Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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But yeah keep going back to their site and watch their ads, that'll show them for sure.
Or, you could do what I do - use [https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit) with an ad blocker. That hurts them on two levels -
You want to swap the order of the text and the link there in Markdown. This:
Yields this:
[https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit)
Whereas this:
Yields this:
Old Reddit
Spez is already talking about monetizing users account histories. Just blocking the ads isn't going to stop them.
I mean, I get that Reddit isn't making money. And that during the growth phase of a dot-com, it's okay to burn money in the name of growing the userbase, but that he has to transition to making money at some point. Investors gave him money, hundreds of millions, if I recall correctly, in the expectation that he can generate a return. He's getting near the point where he has to do that. And the return they're going to expect is going to be in the neighborhood of what other dot-coms can generate from their investment.
Like, the people yelling at him for being "greedy" in that he's aiming to make Reddit generate a return at all aren't realistic. That is something that always was going to have to happen, from the day that Reddit started. If you look at the issues that the moderators are taking up with him, they're trying to come up with a way that Reddit makes money and their concerns are also met.
The problem is that some of the moves he's making to try to make a return have really negative impacts, and a number of people want something that has less of a negative impact.
If the Fediverse can support similar functionality based purely on cash donations, or based on some other model (e.g. Usenet runs on software developed by the community, but generally one has to pay a commercial Usenet provider for service to cover the costs), or a "users donate resources" like BitTorrent and provide a better experience, then that's great. But the Fediverse is also going to have to figure out how to handle the costs of hardware and software development and all that, if it wants to be a competitive alternative. There are some hard questions that may come up down the line for the Fediverse too. The long term for something the scale of Reddit cannot be Earnest paying all of the money out of his personal pocketbook to Cloudflare to handle ramping up kbin's capacity or something like that from the main Lemmy instance operators.
Right now, I haven't seen any ads on the Fediverse, and I haven't yet donated money to Earnest (though he apparently does have a "buy a coffee" tip jar and people have sent him small gifts). Which means that right now, I'm relying on the gift of resources from Earnest and some Lemmy instance operators to me. Maybe they can afford that for a small number of users. But end of the day, if many more users show up, they are going to have to find someone else to help bear the costs on an ongoing basis.
But he has so many better options. He could listen to his userbase and create a product they enjoy. Then explain his cost and ask for donations on the site (with a progres bar as wikipedia does). If you have goodwill in your userbase, you could even just ask people for money in a monthly fashion and give them some "Reddit Supporter" badge. Maybe a "Reddit Supporter" can then vote on the functionality that will be implemented in reddit.
If he'd communicate it well, he could even monetize the API fairly (let's say 1-2x the ad revenue he would get with similar traffic) or monetize it on the user side (user has to pay e.g. $10 for yearly api key).
I can say for myself I'd be more than willing to donate to reddit if they asked for it and I had the feeling they were actually trying to listen to the userbase and improve the platform.
With his current behavior he's just destroying any good-will of the userbase and therefore any direct monetization potential.
Oh, I'm not at all saying that he's handling this in an ideal way. There is a laundry list of things that I think might be better-done. I mean, the very first thing for me would be him at least having an option to let people continue using the site the way they have been with a premium subscription. Might not be worth it for some, but for others, it would, and that immediately solves his problem for a lot of users, and maybe some of the most-fervently-opposed. I'd be willing to pay something for a subscription myself, especially since they already went to the work of setting up anonymized payments during the Bitcoin fad and a scheme for premium service. I don't know if it'd be enough to make myself worthwhile to Reddit relative to what the company is going for, but I'd at least like to see their price point. Let me use a third party client as long as I have Reddit Platinum or whatever and then tell me what that costs each month.
I'm just saying that there is a substantial contingent that is really pissed off and who really does not think that he legitimately has to do something about Reddit cashflow. Like, asserting that Reddit losing money is just a lie, or saying that they just want any social media corporation to go down, that sort of thing. And, I mean, that's just kinda decoupled from the financial obligations that he's gonna be facing.
Have a citation for that? Because that sounds like a great link for an inevitable edited response to all my comment history
I'll have to find it, but multiple places he's talked about Reddit being used by companies to train their AI systems. It's painfully obvious that he's looking for both moral and immoral ways to monetize Reddit immediately. I give it 3 months before this is announced.
And don’t post anything - contribute nothing.
Makes me wonder how long old.reddit.com is gonna last. I think the deletion of that will truly cure me of the addiction I have for the website.
Could also keep using 3rd party apps, apparently all those API calls are costing them millions.
Only the accessibility focused apps will be allowed by Reddit to continue free of cost. The other 3rd party apps will shutdown at the end of this month since their API costs will be too much for them to bear.
Only the accessibility focused apps will be allowed by Reddit to continue as long as they aren't monetized. Sure, if you want to allow blind people to read Reddit because we can't figure out how to do it, go nuts. But only as long as you don't expect anything for your time and effort.
I use old.reddit on computer with ublock origin, I don't even know Reddit has ads, been visiting for 10+ years, never saw single ad, same on mobile where I use Boost + Adaway or Kiwi browser + uBlock origin, I will see how the 3rd party situation works out
I mean, I did too. But you can see why Reddit is grouchy about that. I mean, I have written a lot of content and posted it to Reddit, and maybe that has value that they can monetize. Or maybe there's some value that they can get from data-mining my activity on the server side. But they haven't been making money off my eyeballs directly, or data-mining information available on the client side, and I imagine that that's frustrating when they go crunch the numbers on their costs and revenue.