If Reddit is asking 12000$ for 50M requests, then a regular Reddit user (344 reqs/day) would be paying around 2,5$/month, which seems more reasonable than putting the burden on the 3rd party developer.

In any case, Reddit has no interest in pivoting their business model away from ads to paid subscriptions. This is a dog and pony show they're holding prior to "making the difficult decision" to eliminate 3rd party competitors.

Which is less than I pay for premium. If more people would just, I dunno, pay for services they use regularly, Reddit wouldn't have a problem.

To give just the most recent example: They PMd everyone in Germany about their great new subreddits (Big US subs with the names translated to German), filled with bots posting successful posts and comments from those big subs, auto-translated.

Yeah, that’s a quirky anecdote when Reddit started 17 years ago, it’s a lot less quirky when you do it now.

The shitty thing here is iOS/Android devs that do find a way to pass through to cost might price themselves out of the 15% tier even when 90%+ of the money they collect (after the Apple/Google tax) is going to just be handed to Reddit. That might screw up the economics of any other IAP they have (to unlock features or what not).

They can raise prices to account for the extra 15% loss but still sucks. Apollo alone would hit Apple/Google's 15% rate limit in less than a month and even if it lost 19/20th of it's users it'd still hit it for the year given his estimates.

All the moderators are unpaid 'workers'. And their quality can be abhorrent to the extreme.

Basically reddit is the perfect example of getting people to contribute content and work for free. And when people are run off, so does your content and your moderators.

I moderate several subs, some of them rather sizable. I do it because I want a quality community, not because I want a payday, I probably average 8-10 hours a week moderating which often overlaps with my active participation in the communities. No one is forcing me to do it, I do it because I value the communities.

I similarly give many hours a week to my church, I don't roll up "yo, pay me!" because that's not the point. I show up and teach a class, my wife shows up and leads young women's, we both go and clean the building, when someone needs help and we're free we're there, it's something we care about not a means of earning income. Same goes for moderating Reddit - anyone that thinks it should be a paid gig has no business moderating.

You gave anecdotes about volunteering at non-profit, like your church. I don't attend church myself, but doing non-profit things to help a community is definitely laudable. And I think the more we all do activities like that, we'd have a better community and eventually a better country.

But there is definitely a difference between non-profit volunteering labor (where the sum of your labor is enjoyed by everyone attending), and being a subreddit moderator.

Reddit is a for-profit company, where they derive their profit from 2 different areas: people contributing their personal content, and people moderating for free the areas of a topic. And real paid moderators get real money on other platforms. Why doesn't reddit? Cause they were able to get users to "make-believe" that their subreddit was theirs.

You're there to make the admins profit. And when your subreddit no longer does that, "ownership" is transferred rather quickly. Or your mod accounts will be mass-reported and banned. Or a whole host of other issues. Earlier on, seeing banned subreddits wasn't a thing. Now, I can stumble in from a Google search and hit a banned sub. And we're talking technical subreddits, not porn or violence.

And just how long have bigger subreddits been requesting better automod tooling, and never materializes?

Reddit sucks the oxygen out of the "community" to feed its profit, and provides scraps to make people think they're getting a good deal.

We're now seeing the furtherance of this with this laughable API bill. And it's not targeted at Apollo, btw. Head over to Youtube shorts or Tiktok and witness just how many "bot reads a reddit post with top 2 comments, with unrelated minecraft video". "Scrape-add video-upload" is the big thing I would bet that reddit's trying to stop without paying a pound of flesh.

But still, I'd start looking for other platforms to move your userbase to. Just casually set up offsite operations along with your subreddit, and steer users to all non-reddit areas. (Discord, Mastodon, Twitter, even Facebook) Cause when Reddit finally goes Digg v4, it's going to be crazy.

If companies can be profitable with just subscriptions, they wouldn't need to sell ads. And yet the NYT, FT and WSJ blanket their subscribers with just as many ads as they do for non-subs.

API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. "High-profile" apps will be required to show them at risk of Reddit terminating their access, but the long tail will just ignore them.

Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data, and third parties I imagine would be pretty reluctant to dump some privacy-invading third party sdk blob in their app, especially when they don't really benefit from it.

Also, one of the attractions of third party clients is lack of ads. This'll turn users away from them.

That way reddit gets paid, you avoid having to deal with ads and the developers don't have to absorb an astronomical and unreasonable invoice for API access.

It's pretty crazy that a site like Reddit needs this to target ads effectively. You often have your interest groups already self-sorted thanks to subreddits.

Meh. Serve ads as JS chunks, measure views; if things don't tally up between api requests and ad hits, you have a word with the developer. There aren't that many Reddit apps with significant amounts of users.

However this is worse than regular ads.

Honestly, I wish those platforms(all the social media) were transparent and pay for use. When it's free the experience sucks for everyone, can you imagine if we had the tech in the telephone era to inject ads in phone calls or reduce connectivity to those who talks stuff not kosher in the current political environment.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

As a thought experiment: how big would the network have to be for you to start considering paying for access?

The Fediverse (Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, etc) is already clocking in at around ~10M users. How much do you think it would be a "reasonable" amount for a service provider to charge for an account?

I get what you're saying. I acknowledge I am an anomaly in being willing to pay at all. I just wonder if maybe it was the wrong time ($50 was certainly and still the wrong price IMO) for a paid social network to be successful. Perhaps it could work today with a small subscription.

Now, let me try again: go to https://communick.com/packages and tell me if you think that what I am charging for the basic access packages is unreasonable.

Why do I even want to be on Mastodon, let alone pay to be on it, let alone pay someone who is rent-seeking on top of a platform and content they aren't responsible for? Can't I get access to the social network direct from the source, for free?

For free? No, you can't.

- You (or someone else) will have to develop the software. The source code doesn't just show up magically on github.

- You (or someone else) will have to test the software, triage bugs, help with documentation, etc.

- You (or someone else) will have to pay for the servers.

- You (or someone else) will have to do content moderation

None of these things are free. TANSTAAFL. If you are using it, it will cost you something, it's up to you if you want to pay with your money, your time, or your data.

Come to think of it, did you write all of the Fediverse software you are using? Are you paying those developers monthly? Or did it... appear for free on GitHub? The sense of entitlement here is something else.

I think you would do better if you spend you time thinking of a value proposition instead of being irate at people and demand they pay you. I have no proof you would not be using my data, and I would be linking that (with a credit card) to a real identity. Promising me you won't do that is not a value prop I care about.

Yeah, I am. But you know how? By charging for access. It is surprisingly effective at keeping trolls away.

> Are you paying those developers monthly?

Yes, I do support / contribute to their patreon and I also have a couple of PRs on Mastodon documentation to my name.

Time (and my allergy to PHP) permitting, I am also planning to work on Pixelfed and their LDAP authentication.

> I have no proof you would not be using my data, and I would be linking that with a credit card.

You can pay me with crypto as well.

I keep running https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves.

I have a faint hope that mobile hardware, software, and networking may eventually improve enough that federated communication nodes could run directly off the clients themselves.

The technical requirements are far from impossible - without even going for a Linux phone, you can run a nginx web server on Android via termux, and use dynamic DNS and/or IPv6 to stay discoverable as you move through cell networks. And hardware-wise, the power is plentiful, although I don't know how bad the battery drain would be.

But of course the experience has to be as easy as click link -> install Mastodon app -> have your own instance running off your device, with nothing but a subdomain in the cloud. Anything less and it's a non-starter.

The problem is social, not technical. A p2p network will have problem with reputation and moderation. Only the super technical people will bother to deal with trying fighting scammers and trolls. The only alternative would be something pay-to-play to make it costly, but then those people paying will also want the conveniences and benefits provided by a system with some central authority.

I reported multiple comments calling black people "subhuman" in various ways, or the "clever" variations of "stop noticing things" that Nazis write. It's lucky if reddit gives them even a time out for publicly posting their racist delusions, let alone the permanent ban they deserve.

The last I was on reddit, I was moderating a small subreddit. I had to maintain a regular expression for all the various ways people would write slurs so the poor-quality automated tool would remove comments. There wasn't anything at the administrator level that would remove that or any of the people when they are writing it to be racist.

There was a bot you could use to check a user's comment history for hard-Rs. Useful for trying to determine if someone is unintentionally ignorant and might be open to an explanation, or deliberately ignorant and putting on a temporary facade to waste everyone's time and energy. That tool is something that did get banned, for reasons.