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When I look at those numbers I think “Apollo was made by 1 dude with some occasional help from another person. Reddit is throwing half its budget and 200+ bodies at its app and site, and it’s a fucking disaster.”
Different goals. The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.
I guarantee you a good chunk of that R&D money is for making ads more profitable and other monetization.
To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.
I said it before on Reddit and I will say it again here—
If Reddit has asked me for a premium subscription to use my favourite third-party app, I would have fucking paid.
Just bad business all around
I don’t know the right price point, but 1 dollar a month probably would have worked for most people. It just wasn’t enough because they probably can make more than 1 by spoon feeding you ads now.
I’d go as far as 5 dollars a month, which is more than the buck thirty they make off users right now.
It just boggles the mind.
They had the userbase. They had the community moderation. They had the power-users basically doing their job for them. They could have had a bulletproof, tied-to-world-population-growth metric - not super fast, but basically monotonically increasing. They basically could have turned it into a sustainable money printer, while not crushing user enthusiasm. Hell, they could have even done an opt- in policy for ML training datasets, either offsetting or outright paying users a commission for content that’s used as part of a training set. There were so many possibilities that didn’t involve pointing the ship at an iceberg.
Spez threw it away because he wanted the quick payout from ad revenue.
Spez threw it away because he’s a libertarian tool. He doesn’t care how he gets the payout as long as it’s not ‘collectivist’. This commie shit your’e spouting in this post would not impress daddy Elon. GTFO.
Yeah, but the Apollo dev didn’t have the huge server costs that Reddit has. I’m not defending Reddit at all, but this is just comparing apples to oranges.
So the reason reddit struggled to develop a decent app is… because of server costs?
Seriously. They still don’t have a way to increase the font size on the default app last I checked. How is such a basic feature STILL lacking?
Im a way, yeah. They clearly they made a shitty app to extract as much value from their users as possible. But my point was that Reddit has significantly higher costs than third party app developers (because they host the content), so the business model that works for third party app developers doesn’t work for them.
Looking at a third party app - made by someone who doesn’t have to bear the costs of running the site and can therefore make decent money on an ad-free experience - and a first party one which does have to recoup those expenses doesn’t really work. The financial models are just fundamentally different.
I don’t say that to defend Reddit. They’re clearly a shitty company headed by shitty people, and I’m sure they could’ve found different ways to make money. But yeah, their financial incentives for making an app are fundamentally different than those of other devs.
The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.
Spot fucking on.
Ever have a good app? Something you like using but it’s by a corporation but that’s ok, because it’s a good app and does what you want? And then they start adding more features to it, and it slows down, and it’s more annoying and it keeps offering services you don’t want, and it changes and it morphs and it becomes a shit app.
Hell I’ve watched Whisk become something I liked using to something worthless now it’s Samsung food… Switched to using CopyMeThat which actually also gets me recipes from sites that you can’t just read the recipes from, and that’s ALL it does (well recipe book/shopping cart/meal planning, which is what it’s designed for.)
I’m just sick of “How do we make more money” instead of just being an app that does what it says. Gaming is going down the same hole, sadly.
The comparison is even more apt when you remember that the official Reddit app also used to be the most popular and great 3rd-party app called AlienBlue, which was purchased from 1 guy and rebranded a decade ago.
It’s pretty clear that the reason why the official Reddit app isn’t good is because a good experience for their users isn’t their goal.
a good experience for their users isn’t their goal
They are in tension with the more pressing goal of extracting revenue. But how do you extract revenue from a site that’s mostly just “user content” + “ads” in an era when ad revenue is plummeting?
Maybe if they increase the prices on Reddit Gold?
This is one of those rare cases where what is being said is less interesting than who says it.
What: Reddit stock is junk, the IPO will fail hard, and anyone investing on it is begging to lose money. I believe that most people discussing this in Lemmy already know that, so the info isn’t new here.
Who: Forbes. Forbes’ target audience is investors; greedy vulture capitalists love it. So if Forbes says “it’ll sink!”, investors are less eager to buy stock, and that sinks the stonks even further. So what Forbes says is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I’m glad that Forbes is doing it. I want to see Reddit die.
EDIT: as other posters are correctly highlighting, I derped - the article is from a “contributor”, and it has basically no impact or visibility.
Damn - now I want Forbes shitting on the IPO!
Note that this is a “contributor” post, which is essentially their sneaky wording for editorial. It isn’t a real Forbes article and anyone that knows the Forbes website won’t pay any attention to the article.
What could have been done to increase the valuation higher and maintain goodwill with the community:
- Cut CEO pay by 90%
- Pay mods as employees, think of the GM/guide structure of early mmos where you start as a volunteer for a free sub but can work your way up
- Subscriptions to remove ads
- Push ads in API for third party apps to host your ads, remove for subscribed users
- Profit sharing from ads and subs with top content creators
Their pre order ipo is wanting and planning on like $31 to $34 a share. I’m thinking no.
$6.5B valuation (assuming a standard 20x EPS model) should imply in the neighborhood of $325M/year in revenue from a company that makes about a third of that.
Either Reddit plans on tripling its revenues in the near future or this is an unrealistic target.
Is Reddit a crypto?
Return Of
It never left, bro.
