a real person. Twitter and Reddit make throwaway accounts without personally identifying information was to create. Plus more interactions with people you know in real life.
By red-iron-pine 2023-06-0114:02 You sure about that? Tracking cookies work, and the average person doesn't know what that means.
By Thorrez 2023-06-012:40 >And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money
Why? I would think it's the much simpler "having a ton of users is worth a lot of money".
By majormajor 2023-06-014:09 This seems like a very convoluted way of saying "advertisers like to know what they're going to be displayed next to, unmoderated UGC makes that difficult." A group of people could be talking about sports without sharing any non-sports-related ideologies or rules beyond "keep it PG" and advertisers would have no issue with that. While that same group of people but in the context of sharing porn would be very advertiser-unfriendly.
That's an ancient (in internet terms) problem, framing Reddit as some sort of intentional ideology-spreading-loss-leader-for-powerful-capitalists doesn't correspond with their actions - after all, Reddit has been deeply involved in the spreading of all sorts of ideas on all ends of political spectrums.
They're just running into the same issues all these "give something cool away then hope you can make it profitable later" business do of trying to turn the revenue knobs slowly enough to not drive everyone off.
By smackeyacky 2023-06-013:021 reply The porn/memes/5 jokes on reddit are far more valuable than any ideological conformity you might perceive. Sometimes we all need to take a step back from our entrenched political positions - the recent history of the internet clearly shows that misinformation is targeting a particular side of politics and it's proving to be the fast track to 1930s Germany in the US at least.
Rather unfortunately, the position that "my opinion is unpopular, therefore contrarian and correct" is something that is easily manipulated. The demographic that falls for conspiracy theories loves to amplify the idea that they have some secret / esoteric knowledge. Again, a great way to manipulate people, encourage violence etc.
By censor_me 2023-06-0211:33 [dead]
By EdwardDiego 2023-06-019:10 Ideological conformity is their product? Uh, anything to back that up?
By farrarstan 2023-06-012:10 [dead]
Reddit is a shitty web consolidation play that helped kill the internet. They rolled up a sea of phpbb and somehow made it worse.
Mastodon’s model is fine because there’s no gate to most communities. “Honest communication” is usually a term describing something noxious, but the beauty of mastodon is that if a right wing billionaire with mental problems takes over the server, you can just move.
By sdenike 2023-06-012:24 “Reddit is a shitty web consolidation play that helped kill the internet. They rolled up a sea of phpbb and somehow made it worse.” I don’t know why I never thought of it this way, but that is 100% accurate.
By wesapien 2023-06-0523:15 no system is perfect but twitter is much better now. i'd rather support "not progressives" than progressives.
> I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million
HN has about 5M unique monthly users depending on how you count them.
By echelon 2023-06-014:00 Thank you for sharing this, dang!
Any stats you can share on registered user engagement?
I'd love to see a breakdown or writeup on this subject in general.
By searchableguy 2023-06-012:461 reply Really? How many users perform any writes monthly?
I only see a couple thousand people actively comment or vote.
By tetris11 2023-06-016:49 The way I've usually seen it states is that 10% of your users will comment, and 10% of that 10% will start new threads/posts.
That describes my usage pretty well. Dang, no comments from me on the next 9 articles.
By deafpolygon 2023-06-0113:501 reply Can't comment on 9 in an hour anyways. You get rate-limited on HN. :)
By barefootcoder 2023-06-0115:001 reply I'm not the one that you responded to, but I had no idea that HN had rate-limiting -- shows how little I comment or post!
By deafpolygon 2023-06-0117:22 Yeah, I lurk and comment on here far too much.
By daemoens 2023-06-041:09 People don't downvote for no reason, especially not on HN.
By ta_rhdetvd 2023-06-016:32 [dead]
By isleyaardvark 2023-06-0113:282 reply Hasn’t a significant amount of those users only started here in the past several months? Someone shared a chart a while back and it was striking.
By dang 2023-06-0121:40 Not the case, no.
I don't recall seeing that chart - if anyone can link me to it I'd be interested in taking a look.
By red-iron-pine 2023-06-0114:03 Bots gonna bot
By loandbehold 2023-06-0217:33 how do you distinguish bots and real users?
By emodendroket 2023-06-017:281 reply > Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)
You’re describing Reddit ten years ago. There’s not really a “typical Reddit user” at this point it’s so big. All kinds of people are on it and most of them are not techies with a particular ideological bent.
By pcthrowaway 2023-06-0116:59 You can still be anonymous on Reddit, unlike facebook, which comes with good and bad.
I think it's true that Reddit leans more towards supporting internet privacy initiatives, net neutrality, etc. whereas facebook users often have no awareness of these issues in the first place.
But at the same time, no requirement to associate with a real-world identity means there are more sockpuppet accounts, more astroturfing, etc.
By donmcronald 2023-05-3123:374 reply I've always thought it would be neat if there were loosely affiliated communities that host as an API only with a standard front end for the UI.
So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users.
The API side could moderate their own content and restrict access to UIs that play nice and the UIs could refuse to surface content from API sides that suck.
The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.
> So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users.
Reddit has something like this, but definitely not as intentional,
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.json
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.rss
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.xml
>The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.
Old reddit had stylesheets and they could be very interesting. I still prefer that over the current thing they built.
By junon 2023-06-0110:15 Yes stylesheets were great fun :D https://old.reddit.com/r/ooer
By fho 2023-06-018:29 Did you just reinvent RSS feeds? :-)
By busymom0 2023-06-019:39 If I remember correctly, those end points are going away with the api changes.
By TkTech 2023-05-3123:44 You just described the ActivityPub universe. There are quite a few servers that are minimal ux or api only, and there are a ton of clients that allow you to use multiple servers on whatever platform you want, with mobile, desktop, and web clients.
By madeofpalk 2023-05-3123:41 This is kind of more or less what ActivityPub and/or 'Mastodon compatible API' is to be honest.
By wahnfrieden 2023-05-3123:40 I’m building it with both web and native Mac/iOS, on top of mostly rss for static friendliness. White labeled web and Apple App Store native SwiftUI deployments. Offline friendly
> I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit.
I have to heavily disagree with this. Reddit content is way better in both quality and quantity. The only thing worse is maybe the Signal to noise ratio, and even that is questionable. For example, askHistorians is a gem. Many subreddits are very useful. Moreover, for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. Not once have I needed it to find useful content on hacker news.
By johnnyanmac 2023-06-063:25 >for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google.
I do it more out of necessity than because reddit is a good site. You get into a niche enough subject and your choice is either a small subreddit or delving into the artifacts of the early internet like GameFaqs, Deviant Art, or some new site forums (the ones that still exist). I Still need to take a grain of salt and check if the redditor isn't blowing hot air or isn't on some unhinged rant.
HN is great but focused on very specific, technical contetnt. Not gonna be much oppurtunity to talk about media or craft hobbies here.
>For example, askHistorians is a gem.
Ask about anything remotely controversial, and you'll see how quickly it's an echo chamber.
By fknorangesite 2023-06-0112:40 > you'll see how quickly ~~it's an echo chamber.~~ requires sources
By red-iron-pine 2023-06-0115:011 reply I'm convinced askHistorians is mostly for the same people asking and answering their own questions
By deroanth 2023-06-0118:31 Just in case you're not joking: if that were the case, there would be few-to-no questions with no responses, but there are plenty of those. I won't deny it's possible there is some of that, but I doubt it's all that common.
By witchesindublin 2023-05-3123:242 reply I actually think that Reddit is more "mass market" than tech-savvy. I never associate Reddit with techies in my entire life, unless you mean the people who move into tech for money.
By jodrellblank 2023-06-0213:41 A recent link on HN was the archives of Reddit comments from pushshift.io; of the first year of Reddit (December 2005 to December 2006), the comment counts on subreddits with >100 comments were:
Where "joel" was Joel Spolsky's programming blog. That's quite programmer-heavy. Some of the comments on "reddit.com" in 2005 were:115 ru 129 de 215 tr 380 nsfw 765 ja 932 freeculture 985 request 1487 joel 1784 lipstick.com 2022 features 4208 science 31266 programming 322776 reddit.com> "One thing I've noticed is that the bulk of reddit's content is usually IT-related or at least culturally related, while digg is more generalized in its content (perhaps this is a product of time?). My point is that it seems to me that the fact that the "who" uses the site has a greater influence on usability than "how" the site is used." -
> "In the beginning, digg was pretty much all tech-related links, and whenever someone posted anything else you'd get a flurry of "this is a tech news site"-type comments. As the userbase grows and you get a more diverse demographic using the site, it becomes less "elite" and expands into other areas."
By bellowse 2023-05-3123:17 I'm dying for this, and would happily throw in some free dev work. HN is the only community I still actually enjoy, social media is a cesspool. I'd love a "Lichess of social media," something centralized but robust and user-respecting, and for communities other than tech.
>prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan
The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.
They are not in English. The old one is HKGolden while the new one is LIHKG. I think a similar pattern of movement happened from PTT to DCard too. I think these all have a Wikipedia page, and I hope translation tools work well enough to make them understandable.
By Inocez 2023-06-0115:01 To be honest, the pattern is not quite similar. The main reason for PTT's decline can be boiled down to political issues. The PTT operators were unable to effectively deal with the issue of water armies, resulting in a decision to halt new user registrations for nearly three years.
By johnnyanmac 2023-06-063:10 >We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)
TBH, 4chan these days are nowhere near the days when it was known as the boogieman of the internet. Still stuck with language that wouldn't last 10 seconds on Twitter or even Reddit, but we're not talking about a doxxing/harassment hub anymore. Or at least, no more a hub for that than Twitter/Reddit.
By wesapien 2023-06-0523:00 4chan is indeed not the ideal but the current reddit isn't ideal either because it leans too much progressive. i would like to prune both extremes.
By hardware2win 2023-06-018:18 >i believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the
What? Id say max 50k
I don’t do 4chan, but I know people IRL who do. They seem to think it’s pretty good.
Is there a chance it’s getting better?
4chan will never "get better" because if that happens it'll cease to be 4chan as we know it. /b/ has always been an open pit sewer that the occasional nugget of gold flows through. /trv/ is where I like to hang out, but /pol/ can't help itself and likes to crap-post in there on the regular. /gif/ and it's blue board, "safe for work," version /wsg/ are fun to browse, but the 4chanX extension and some filters are needed to hide a lot of the trolling and truly awful stuff while browsing.
By yoshamano 2023-06-0120:58 Yes. On 4chan they're called boards. Some boards are focused on particular content. Other boards are focused on the type of media posted.
/b/ = random /trv/ = travel /pol/ = politically incorrect /gif/ = .gif and .webm files /wsg/ = the work safe version of /gif/ (its toned down but still not actually safe for work)
By surgical_fire 2023-06-0110:261 reply I remember my /b/tard days, in the mid 2000's. I drifted away from it many years ago, but I remember ir fondly.
4chan was horrible and excellent at the same time. A sea of garbage that was also full of gold.
Probably the only online community I ever enjoyed to be a part of. All else was shit.
It was a good time for the internet, back then. I do miss those days. I've tried to visit 4chan a few times in the last decade, but the community is... different now.
By surgical_fire 2023-06-0111:011 reply I had the same experience.
But I'm also much older now. I wondered if the community changed, or if I was the one that changed and can't appreciate it for what it is anymore. Maybe both I and the community changed in different directions.
I probably will never have an answer. But I still remember the old times there fondly.
In a sense, 4chan in the mid-2000's was probably my final experience with the old web, in a time before walled gardens, before social media trying to lock everyone in and tracking the shit out of everything to shove ads down the collective throat. A place still not neutered by contemporary political correctness and value systems. Full of extremely smart people and extremely dumb people in equal measure. It was maybe the ultimate form of the prior iteration of internet forums and irc chat rooms.
Nothing lasts forever, entropy dictates that on a long enough timeline all things become shit. Oh well.
By pyuser583 2023-06-0116:12 Mid 2000s - that was pre-Facebook. Did other social media companies draw folks away?
I’ve used it off and on since 2005 and /b/ has always been bad, while the tech and music boards have been pretty good.
By pyuser583 2023-06-0117:12 Seems tech neighborhoods are pretty good everywhere.
Twitter and Reddit tech neighborhoods have good reputations.
Yup. I'd join Apollo if it was substantially similar. They could not possibly make a worse UI than the current "new" reddit web UI so the bar is pretty low.
I have recently searched for some open source alternative to reddit. Lemmy.ml seems to be a fediverse alternative, and have a nice web UI and apps, though the site is pretty much empty. If popular 3rd party app could join force and migrating to lemmy because of reddit's brain-dead pricing. It will be interesting.
I tried out Lemmy a year or two ago (it seemed nice) but found that they had a hard-coded list of "bad words" that automatically got censored, some of them quite soft (and with dual meaning), like "bitch". So yeah, I quickly uninstalled it once I realized that. How the fuck are you going to run, say, a dog breeding node? Or just have any kind of semi-normal adult discussion where people aren't bothered by cursing? No thanks - as a moderator I (my community) would want to choose what to censor myself.
It might have changed since then but from what I remember of reading through the lead devs reasoning behind the "feature" I want no part of that ecosystem.
By dugite-code 2023-06-014:242 reply Lemmy's devs have a long history of questionable actions and opinions that goes beyond the slur filter. I'm afraid it will forever be condemned to be a low traffic fringe project.
By wraptile 2023-06-014:36 The curse of reddit alternatives. It's always some fringe group that starts it and scares everyone else off. I was an early Lemmy adopter but being from post-soviet country just couldn't handle the ignorant tankie politics being injected into every discussion. There's just no sane leadership.
By DoItToMe81 2023-06-0115:38 It's run by the liberal equivalent of Evangelists, with all the moralistic and obsessive baggage that comes with it. Unless you're in the group that runs it, you're not going to be able to use it.
We had a fun incident at a work place, where the Big Corporate US Owners had a Slack with profanity filter on, but our company was Swedish. The word for "end" in Swedish is "slut". So basically you couldn't talk Swedish in that Slack :P
By spurgu 2023-06-0112:55 Haha! And shuffling around, had it been a Swedish filter then "hora" would've been filtered, driving the Spaniards nuts :D
By dingledork69 2023-06-0112:46 Wow, that thread is insane. Why do these people think they get to play arbiter of morality for everyone their private installations? Are they not aware of other languages than English?
By wswope 2023-05-3122:41 If you’re talking about a self-hostable Reddit-like service, Tildes’ platform might be a good option if it suits your taste.
By popcalc 2023-05-3122:10 You could always co-opt Dread ;)
The tech isn't the challenge with something like Reddit, even the comically inept Reddit leadership could figure it out after all.
The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted.
Only if they have a solution for that can try going their own way.
It became a lot more possible this year to start doing AI content moderation. It won't be perfect, of course, but human mods are probably worse.
and yes, I've used content moderation AIs in the past (like Google's Perspective API) and they're not really usable. OpenAI moderation endpoint, embeddings classification, or even just gpt3.5-turbo would work marvelously.
By josephg 2023-06-012:54 This is a great idea. The first version of this could be a human-assisted AI, where an ai makes moderation choices (with a confidence interval) and the choices it makes can be supervised and overriden by human moderators when it gets things wrong. Over time the AI can be retrained to make better choices. Kind of like a spam filter with more knobs.
The hard thing early on might be getting getting started with good training data. But chatgpt might already be good enough to make reasonable choices today with a good system prompt.
By MichaelZuo 2023-06-011:261 reply Have you tested this on a small scale?
By Implicated 2023-06-014:59 I have a reddit post database with ~6 million unique post titles and through various manual means I've identified ~100,000 of these post titles that _are_ spam.
First, I parsed the posts for the most common phrases at varying lengths, hand identifying 3,730 individual strings that I felt indicated spam within the post title, post body, reddit username, reddit user description or comment bodies.
These strings are then checked against new or updated records and things are flagged as spam as needed.
It's been weeks since I've had to manually intervene and identify more spam strings - that's not to say I won't need to eventually as trends and techniques change (or, as it happens - reddit's api changes), but this was a fantastically successful means for identifying and analyzing obvious spam.
Beyond the above, I used what was a relatively simple approach to identify similar post titles to those that were determined to be spam for a "if you thought that was spam then you'll probably think this is too..." type feature that was very effective.
If reddit's api changes weren't happening I'd have already started training an ML model/NN or whatever chatGPT told me was the best one to use in order to classify these objects from the existing data.
Ironically, all of this was in order to offer moderation bots to subreddits to help handle the spam problem.
I started with scraping the API to play with meilisearch as a search engine but was just awestruck at the amount of _obvious_ spam that was getting through automod/reddit's own spam filtering (if there is any?) before being published/available via the API. I just didn't want to store all the metadata I was generating for all the spam posts and couldn't depend on reddit to police the issues on their end.
Now they're still unable to get a handle on spam - but also cutting off the developers trying to help them.
By scarab92 2023-06-010:32 Several popular reddit clients could team up, launch the site but require a small monthly subscription fee (which these clients already collect).
Even $1 per month is enough to keep a lot of the outrage junkies out and you can use the revenue to pay for moderation of the smaller group of power users that remain.
By cortesoft 2023-06-011:38 It isn't just mods, it's a community in general. If no one else is posting and commenting, no one wants to visit.
By StanislavPetrov 2023-06-012:061 reply >The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted.
The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all submissions and comments that conflict with the narrative being pushed by the establishment.
Hacker News is great because many of the comments are substantive, thought-provoking and don't read like State Department press releases or obvious corporate astroturfing.
Honestly I think the tech is an issue.
Most web development is downloading. Social networks have massive uploading and frequent changes.
Twitter literally invented microservices because of this.
By preommr 2023-06-013:55 > Twitter literally invented microservices because of this.
Service-oriented architecture: Am I just a joke to you?
What happened with reddit is imo the mods affect the site's direction moreso than the administration or the devs. This is what happens when you put profit and cancerous growth above cultivating a community.
By wesapien 2023-06-0523:26 this is what happens when you let the patients manage the hospital. similar to what's happening in politics. the left and right extremists dictate the narratives. i can only dream when moderates gain some balls and put each extremes into their place. the moderates should be cultivating the culture.
By witchesindublin 2023-05-3123:422 reply I really doubt that the entire moderation team of all the subreddits were capable of sweeping the entire right wing and most moderates of Reddit independently, and without pushback from international users who knew the moderation wouldn't be culturally sensitive. It had to have been centrally planned.
There is admin intervention for sure, but I'm not sure if it's ideological or just advertiser appeasement.
The removal of r/waterniggas (a sub about staying hydrated) seems absurd ideologically, even with that name.
By gsinclair 2023-06-1114:03 Why on earth was there a sub about staying hydrated? Just drink some water, for crying out loud.
By pokerface_86 2023-06-0121:21 don’t a couple power mods control the vast majority of the popular subreddits?
Yes, please! We need alternatives to the social media giants that are now obviously bent on monetization and other, shadier motives.
Moves like this are what caused the huge Digg -> Reddit exodus that significantly boosted Reddit's popularity. People need other places to go when their favorite platform takes this seemingly inevitable path.
I was part of the Digg -> Reddit exodus at the time, I loved Digg until they destroyed it, had a Reddit account for long but never really used it.
Now with Reddit trying to shutdown Apollo and other 3rd party clients with this pricing move I can see myself never using Reddit, their official client sucks a lot (it's unfortunate they bought Alien Blue just to kill it, which gave Apollo the chance to rise from those ashes), if Apollo dies... I will simply not use Reddit as much, the only other way I can use Reddit right now is through old.reddit.com, that sucks on mobile browsers without RES.
It seems I will soon experience a repeat of Digg with Reddit, slowly use it less and less because the experience is broken until the moment I forget it exists.
With the Digg exodus, Reddit was already the strong #2 alternative for a decent amount of time so it was a no-brainer and obviously Reddit has grown exponentially beyond what Digg was.
I have no idea what is out there as an alternative at this point, there just seems to be too much chaff everywhere.
By johnnyanmac 2023-06-068:57 I've looked for a long time. Tildes feels like a good #2, but it seems content remaining extremely small. I think it's still invite only after 5 years.
Pretty much all alternatives I looked at lacked community. Not expecting reddit numbers, but even a threshold as simple as "more than 5 posts/20 comments a day" was a huge hurdle here. Social media is just so centralized now.
By Casteil 2023-06-0216:22 Yep, Twitter is currently enjoying this effect of having no "close 2nd" choice for their user base to defect to.
By holler 2023-06-015:41 Building a public chat network / alternative to Reddit/Twitter/Discord at https://sqwok.im
Create post -> share url -> instant chatroom based around the topic -> live chat with anyone on the net in seconds (hopefully have fun). Open to feedback :)
By prox 2023-06-017:37 From a comment : >They’re trying to overvalue their services before going public. Execs want to cash out and move to a tropical island. I can’t wait for this cesspool to fail.
This is their real motivation. You can’t fight that honestly. Greed is good for these folks.
By krabizzwainch 2023-06-011:232 reply I forgot about Digg and just went to look at it. Not a single thing is recognizable about it.
I left Digg for Reddit after V4 dropped. It’s kind of surprising what Digg has turned into. I would have expected it would just continue course as it was (still maintaining comment sections & voting etc) but surprised it’s now just staff picked content from other sites.
By krabizzwainch 2023-06-0112:47 Is it even that at this point? It looked kinda like Gizmodo now where its a few authors rewriting content from other pages, and then a ton of ads. I will say I scrolled for a little bit and my take away was generic tech blog, nothing too egregious but it doesn't do what it once did.
By pokerface_86 2023-06-0121:28 i feel similarly about reddit, the site is completely unrecognizable from when i first joined in 2013 looking for a way to keep up with the gaming industry without clickbait youtubers.
This was precisely my first thought when I read this. For the price that Reddit will charge, Apollo's author could easily recreate Reddit and take advantage of Apollo's user base to seed that community.
By MichaelZuo 2023-06-011:301 reply Hiring a few hundred competent mods, plus management, can easily triple that figure, so it would likely need some serious backing.
By rusticpenn 2023-06-012:041 reply Mods work for free on reddit
By MichaelZuo 2023-06-012:241 reply They work, for free as it appears from the company's accounting department, but they are earning money through other means.
My hunch is that the Apollo founder would be unwilling to participate in the same schemes.
As a moderator on reddit, I can assure you it is in no way lucrative. It is just another thankless chore with no monetary upsides.
By MichaelZuo 2023-06-0319:591 reply The default ones have mods that earn money, which would likely need to be factored in to an Apollo style replacement, that's the point.
By johnnyanmac 2023-06-069:00 They make money, but not in an official capacity (and perhaps, not even in a way that complies with Reddit TOS).
There is also one more story on the other side of it.
Twitter used to have a vibrant ecosystem of clients, most of them working better than the official app both on web and mobile. Twitter was able to kill their third party app ecosystem with their paid API changes and lived to thrive as a company till recently.
The reality is, you need a good cohort of content and users to move who can sustain the content, moderation and discussion. Just moving Apollo users doesn't ensure that. There are other good third party clients like Relay etc as well
By raverbashing 2023-06-018:44 Twitter official app learned a lot about these 3rd party clients, also they didn't think their default experience should be alienating to most users
By dmonitor 2023-06-0116:00 twitter experience is a lot simpler. at the end of the day, twitter power users just need to tweet. reddit power users are moderating a forum.
This is what everybody thinks, until they grow large enough to care about the amount of money they’re burning and get tired of it. Then they try to not lose so much money, and their loyal users turn out not to be so loyal.
All reddit is doing is storing text and serving it to people.
This not expensive or a hard problem. You grab a bunch of servers, you set them up properly, and then you write your app properly.
No resume-driven bullshit; no hype-driven bullshit; no “we need to be galaxy scale now” bullshit. No email notifications, besides basic “thanks for registering, here is your login” and “here’s a password reset link.” No cloud-based bullshit. Don’t use fucking python. Use a real systems language to eek out as much performance as you can from the hardware. Actually understand databases and how your specific databases work. Use Postgres unless you have a very good reason not to.
Just a few thousand dollars a month, and a brief reprieve from short-term mania to actually think, and you too can literally serve 1 billion pages a day.
Why does everyone run into problems with this? Because they have personal hang-ups and delude themselves (or simply don’t care). This path has been tread numerous times before. The mistakes have been made thousands of times. The people who made those mistakes are available to help you out (for the right price, or if you’re good enough company).
I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material.
Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem.
By jodrellblank 2023-06-0216:41 "I could build a Reddit clone in a weekend" says person who hasn't taken over from Reddit. "Cost a few thousand a month, it's not hard" they continued, turning down an easy shot at Reddit's $10Bn valuation with admirable restraint. "It's just self delusion" they said, describing "numerous" failed attempts and "thousands and thousands" of previous mistakes they have convinced themselves they wouldn't fall into should they try, which they carefully avoid having to by dismissing it as "not interesting".
"Take my word for it, I'm just superior" the comment, which would be as fitting on r/SneerClub today SlashDot 15 years ago or Usenet 30 years ago as a dismissive geek putdown-cum-status grab, could have been summarised as.
> I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material.
> Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem.
Exactly, tech is full of this weird hubris that everything has to be super complicated and over-engineered.
Heck, while you exclaim disdain for Python, I've seen large web services run on Django and a few servers behind load balancers with very few problems.
By Karrot_Kream 2023-06-016:502 reply Care to show some proof? Create random data, store it somewhere, make sure it's about the size of Reddit. Off-the-cuff let's estimate that read traffic is 100x more than write traffic. Create some load generators that generate this synthetic read and write traffic. The load should follow a Zipf distribution of topics. Make sure it can handle huge traffic surges for events or abuse attacks. Show us your read and write performance. Do a small writeup on the architecture you ended up on, the number and types of servers you allocate, etc. You shouldn't be stopping at an order of magnitude short as scaling challenges change as the magnitude of scale changes.
Unlike Reddit, you'll have the benefit of the hindsight of 2023 instead of managing 20 years of tech debt.
Instagram has used python and django at scale. They have written about it in their engineering blog[0]. Not sure what their current stack is.
They did resort to all kinds of tricks. But your overal point still stands. The performance of python is lacking memory and it's embarrassingly slow. I hope python4 will have scripted for developing and compiled for production, like Dart. And a great compiler like Rust.
[0]https://instagram-engineering.com/static-analysis-at-scale-a...
By Karrot_Kream 2023-06-017:541 reply My question isn't about Python. It's about Reddit being trivial to recreate. I work on an API team at a Big Tech company and, funny enough, a lot of our legacy is in Python and we've scaled it using lots of pretty gross tricks. We may or may not be Instagram (:
The keyword here of course is "at scale". At what scale? Any commenter that believes what was written upthread should create a system and demonstrate that it can scale to Reddit levels.
By raverbashing 2023-06-018:56 They also think what Reddit does is "only serve large amounts of text" oh where should I start with how wrong this is
I'm sure not even HN "does only that" and even that it does with a lot of help from caching, etc
By RadiozRadioz 2023-06-0223:47 python4? Is that coming?
No... not again... I can't.
By Maxion 2023-06-018:36 > Care to show some proof?
I said large, not huge :P
I'm afraid I don't want to dox myself so I can't post publicly stuff from my employer. And I don't really have time to do what ask and write it up in my free time.
I doubt something the size of reddit would run properly on Python, but I think both mine and the commenter I replied to had the point that most sites on the internet WOULD run fine without all the bloatware and overengineering complexity. Very very few sites have the traffic that reddit does. Most websites belong to the long tail, and for those almost any tech stack would work - so why choose a needlessly complex one?
By habi 2023-06-016:45 > I hope to see Apollo go down this route.
Make it work with https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy would be one idea. I have absolutely no clue how hard this would be though.
By HDThoreaun 2023-05-3122:22 This is sort of just the cycle of social media though. Facebook has the same stigma, it's unavoidable as the first wave ages.
This Tapatalk by chance? I only remember it because it would sign your posts with a little ad.
By gaudat 2023-05-3122:52 Nope, the forums are not in English. The new forum's app/favicon is a yellow smiley face.
I thought Tapatalk is more like a generic mobile client addon to forum wares than being a forum itself. I remember that nagging banner when I was on XDA years ago...
By renewiltord 2023-05-3122:34 That was the one that I thought of too. I didn't understand why every Invision forum would pop that up as the client to use. Seemed like they were giving away the keys to the castle for free. Crazy.
By pokerface_86 2023-06-0121:16 browsing any major, big subreddit will reveal that it’s users are no better than the average facebook, twitter, or tiktok user. have you looked at /r/all or /r/popular in the past… 3-4 years? it’s all garbage. i think the reality is that an extremely small percentage of people bother setting up a real home page, unsubbing from all the default subreddits, and having a tailored experience more akin to forums is just not what people want anymore- they want a black box “algorithm” to push rage bait and ads at them.
By ymolodtsov 2023-06-018:22 Unfortunately, the value of Reddit is in all the existing communities and the content. It'd be hard to move it, and while this might be a big news on Hacker News, most Reddit users probably have never heard about alternative clients.
Most forum have gone into demise, unless they focus on some very small niche (so they're small already). People prefer apps, otherwise they forget about things unless they're enormous.
By lost_tourist 2023-06-014:19 I would definitely 100% join Apollit if that happened. but only if they allowed 3rd party clients.
Soon another 3rd party client will be made that hammers the new site. That gets blocked and the circle goes on
By gaudat 2023-05-3123:00 You get it. Or unless you outdo the 3rd party ones in making a good client.
Nothing online is forever unless you attact the data hoarders.
By gogopuppygogo 2023-06-012:091 reply Reddit initially monetized using Adzerk. Apollo should do exactly what you are pitching and just use the same engine to sell ads.
By uw_rob 2023-06-0112:27 My understanding is that Apollo isn't allowed to show ads based on reddit's new TOS. The only monetization strategy open to Apollo is a premium subscription.
By gaudat 2023-05-3123:37 Send me a PM and I will give you a beer #hoho#
By m3kw9 2023-05-3123:26 Back then you didn’t have to moderate much, now it’s a major moat for Reddit
By gaudat 2023-06-014:28 #good#
By pabs3 2023-06-012:42 Which forums is this story about? Are they public?
By ekanes 2023-06-010:54 Apollo. Let's go.
By holahola1234 2023-06-015:02 Mmm. Sound like LIHKG
By m-p-3 2023-05-3123:20 It is (or was) a kind of proprietary addon that forum admins could install which would act as an API that let a the Tapatalk client interacts with the server. It mostly showed up at a time when web forums weren't responsive or a mobile UI and phones weren't as powerful as today and struggled to render complex webpages.
Christian (Apollo’s author, the Reddit app in question) isn’t a paragon of virtue either.
The app has been regularly nagging existing paid users, who paid to remove ads in the app, about “amazing” deals to “upgrade” to a monthly subscription to the app to get some virtual stickers and other silly things of dubious value over and over. People complain about it every time they come up on the Apollo subreddit, directly mention the app’s author, who has yet to ever respond on this matter.
I think Reddit is being greedy, but I’m only sad if Apollo goes away because the Reddit client is so shitty; not because I love Apollo.
By monocularvision 2023-06-015:041 reply Oh please. I paid for ad-free Apollo a long time ago and the prompts to upgrade to the subscription client are extremely rare and not obtrusive.
By ornornor 2023-06-015:09 That's the thing with opinions: they're personal.
I get nags to upgrade to something I couldn't care less about, in an app I paid to avoid these ads and nags, every time I open the app (i.e. multiple times per day) on "promo" days (i.e. any US holiday)
These nags have also been disingenuous, because the price will usually go up on "promo" days so that Apollo advertises a "special deal" that is basically the price it's always been before. It's advertised with a full-screen popup upon opening the app (or while using the app)
If it was no big deal and nobody minded, there wouldn't be a slew of posts complaining about it every time, and the app's author wouldn't consistently ignore these posts and comments as he has done every time while always answering praise and positive comments in the same threads and subreddits.
Selling me something to remove all ads and then showing me your own ads anyway is dishonest. Either mention this at the time of payment, or make it opt-in like virtually every other company I deal with (aka "do you want our marketing material?")
By kkarakk 2023-06-015:01 This is everyone on the apple ecosystem now - they all want you to subscribe to their app
I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase.
Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM clients.
Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be developing its own first-party language model, and any other model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay these much higher rates.
Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are losing.
If you want training data for an LLM and are actively talking to some data providers, you'd just ask for a dump, instead of making a billion small requests.
(You'd make the billion small requests, if you are doing this on the sly.)
By 58x14 2023-06-030:01 You’re right, but I think it’s also pretty clear that
A) there is demand for functionality that depends on semi-real-time data, e.g. a prompt like “explain {recent_trending_topic} to me and describe its evolution” where the return could be useful in various contexts;
B) the degradation of search experience and the explosion of chat interfaces seem to indicate “the future of search is chat” and the number of Google searches prefixed or suffixed with “Reddit” make it obvious that LLM-powered chat models with search functionality will want to query Reddit extensively, and in the example prompt above, the tree of queries generated to fulfill a single prompt could be sizeable;
C) improvements to fine-tuning pipelines make it more and more feasible to use real-time data in the context of LLMs, such as a “trending summary” function that could cache many potentially related queries from Reddit, Twitter, etc and use them to fine-tune a model which would serve a response to my example prompt
By fennecfoxy 2023-06-0115:231 reply Eh can still just automate creating a bunch of accounts and do it manually. Use one of the many captcha completion services where you pay for people to complete captchas for you. ML models can already pretty much do them anyway.
Then rotate between accounts and put a random time between requests. Restrict certain accounts to browse within certain hours/timezones. Load pages as usual and just scrape data from the page rather than via api.
However, I believe in a company's right to charge whatever they want for their services. But I also believe in the right for people to choose not to use that service and for freer alternatives to spring up.
Just like Tumblr, Reddit seem intent on killing themselves, although these days I'm not so sure. When Elon took over Twitter everyone was saying that all the users would leave and it would die. This is not the case, human nature means that people seek familiarity and will cling on, hmm.
By eru 2023-06-058:20 > Just like Tumblr, Reddit seem intent on killing themselves, although these days I'm not so sure. When Elon took over Twitter everyone was saying that all the users would leave and it would die. This is not the case, human nature means that people seek familiarity and will cling on, hmm.
Wouldn't network effects be the obvious null hypothesis, before we start speculating about human nature?
Right that'd be the case now but previously you could just make a billion small requests for free.
Or at least you could try.
But that still makes the original commenters argument moot:
> Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, [...]
That speculation is not how things have been or were.
By fluidcruft 2023-06-0111:051 reply I think most people who wanted large datasets got their data via pushshift. Pushshift was basically a guy who started out doing small things got so frustrated with the API that he eventually grew to maintaining large mirrors of Reddit content on Google cloud that people could access and query. I don't know why anyone doing research would have used reddit's API instead of using pushshift.
Pushshift has been shutdown by reddit earlier this year, so probably they are getting hammered by LLM folks trying to get the data now since they killed pushshift without understanding how it fit into the universe.
Reddit is completely stupid if they think people are going to pay for "enterprise API" access... pushshift existed because the API was trash and the only real option is to dump the entire dataset into something usable. The reason reddit's data was used so much is because there was an SQL API via pushshift and you could also download archives of the entire dataset at one go.
LLMs have nothing to do with it. Someone skilled enough and rich enough to develop and train an LLM is absolutely capable of reverse-engineering your private API or scraping your web UI and defeating whatever protections you have.
By throw_nbvc1234 2023-05-3123:391 reply And open yourself to potential lawsuits. You can fork any public repo in github too, don't need any fancy resverse-engineering or web scraping. But if you use the content illegally then what's the point.
By dvngnt_ 2023-05-3123:49 i think you can only scrape public information, so if everything is behind a login screen then that might cause issues
By lost_tourist 2023-06-014:38 lol you can't get in trouble for datascraping or figuring out ways around their anti scraping measures. Good luck enforcing any user agreements the bot has to click through. If they don't want it scraped then they have to not put it on a public facing webpage.
By numpad0 2023-06-012:39 I heard researchers on public funding can’t violate ToS without invalidating their current and future employment, and therefore cannot engage in social media researches without free API…
By moneywoes 2023-06-012:37 Managing all those LTE proxies is far from cheap
By babuloseo 2023-06-013:16 dont tell this to youtube
By quartz 2023-05-3122:52 Yes it's this. This has nothing to do with 3rd party app operation and everything to do with generally closing the gate to the data garden.
The value of reddit's content to non-reddit entities is rapidly increasing as its monetizable use shifts from a set of signals on which to build first-party ad targeting (which they never really figured out) to generally useful llm training data.
Archive.org was knocked offline the other day due to some AI startup scraping it to death. It’s not a good thing.
By Kon-Peki 2023-06-012:55 By piperswe 2023-06-014:13 True - and their lack of rate limiting ended up letting someone overwhelm their servers, knocking them offline.
By edgyquant 2023-06-015:23 They put out a blog asking people not to scrape afterwards. A simple google will be much fast than asking for sources.
Archive.org is a non-profit without the capacity to serve that many requests. An excellent resource for people to use carefully, but not a treasure trove for bots to scrape down to the last bit.
By notpushkin 2023-06-0111:51 Would be cool if they introduce some reasonably priced access for mass scrapers. Should make some nice income in addition to donations, and a valuable service to community.
By notacoward 2023-05-3122:04 That would be worse.
This is very obviously what's going on.
The web is in the process of rapidly filling up with AI regurgitated garbage, eventually there's going to be a handful of sites with real usable content on them left, reddit being one of the biggest.
By xtracto 2023-06-024:26 >The web is in the process of rapidly filling up with AI regurgitated garbage
This is already the case. See the oceans of crap SEO optimized "food recipe sites". It's unbearable.
So sad that, BBC back in 199ps and 2000s, there were so many random sites to visit with interesting things. Search engines were of actual use.
Now, it's basically facebook, reddit, pinterest, instagram, stackoverflow , and a couple of counted others, depending on what you like. And EVERYTHING is monetized.
The WWW of today is terrible.
Now
By Macha 2023-06-0212:34 I don't think the LLM boom caused Twitter's first API lockdown in 2012, nor do I really think it's anything to do with the more recent final nail which seems much more in tune with Elon's twitter trying to increase ARPU/engagement while also dealing with a 90% reduction in headcount.
By hackernewds 2023-06-0110:391 reply ah that explains why Twitter led the pack making their APIs insanely expensive. there is value in the data and the LLM companies will be willing to fork it. a whole new business model and monetization of mass data not predicated on ads or user privacy. what could go wrong?
Everyone saying their pricing is absurd had better get ready for the new wave of API pricing.
Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze" where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half the customer base.
Twitter was one of the first to give access to cheap mass data, and now they're one of the first to charge through the nose for that. The move is going to be that if you're not enterprise level you're not getting this data anymore, and I doubt it stops with reddit.
By the_snooze 2023-05-3121:501 reply >I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
In economics they call this rent seeking[1]
> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society.
You can see Reddit as a landlord, owning the land (or website) that the value grows on. They don't contribute value themselves, instead they make money by charging rent to everyone who wishes to grow value on their land.
> by charging rent to everyone who wishes to grow value on their land.
That goes beyond rent-seeking into feudalism.
Rent seeking is running an application as a service that could just be a tool you pay once for, and instead have to pay for monthly. Charging people rent for access to a commons in which they provide all of the value is digital serfdom.
By lotsofpulp 2023-06-010:314 reply The business’s servers, bandwidth, and employees are “commons” now?
By stavrianos 2023-06-011:163 reply We could fight about the actual value of the CPU, HDD, network, etc is. Not literally zero. The manpower to keep it running is a stronger argument, but I still think it's missing the point. The real value is the community generated content, and yeah, that's a commons.
Subtract the fact that at least the serfs got to keep some of the net product of their labor while Reddit users get less than nothing and I think it all evens out.
> while Reddit users get less than nothing
those poor bastards, all chained to their computers, joylessly creating content for their overlords.
By vitiral 2023-06-0112:20 That's actually pretty descriptive.
By lotsofpulp 2023-06-012:381 reply Reddit users get less than nothing? Then why were they using Reddit’s computers in the first place?
By hinkley 2023-06-0118:53 From the owners. Everything they get is from the other users, and the moderators.
Unless you enjoy ads. I mean occasionally they are funny.
By lost_tourist 2023-06-014:23 that value means nothing to the owners if they aren't making a profit. Nothing in life is free except parents' love.
By MichaelZuo 2023-06-011:321 reply > The real value is the community generated content, and yeah, that's a commons.
According to which court or government?
I'm not familiar with every country, but I don't think a single G20 country or the UN has spelled out anything like that.
By stavrianos 2023-06-011:511 reply I was absolutely not using the term in a legal sense. Is "commons" even a legal term? I suppose I should have said "should be a commons" - as in, a publicly generated and maintained 'good thing' (susceptible to tragedy).
By MichaelZuo 2023-06-012:181 reply Okay, it's certainly an interesting idea to speculate about, maybe some country will recognize it in the future. Though it seems unlikely, unless most of the world agreed, considering WIPO and various other treaties which have been ratified.
How is this relevant to the present issue regarding reddit?
By stavrianos 2023-06-012:371 reply In regards to the idea of reddit rent-seeking - the primary value of reddit is not something they create, it's something they _host_. It could be anywhere, but by dint of network effects, it happens to be there. Reddit is not valuable because it owns a serverfarm, or even because it employs people to maintain the serverfarm. It's valuable because it controls a cultural meetingpoint.
Aggressive control of the meetingpoint (which it is able to do), is rent-seeking because reddit controls _access_ to the value, but does not create the value. You were making a point that reddit doesn't provide literally nothing. That's true, but it's a red herring. Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.
edit: I'm sorry, you were not making that point. I was responding to that point.
By lotsofpulp 2023-06-012:392 reply > Reddit is not valuable because it owns a serverfarm, or even because it employs people to maintain the serverfarm. It's valuable because it controls a cultural meetingpoint.
How did it come to control a cultural meeting point? Was it because they owned a server farm and employed people to create a website people wanted to use at the right time and the right place?
> Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.
This will be easily proven by people moving from Reddit to an alternative. Or disproven by not moving to an alternative.
By stavrianos 2023-06-012:591 reply > This will be easily proven by people moving from Reddit to an alternative. Or disproven by not moving to an alternative.
This ignores the nature of network effects. The value of the thing is precisely that other people are using it. That's not a value that's created by reddit, it's a value that's _exploited_ by reddit.
"Just go somewhere else" requires either a phenomenal degree of coordination, OR to just bite the bullet that not everyone will move to the same place at the same time, which fragments the community (which was, again, the bulk of the value in the first place).
The difficulty of network effects is that, as the group gets larger, the value goes up faster than linear AND the cost of coordinating a migration ALSO goes up faster than linear. A gathering that's 1/10th the size, isn't worth 1/10th as much. It's _significantly_ weaker. And migrating en-mass is an n^2 coordination problem. It's closer to a hostage situation than it is to a value-add.
> How did it come to control a cultural meeting point? Was it because they owned a server farm and employed people to create a website people wanted to use at the right time and the right place?
Kinda don't care? Maybe they worked hard for it, even. Does that justify indefinite control of an important resource? Legally probably, but you can tell I think it shouldn't.
> Kinda don't care? Maybe they worked hard for it, even
So you could've just lead with the fact that you don't care about private property and have an anti-social outlook on life. It was spelled out to you why there's value in Reddit. You say the commons are the important thing.
If I go to your living room with 3 friends and we start talking about life and philosophy, you'll ask me to leave or pay rent. But I will tell you no, you just host the place where cultural discussion is happening, I don't care if you worked hard to get your home, I'll just be there and it's not up to you to control that home forever. I could've gone into any home, the value is in my discussion, so you should be happy I'm having it there and allow me to have it for free, since there's no value in your home and you shouldn't even own it for the future.
By jodrellblank 2023-06-0215:24 And then they'd call the police and get you kicked out.
If instead you'd been invited in - "come along, bring your club members, you don't need to pay for your own hall anymore, use my house, free signup, moderate your own room, use it without paying, bring your friends" and then when your old meeting place had shutdown and been abandoned and all your leaflets and documentation and inertia had settled on the new location, then stavrianos turned on you and said "now you're all used to coming here, I need to pay off my investors who have been funding this all along, that'll be $10Bn valuation please - and don't bring your friends unless they can pay a few million a month. Or you could just leave, after I've borrowed a lot of money and arranged things to make it so you can't easily do that".
By stavrianos 2023-06-0112:48 Compare to trademark genericization, where a brand name becomes the word for a whole product category, and loses trademark protection because our use of the word is more important than their use of the brand. That's not something that happens instantly, there are thresholds for it. But it's also not something that never happens at all. Maybe you think that's bad, but I certainly don't. There's a whole lot of room between that, and abolishing private property altogether.
Your last example conflates the idea of private property and personal property.
By vasco 2023-06-018:47 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_property
> Private property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy, with socialist perspectives making a hard distinction between the two. As a legal concept, private property is defined and enforced by a country's political system.
> The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy
That is a political statement, whereas what I described is a practical situation of life. Do you support the viewpoint that I replied to that it doesn't matter if someone owns something, even if they worked hard for it, that you should be able to come in and takeover because of discourse that happens there? If so we can disagree on that, there's no need to make it a wider political statement.
By lmm 2023-06-013:36 Funnily enough the Reddit community originally started on Digg and moved there after Digg shot themselves in the foot in a similar way to what Reddit is currently doing. So while Reddit now is a lot bigger and more entrenched than Digg then, I wouldn't be at all surprised if history repeated.
The land the nobility or the roman catholic church owned were the 'commons' then.
A server with nothing on it is like a field of weeds. It's just taking up space.
By jodrellblank 2023-06-0215:34 A field of weeds is home to insects, pollinators, small wildlife, CO2 removing/oxygen producing plants, it can be a nice place to look at, to make a path and walk through, weeds can be beneficial[1] to the soil, or edible or medicinal[2].
A server with nothing on it is worse than taking up space, it's an investment of energy and CO2 release to make it and ship it around the world, and if it's powered on then it's taking electricity probably from fossil fuels and turning it into waste heat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_weed
[2] https://gardenerspath.com/plants/herbs/edible-medicinal-weed...
By lotsofpulp 2023-06-012:371 reply I agree on land being the “commons”.
If a server with nothing on it is just taking up space, then the users will have no problem spinning their own up and replacing Reddit or whatever.
By MagnumOpus 2023-06-019:39 That's the point, the server is commodity, hacker news or voat or dozens of others can provide the same platform.
The community and the eyeballs are what is valuable, and Reddit holds them captive not due to any incremental value they provide, but due to network effects. Lots of people or companies would immediately replace Reddit if the quality of the server or UX or UI was what mattered -- but cannot because the audience is captive.
Killing the apps represents a unique "digg moment" of pissing off users enough to bother migrating.
By johnnyanmac 2023-06-069:20 For the sake of this metaphor, all of that would be equivalent to the park, custodians, and park rangers. The latter two are paid by the government (the "owners"), but few people would argue a park as a "commons". So, maybe?
main difference ofc is that few pay for a private server, despite contributing to it. Parks are paid for by taxes, and sometimes voted upon by citizens to allocate budgets for. But a park with no visitors is similar to a forum with no visitors.
By zeroonetwothree 2023-06-014:291 reply Charging people for a valuable service is the opposite of rent seeking.
By xigoi 2023-06-018:00 The service itself isn't valuable, the content is.
By philistine 2023-05-3122:505 reply I don't disagree that it's one point of view, but I hardly believe both examples do not have a simpler explanation: both companies no longer want APIs for third-party clients.
Elon wanted to turn it completely off and was probably convinced to ban the accounts of all the third-party clients and to try and harass the world's many weather services to pay 42,000$ a month.
Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo. He's always been fairly transparent about his money flow, so it's exceedingly easy for Reddit to price him out and put the fear of god into any developer interested in a Reddit client.
By afterburner 2023-05-3122:591 reply > Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo.
Do you mean at least one? Because there are many "credible" ones, unless I misunderstand what you mean by credible.
By this definition, there's still multiple credible reddit clients - relay, baconreader, rif.
By SturgeonsLaw 2023-06-013:20 I'm surprised how infrequently I see Relay mentioned considering how slick it is
By afterburner 2023-06-016:03 Redreader is good. I have no idea how successful it is.
By spurgu 2023-06-013:19 Boost also.
By delta_p_delta_x 2023-06-012:48 > Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo
Tell me you only use iOS without telling me you only use iOS...
By JustSomeNobody 2023-06-012:212 reply > Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo.
Ooof. I mean, if you're only an iOS user, maybe?
On iOS Apollo and Narwhal were both good options last I tried them. Android has a lot more going on. All of Infinity, Joey, Sync (my choice), RiF, Boost and Now are pretty solid. Pretty reductive indeed to say Apollo is the only serious contenter...
Here's the difference. Apollo has arguably more user value than Reddit itself. I wish Apollo worked as a client for HN, for example. It could easily be plugged into any similar platform and still be one of the best mobile apps ever built.
The others are just a-dime-a-dozen Reddit clients.
By folkrav 2023-06-0214:46 I've used Apollo when I was on iOS. It's indeed great.
But holy hell, you must have spent exactly 0 time with Android clients, or just don't enjoy Android apps in general, cause I'd easily put Sync and Boost on equal footing as Apollo. Infinity is extremely solid as well.
Speak for yourself. I would pay for RiF to add HN support, while I couldn't care less about other clients, including Apollo.
By surgical_fire 2023-06-0110:32 RiF is probably the only reason I used Reddit for as long as I did. Excellent interface, really solid client. I even paid the premium just to show my appreciation.
My hatred for Reddit the platform only grew as time passed, to a point where I mostly dropped the site from my browsing habits a couple of years ago. I hope the recent changes bring an end to Reddit, the world will be better without it.
But my hatred for Reddit does not extend to RiF, much to the opposite. I hope whatever Reddit replacement spawns in the future has a RiF for it.
Understandable, given you’re probably on Android.
I took another look at RIF just in case my memory of it was out of date and the difference in quality between it and Apollo is massive. I’m doubling down on my original comment: Apollo is a truly special app and RIF (and likely others) are very generic clients.
I am an Android user so I don't know Apollo but I too am a huge RIF fan -- it's the only way I consume Reddit. I also agree with GP statement, I wish I could use the RIF app as a HN reader.
What makes Apollo a "truly special app?" in your opinion?
The TL;DR is that it's so good, it increased my time on Reddit by 10x or more versus using the website. I had to delete it because it was such a joy to use, it's all I wanted to spend my free time on.
More specifically, just a few things: 1) lovely UI design with proper adherence to iOS human interface guidelines, 2) useful customization, 3) flawless performance throughout, 4) gesture support which translates into being able to sift through a lot of content and conversations, 5) complex native (performant!) in-app support for many media types hosted on all types of 3rd party sites, 6) and just all around thoughtful and thorough support for the entire Reddit platform and its features.
All of this executed extremely well by just one person. Frankly, an inspiration and should be championed here.
Not to dunk on Apollo since it is excellent on iOS, but Boost on Android has all those things. It also has a tablet UI, moderator support, and a "gallery" masonry view that is a joy to use. Last I checked, Apollo has neither an iPad UI nor a masonry post view.
(I have also deleted Boost many times to control my usage.)
By pb7 2023-06-0414:32 AFAIK, Apollo also has extensive moderator support (I'm not a mod so I can't speak to it but fairly confident it exists) but yeah, no iPad support which really sucks.
I took a look at Boost and it's really nice! Looks extremely similar to Apollo to the point that I think they may have just duplicated the Apollo app on Android and this is not a bad thing at all. I was considering doing the same for HN.
And there's even Narwhal on iOS that's totally viable and fine. That's insane hyperbole.
By vczf 2023-06-0222:18 I stopped using narwhal because it doesn't have good "drafts" support. At the time, I was writing a lot of thoughtful, heavily revised comments and posts.
By vimy 2023-05-3123:12 Yeah, this is the equivalent of a freelancer quoting an absurd price for a job they don’t want.
By jethro_tell 2023-06-014:191 reply This kinda assumes that people won't leave in mass. Digg migration took like 60 days.
I think especially in a forum where people tend to be semi anon. This isn't staking out a facebook name and keeping up with highschool friends. I know a few user names by sight on reddit but I really don't care if I hear from them again and I don't expect they care about me.
Makes leaving to anywhere that can put together a decent UGC interface pretty simple. It just feels like other than content, which reddit doesn't actually post, there's not much in the way of network affect.
By _fat_santa 2023-06-0112:511 reply I feel like Reddit sees their userbase as two types of users: casual users that browse /r/pics or something like that on the official app / web and power users that are subbed to niche subreddits, use 3rd party apps and likely still use the old.* subdomain.
For the longest time Reddit was predominantly the latter group of power users but in recent years Reddit has had a mass influx of the former casual group of users. I think the bet that Reddit is making is that the latter group is much smaller than the former and cutting off API access won't make a significant difference. But if they are wrong, this could well be the end of Reddit, going just like Digg went. It will likely still exist, but as a shell of it's former self.
By OGWhales 2023-06-0114:26 I wonder how pissing off the power users, which produce most of the content, is going to turn out. There is a similar issue with moderators, who heavily rely on third party tools to moderate their subs.
I can’t imagine this killing reddit, not at all, but I think the power users and moderators are important to what makes reddit reddit and that without them the quality will decline quite a lot.
By zouhair 2023-06-010:20 I don't use LH on mobile because there is no decent app. When Reddit 3rd party apps stop working I'll just stop using Reddit on mobile. Also on Desktop, only old reddit makes it worth my time. The moment old reddit is turned off Reddit is over for me.
Good. It's about time for more people to move on to better platforms. Twitter is a cesspool, and Reddit has some good communities that will be better served from a platform that's not ruled by a greedy corporation that couldn't care less about its users.
Seems like a golden moment to astroturf in a successor with both reddit and twitter sabotaging themselves?
Why astroturf? I mean, social media networks are naturally cyclical; the only thing they do is connect users, all the content comes from the users themselves, so the only way they can compete is by being free and not having figured out an annoying business model yet. Once they have to start making a profit, they are done for. Reddit and Twitter are about to hit/have hit that point. No astroturf here, plant some all-natural grass seed.
By numpad0 2023-06-012:36 Biasing parent comment with an /s, maybe meant to say “create huge traffic of anime porn and burn down bank as well as hosting accounts of the poor operator”? That kind of happened with Mastodon and is happening on Misskey. :mailus_banknotes_areallscams:
By moffkalast 2023-06-0110:091 reply > Tildes is currently in invite-only alpha, and you must be invited to be able to register.
Copying the Google+ model, nice. We all saw how very well that went.
By bananamerica 2023-06-0423:37 You're being absurd.
Tildes is so profoundly unlike Google+ in so many levels I can only assume you never even opened their website.
By bananamerica 2023-06-0423:38 I don't have any invites left, but you can get one easily on /r/tildes.
Fair enough. I do enjoy a daily dose of meme though and I’d prefer that that didn’t come from this website. It feels like this is the one place I can go to to find (usually) intelligent conversation about a wide range of topics.
By pokerface_86 2023-06-0121:43 funny enough that daily dose of meme feels like it has infected the entirety of reddit, at least on any sub with more than 100k subs that doesn’t have extremely strict moderation. a few months ago i left any and all subreddits that allowed image/meme posting and my reddit experience became a lot better.
By ed25519FUUU 2023-06-010:591 reply Why is Twitter a cesspool? I interact mainly with WFH tech people who garden and I think it’s absolutely wonderful. There’s no reason to follow or interact with anyone who is negative.
By lmm 2023-06-013:50 Most people have a range of interests, and most interests have a range of people. If you follow people you'll see stuff you don't like, and if you follow hashtags then as soon as they get popular they get hijacked by entryists. Plus the site is optimised for ragebait - that's the natural result of the emphasis on short posts and the algorithm that optimises for "engagement" - so even if you're following the right people and the right hashtags you'll still see the worst parts of them.
By fennecfoxy 2023-06-0115:17 Eh, I think this goes in line with Netflix's recent hardline changes.
Everyone references their Tweet from years ago of like "love is sharing passwords" and bitching about how Netflix has changed & become greedy.
But those people are thinking big enough; Netflix has changed this way because back then, they didn't really have any competition in the space. And now _everyone_ has to have their own fucking streaming platform, so of course Netflix is gonna change policy.
I'm not defending Netflix here, but what I am saying is that people are doing the shortsighted animal thing and bitching about Netflix. Really they should be bitching about all streaming companies and requesting that our democratic governments enact policies that force companies and corporations to be consumer friendly. All of them. Tax the rich. All of them.
By rsynnott 2023-06-0110:26 The thing is, though, that the value of these APIs is largely driven by the userbase, and the most valuable users tend to use third-party clients.
Now, I'm not surprised to see _Twitter_ doing this, because it's just one of a laundry-list of ideas that Naughty Old Mr Car has to make Twitter worse; it really barely registers. But _Reddit_, I would have thought, would be a lot more conservative in the "massive dangerous change" department, particularly after what happened to Digg (and more generally the history of internet forums). I'd expect that there's a huge danger for them here that the big third party apps will simply endorse a Reddit clone.
By SergeAx 2023-06-016:29 But it doesn't make a lot of sense: people will just start to scrape sites again. APIs was there to make the process less painful for servers and control who scraping what and how fast.
If you go into that thread there are people begging Selig to charge them 4x what Apollo Ultra costs. And they're begging him to charge it to everyone all the time.
This can't just be laid on the feet of faceless bean counters or old men in the executive suite.
40% of reddit posts are marked NSFW. All those won't be able to be accessed from the API.
And those NSFW posts are far from just porn. It's frequently news (especially related to war), the "vice" subreddits (cigars, guns), mental health subreddits, ect.
Also, 4x of Apollo Ultra is probably not enough. After the Appstore takes its cut and the dev pays himself, you're not left with enough money to pay for the API access of the power users you're now inevitably left with. Powerusers, who, again, can't access 40% of posts on your app.
By saltminer 2023-06-114:07 > And those NSFW posts are far from just porn. It's frequently news (especially related to war), the "vice" subreddits (cigars, guns), mental health subreddits, ect.
And for the longest time, many subs based their flairs around the NSFW tag combined with some CSS hacks, especially for subs based around TV shows wanting to add spoiler warnings. Some subs never bothered to update to the new system and still use this.
By OGWhales 2023-06-0114:30 I’m not sure how this will be handled, considering there is only one kind of NSFW tag, but the reddit admins said that only sexually explicit content will be inaccessible from the API.
By brookst 2023-05-3123:47 Good point. We must lay this at the feet of people who want the product and are willing to pay for it.
By Shekelphile 2023-06-016:29 [flagged]
By NovaDudely 2023-06-013:14 A slight various on Microsoft's EEE. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Embrace the users.
Extend the functions to get them locked in.
Exploit them for everything you can get!
or maybe we are past the excess of a 0% interest rate environment and people are now expected to pay for shit.
By NovaDudely 2023-06-013:331 reply That sounds like a reasonable factor on all of this.
By vczf 2023-06-0222:27 Lock API access for apps behind reddit gold and now your power users are happy. You wouldn't even need to hold their hand when they set it up. I'd be willing to pay for reddit to some degree.
Because this isn't what they did, I suspect third-party apps are just collateral damage in a policy aimed at gating access to reddit content: from LLM developers, AI researchers, and anybody who can derive value from it.
By hnick 2023-06-012:37 I thought Google Maps was the first? There was a big hoo-ha about that a while ago.
By PestoDiRucola 2023-06-0110:26 Good thing web scraping is a thing.
If you make more money it's hardly BS. There are supply and demand graphs and you can reasonably calculate how many customers you lose/gain from a price increase/decrease.
By 9991 2023-05-3122:20 reddit's users are creating the content for the other users, so a drop in users means less or worse content. Doubt you could model easily with a demand chart.
By jeffalyanak 2023-05-3122:091 reply It can be rational and still be BS.
By warkdarrior 2023-05-3122:141 reply It's only BS because you have to pay more.
By jeffalyanak 2023-06-019:28 Yes, exactly. It's only BS because you have to pay more, I don't think they made any other changes.
Those graphs rely on knowing the price elasticity of demand, which is easy to get for commodities like wheat and next to impossible to get for differentiated products, at least without testing various prices on statistically identical cohorts, which is technically difficult and a PR nightmare.
The short run elasticity might also be very different from the longer run elasticity.
Eg consumer put up with the increased price for a while, but will switch away over time.
By brookst 2023-06-012:58 Indeed, and then second order effects where elasticity might change as the platform gains or loses users.
