This is getting so stupid, it’s beginning to sound like The Onion. Why don’t they just start charging for reading posts.
Here’s an idea: Every day you get 5 Reddit Emeralds for free, and you can use them to read 5 posts. If you want to read more, you can get more emeralds from Common Reddit Loot Boxes. You can buy those boxes with Reddit Rubies.
You can get Reddit rubies from Rare Reddit Loot Boxes, and in order to get those, you have to use Reddit Diamonds. If you have 19 Common boxes you can also craft 1 Rare Loot Box. Doing so will also require 10 rubies.
You can also buy Reddit Diamonds with Superior Crypto-Augmented Money (SCAM), and getting those coins requires real world money.
Ok, so now that you have all these gems, you can put them to good use. Emeralds are used to read posts. When you comment, there’s a 50% chance that it will be deleted within 30 minutes, but you can improve your odds by spending 1 Reddit Ruby. For each Ruby, the odds improve by 10%. Posts have the same mechanism, but you need to spend Diamonds instead.
Dear God they’ll have this implemented within a week. Why did you do this?
Twitter only lets you read so many tweets without paying, so this is entirely possible
Same reason why Raid Shadow Legends and Destiny make so much money.
See also: different types of deceptive designs
While working on a software project, you could turn that job into mini-game where you try to squeeze each and every one of those tricks into the app. Who knows, there could be a secret achievement for that.
Why don’t they just start charging for reading posts.
They’re already discussing this, believe it or not. I saw an announcement about it a few weeks ago.
Got half way through your post and started to feel sick. Not because it’s ridiculous, but because it sounds like actual other apps and this is our reality now.
I wonder whether the average person is really as retarded as they are made out to be by large corporations.
Unfortunately, yes.
When Netflix clamped down on password sharing I expected a mass exodus back to pirating and more people self hosting like I did.
Instead they complained for 3 days and brought out their wallets.
The difference is, that Netflix (or Spotify, or whatever) does bring value on its own. I am paying money to comfortably and legally stream content, which itself is paid for and licensed by the streaming provider. From the perspective of a lazy end user, it’s worth it, because you do not need to care about downloading, finding releases, opsec and whatnot. I don’t want to protect Netflix, fuck corporations and subscription services, but password sharing was always only tolerated at most. From the same end user perspective, reddit is just an empty platform. The content is brought in free of charge by the community. And now not only they want the same community to pay, but also for an objectively worse experience? I don’t think that you can compare that.
Agree with you, but small nitpick, password sharing was encouraged at some point, at least from the PR side of the business.
I can somewhat understand both perspectives. Although I too sail the high seas, if you don’t have the aptitude to self host, and you only care to binge a show over the weekend, $12 (or whatever it costs now) is a somewhat justifiable expense. I mean, 1 comic book is $4-$6 on average these days. One of those might provide 15 minutes of entertainment and a month of anticipation. $12 is a good value.
Everything I want to watch is readily available for streaming. Why self host unless you want to keep copies?
The strange thing, to me atleast, is that you can even just stream shows and movies on websites like bflix with subtitles for every language. I have friends and family that would pay netflix their left leg if they asked them to. And now they’re stuck with a bunch of subscriptions to multiple streaming services because everything is split between multiple platforms.
Weirdly, I’ve been using my parents’ Netflix credentials still and haven’t been kicked off yet. They live hours away so there’s no mistake there about being in the same household.
Hopefully I’m not tempting fate too much by talking about it on the Internet lol
Plot twist: Your parents can’t access their Netflix anymore but aren’t tech savvy enough to understand why, so they’re back at watching classic broadcast television.
Thinking people are retarded because they don’t pirate or self-host. Most people don’t have the time, room, energy to do it, you must be a genius
Bit of a leap there. I was merely saying consumers gonna consume no matter what the overlords demand in return.
Just earlier today I had to beg my cousin to get a DOS laptop with an i3 and ssd over a windows machine with a celeron + emmc for the same price. The task of installing windows was enough to make him see these options as equal.
I find it a tad arrogant to believe costumers can’t make rational decision that differ from those of the vocal online minority of reddit et al. Whenever a website changes its product (arguably for the worse, most of the time) said minority prophesizes the end, and calls out some kind of revolt, whereas the vast majority of users or costumers customers just makes due with the slightly worsened conditions, simply because they still see the product as worthwhile. Netflix, for all its flaws, still is a decent product for a decent price, as long as you’re into the kind of slop they produce. And there probably is a large portion of costumers customers who weren’t even affected at all by the recent changes.
Posting for it is still easier than learning how to pirate and dodging lawsuits.
My GF pays for Netflix and other than some annoying messages and text account sharing is still possible, not as cool as before though.
Anyway, as she does not have the premium version, or whatever is called (no 4K) good quality picture films we end up watching them on Stremio lol.
She doesn’t care, but I do.
Well, why would they ditch for piracy? Netflix was smart about the whole thing: adding an authorized household (not user, entire household) is cheaper than creating a new subscription. The people subscribing to Netflix aren’t fundamentally opposed to paying for streaming, they were opposed to an unfair change in the business model. Netflix countered with a seemingly fair change in the business model that now eliminates the hassles that come with password sharing and could make the marginal increase in cost per household fairly small. It was overall a pretty smart business decision.
There are many many problems with Netflix, including their growth-based business model, the lack of insight into their finances, and the way they’re slowly enshittifying the film industry. They’re a major reason for the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. However, this change wasn’t stupid and people weren’t stupid for going along with it. I don’t see how it would lead to an overall increase in piracy, that’s being driven by the many new streaming services forcing costs on consumers. But consumers won’t blame Netflix for that because, frankly, that’s not Netflix’s fault.
I kept paying for a little while, until I had ripped everything off their site I wanted to see, then I cancelled lol.
Obviously yes. Reddit could change the app icon to a swastika and hide the real icon behind a $50 paywall and people would still use the app because of convenience.
Remember a scary thing about average IQ: half of the people have IQ below that number, hence “average”.
That’s not really how averages work, that’s the median, but I get your point. In order for that to be average there have to be scores lower.
VC money very likely dried up and the IPO was the opportunity to raise more funding. all they needed to do was put ads in 3rd party apps and they take a cut of revenue…
I honestly thought that after all these things they would spring back but I honestly now feel like they’re going to go the way of Digg
Or just require an account to have reddit premium in order to use the API.
I mean I honestly don’t understand. I’m just going to assume that they aren’t actually retarded and want the best for the company, but this sounds like one person over there is making the decisions and everyone else is terrified of calling out the bad ideas. How else does a company just implode like this? I’ve worked in creative tech environments with super dominating bosses that was scary to even ask a question let alone call them out. So sad.
I was a daily (hours) Reddit user for the past 15 years and I quit…completely. I have not gone back. The hour Apollo shut down I was done. I said I would leave and I keep my word. Been here ever since. It’s taken some time but this is filling my Reddit need.
Only problem is looking up tips on video games always links to a Reddit discussion and I just refuse. Fuck u/spez
I agree with everything you said. However, I almost couldn’t finish reading your comment because of your use of the R slur. I’m not reporting it or anything, just something to think on.
Well you see, finding a way to reliably deliver ads via the API would have taken far too much developer brainpower for a company that can’t make a functional video player or a mobile app that doesn’t annihilate battery with ridiculously excessive cpu use and keepalive requests…
Well you see, finding a way to reliably deliver ads via the API would have taken far too much developer brainpower for a company that can’t make a functional video player or a mobile app
It honestly wouldn’t be that hard at all. You deliver ads via the API alongside actual posts, as if they are an actual post, and forbid altering them in the developer ToS. If you want to be anal about enforcement, run popular 3rd-party apps in an emulator to verify that the JSON returned by the site is unaltered when it’s rendered in the app. You could put this together in a weekend.
Which really just speaks to quality of talent at reddit, or the management at reddit suppressing that talent. Or both.
I’m pretty sure the real issue is the data collection Reddit wants about user habits. They can’t get thst from 3rd party apps, even if they make browsing habit data (scroll speeds, post linger time, ads displayed, etc) a mandatory part of the API they cannot verify what the 3rd party app is reporting and it becomes junk data that advertisers cannot rely on. They need complete ecosystem control to make the marketing optimizers happy. So, fuck the consumer!
a mobile app that doesn’t annihilate battery with ridiculously excessive cpu use and keepalive requests
Speaking of which, how on Earth it’s such a slug these days? I pretty much quit Reddit when the protest started and moved to Lemmy. I never used any other Android app since I was reasonably happy with the official app. However, when I launched it to check how my old subs fared, I was quite surprised at how slow, laggy and bloated POS it had come.
I honestly don’t remember it being this crappy just a few weeks ago.
It’s some combination of developer incompetence- they’ve basically never put out any decent running code- and intentional resource use for the ridiculous amount of tracking they run. Reddit tracks everything about your browsing habits as well as actively loads ads in the background. It’s entire purpose was never for quality user experience, it was for revenue generation (which 3rd party apps get in the way of)
I also hate the inclusion of the u/spez freakout about employees not wearing reddit colours in public for fear of physical harm. It is a full-on propaganda tactic, in the vein of Elon Musk or Trump’s bullshit. It immediately puts shade on the userbase. These “journalists” should get their shit together and either write about how ridiculously stupid he was to say that or just not present it at all, it’s barely relevant to the article. For anyone who has actually been following along, the way the article presents that tidbit is inane and completely false at best.
There’s this super frustrating trend where instead of making the paid version of things better, they just make the free version worse. Like how you used to be able to do background play on the YouTube app. It’s like they know these features are good so implement them to attract people to use their service, and then later take it away to force the subscription.
Oh it was so much worse than that. Google indirectly banned every 3rd party app on the Play Store from streaming videos in the background to push that feature. Seemingly overnight every app that could do it vanished or cut the feature. Sure you can sideload a fix but your average non-savvy users got screwed into paying up.
I’m glad they do that, it makes people switch to open source alternatives, like NewPipe for YouTube.
They simply have better features and privacy.
YMusic ftw. if you want to listen to music in background, it’s the better alternative compared with newpipe. newpipe is the best for videos…but YMusic for music.
What do you like better about YMusic? I’ve been using NewPipe for a little while and it’s OK, but it’s kind of annoying that you can’t sort by date or views. I usually end up searching Youtube and plugging the URL into Newpipe.
The problem with (almost) all social media platforms is they need a LOT of users. Because each individual users brings in such a small amount of revenue.
So these companies (running on investor money) go through a deliberate early “growth” stage, where their singular goal is to get as many users as possible. They usually do this by…actually making something people want to use. Plus some addictive tricks thrown in to keep people “engaged”.
Once they have their 100 million users, or whatever number they’re targeting, then the processor of turning it to shit begins. Because now they have the users they need to extract revenue from them. The problem is that growth stage often kills off competitors as well. So now you have a near monopoly tightening the screws on users, who have to just accept it because the cost of moving to an alternative is too high.
But eventually it hits a breaking point. Users jump to something new, and the cycle repeats. The users who stick around with a shit product are the ones who ultimately pay the debts that early users got to enjoy.
This is why so many apps and services have problems monetizing their stuff when they start out as free and/or ad supported as a means to pump the usage numbers fast for that juicy investor funding and sky high stock valuations.
Free/ad supported is essentially the “bottom” of race to the bottom when it comes to how to make money on a product or service. And it is hard to climb the ladder of convincing people to pay for something when the core product that provides most of the value has always been free. You can’t exactly just paywall the core product or people will likely feel ripped off and leave. So that leaves increasingly sketchy “value added” options.
