this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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It's their own fault. They didn't have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn't have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.
They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.
I'm really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants
There's this toxic idea in the business world, that in order to be successful you can't just make money and be profitable, but your profits have to keep increasing year after year. This kind of runaway, cancerous growth is poison to the country and the world.
The founders want to be billionaires, as if being a multimillionaire would not be enough.
This is like if a Grocery chain said that they need to stop selling Lemons to little girls because the lemonade stands were profitable and they aren't. The scale of the two businesses is not the same... none of these apps have millions of dollars in VC funds or thousands of employees.
But Reddit doesn't need these thousands of employees, they're already getting the brunt of the workforce for free (the mods). Like the other guy said, one hundred engineers to manage the platform, 100 customer service to help the mods/do admin and off you go, you just need a few unobtrusive ads to finance that. But that's way too open and won't turn you into a billion dollar business nor get you any love from advertisers or VCs, let alone going IPO, so we are where we are.
Agreed. What are all their employees doing? Is reddit basically an adult daycare?
they are doing things like launching Avatars, NFT's, and other ways to try and cash in for a quick buck.
As someone who's 4 weeks into new job with very unclear duties, there's definitely a point where a company loses a lot of efficiency because there's too many people who don't seem to do much for the company, even those who want to do more for the company.
On the upside its a very low stress job with very good pay and benefits, plus I'm getting to do things like leading trainings that I might not otherwise get to do at this stage of my career
and im willing to pay for API access. If Reddit started charging me a buck or two i would be ok with that. I recognize that servers are not free, and their profit has to come from somewhere.
But charging app devs $20,000,000 a year is NOT the solution.
I would have accepted it.. Not anymore. They burned this bridge.
And the Apollo dev said there were things they could have done, but the combination of 30 days notice, and the number of subscribers Apollo had who had prepaid for a year, (at a much lower price) the was no way to make that work. Plus Reddit had promised them no API changes just a few months ago.
They also could have saved money by remaining a link aggregator/discussion board instead of deciding to host media as well. Any surge in costs is their own fault.
THIS!
Here's your API passkey. If we catch your app not displaying ads, your passkey be invalidated.
Bobs your uncle, all the browser apps are now delivering your ads.
This is the big issue with growth investment or whatever the hell its called. Instead of being happy with a steady revenue, big companies have to always grow until they become completely unsustainable.
If they were worried about money, then they should have remained a link aggregation/discussion board site instead of hosting media themselves.
I've seen people saying "Lemmy can never replace reddit because the instances won't be able to afford to host video!" ...My dudes, I have never once asked my forum / social media site to host videos.