"Investors are fed up. Fidelity, which led Reddit’s $700 million funding round in 2021 with a $10 billion valuation, has cut its Reddit company valuation by 41% since it invested. This could scupper Reddit’s plans to eventually go public with a reported valuation of $15 billion."
I guess this is the new Reddit! Time to kick our feet up.
I expected as much. 2 days is a pitiful protest length. I will not be using Reddit any longer whilst keeping an eye on updates from here and other news sites. I'm hoping this memo encourages all subreddits to protest idnefinitely until this assclown of a CEO is willing to negotiate lower API prices. And if he's not, onto greener pastures. And watching /r/wallstreetbets figure out a way to destroy their IPO when it eventually launches.
I agree i'm in no hurry to use Reddit. I'll be satisfied if enough people stick around and keep the place interesting. In fact i would say sticking around the fediverse is the only answer to dystopic corporate domination. Those who return, enjoy your exploitation, lol.
Looking at this from a leadership perspective when communicating to investors, it’s a lot easier to explain the low user engagement over the next couple days as a blip due to a service outage blocking access rather than due to an intentional protest against using the site.
Not suggesting this is deliberate, but I do imagine this is actually a best case scenario to them in some ways.
Exactly. If people want this protest to be taken seriously, they shouldn't have pre-emptively announced it would only be 48 hours long. 48 hours is nothing to worry about when you know it's coming. Like you said, they'll just blame the lack of engagement on server issues.
I love the format of kbin, with some TLC i can see it taking off. I like it better than Lemmy's layout. As to people returning after 48 hours, doesn't that depend on Reddit caving in? I don't see that happening, so why would anyone return if Reddit's terms are egregious? They going to cough up the money to Reddit to use their API? People just going to cave in and use their shit app, enduring the ads and personal data farming? This should be interesting.
Insanity. I’ve been around a few times when people were talking about migrating but this truly does seem like the most real possibility yet. And I welcome it with open arms.
What if they're doing this, letting us all get riled up, and then after the black out they go "ok ok, we get it. We'll reduce the cost down to insert still high but irritatingly doable number" and that was the plan all along. That they started outrageously high so they can land where they actually expected to be. A bunch of users go back grumbling but feeling like they still won, yet we got 4d cheesed.
Standup response, I hope Christian finds a promising career ahead of him.
If I'm being honest, I wouldn't be nearly so kind to Reddit following his ordeal. Even if Reddit renegs on the API pricing completely and go back to making it free, the trust has already been sufficiently broken that I wouldn't return. They won't stop monetizing the site just because they lost some users and pissed off their developer partners. They'll just be subtler, quieter the next time they try to screw you over.
Second chances are important, but there are limits to trust. Reddit slapped their users across the face today; despite any promise or apology they make in the meantime, there is no indication that they won't do it again tomorrow to get what they want.
I agree, I don't think they would just keep the API free forever, they've already said that Reddit is not profitable, and so they will continue to add more "features" to be more like tiktok.
Third party devs have said they don’t mind a reasonable API rate, but both the cost (~$20 million/year just for Apollo) and the timing (30 days to make the pricing changes, update the app, work out bugs, get Apple to approve it, etc) were just stupid.
It was done this way to kill the third party apps, period.
If Reddit didn’t insist on hosting all pics & videos themselves, they would probably already be profitable.
If the API pricing was reasonable, users & third party devs would happily pay it.
If Reddit had given more time (3-6 months) for third party devs to implement changes, then they could and would do so (assuming reasonable API price).
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