That's very reasonable actually. Pay for the product or be the product, whatever suits you.
I'm curious how the laud power users would react to this though. I suspect they won't like it because it's not the same as using the product on VCs dime.
The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money or creative people's content. Unfortunately, the VCs are not into philanthropy but in money making and the creative people need to be compensated too, so this can't last.
I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standart. Paying through extra steps(advertisement) or paying through political power transfer(free curated content with agenda) is bad for the society.
I pay for a Reddit subscription. But I pay to support Reddit, for the greater community. (99% of the people I talk to on Reddit, don't subscribe). If they slap pricetags on their APIs and kill third-party apps (which is identical to killing all apps and all mobile support -- literally no one uses Reddit's app/website), the community engagement will drop, so there will be no reason for me to keep paying them a subscription.
I pay Reddit so that others don't have to, to keep the forums open for the community. Reddit does not seem to understand this, instead spending subscription money on like, avatars, or fake currency, or minting freaking NFTs, or whatever other junk they're spending all their budget on.
> The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money.
Nah, the good old internet was built on reasonable product goals and simple ad revenue. (See every major forum that existed in every little niche, most of which went away when Reddit got popular). In fact, that is what built the original Reddit too. They didn't need any more VC money, they didn't need any of their last round. Reddit literally has a $350+ million yearly revenue. Reddit won, they have a perfectly fine medium-sized business, and one of the few stable/mostly-functional social media experiences still left on the internet. They should be riding off into the sunset.
Instead, they're chasing a stupid IPO. Taking VC money is going to be the thing that kills Reddit.
> I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standard.
If my experience is anything to go by, this will never work. Everything I pay for a subscribtion to, eventually takes VC money anyway, and eventually kills their product trying to chase impossible infinite returns. "Just pay for service" only works if the founders/owners can resist the temptation to gamble with VC's, and so far, none of them seem to.
Yea, this is the sad part. They literally already won and now they're stopping right before the finish line to fuck with the other people in the race.
What are the costs to run what is essentially a big text based site? They already offloaded all of the image hosting to third parties. Desktop ads would be more than enough to support the site indefinitely. Heck, maybe you can build in something to convert Amazon links to referrals or something. Fine, whatever, it's your website.
I'm sad to say it, but I don't think Reddit will be the same powerhouse in ten years. Just like Facebook, people will slowly start to migrate somewhere else. If they had focused on taking care of the community they already have, it didn't need to end like this.
They've increasingly on-loaded image/video hosting into Reddit, presumably to make the pathway to sharing that stuff simpler, and have it integrate better with their app. They also probably correctly just realized that having huge amounts of their content depend on Imgur existing and being reasonable was not a good situation.
As it evolved, new cool things came because VCs poured money in it.
With Web 1.0 people were sponsored by their parents or institutions and they created the early tools and content. They were not personally looking to profit from it. However early VCs were pouring money into infrastructure or bets, so the thing was getting professional and serious, so can evolve. The most demanded content was content created prior-web, and that content was shared freely(the mp3 and divx era) on platforms created by people who were looking for clout and not necessarily monetary compensation.
With Web 2.0 the content was created by people for free but the platforms were completely VC paid. In this stage everything become professional and as it matured we ended up in this horrible state.
Arguably, HN is a reminiscent of the early stages of Web 2.0 and the place has good quality because it's paid by VC who expect to have reach(to the talent and market). IMHO HN is possible because it's not optimised to it's full monetary potential.
HN could easily be run as a classic forum. The VC money just makes it possible to have one (?) FTE which makes it alot simpler to not mess up concessions when admins get tired. But ye it is suprising that Ycomb don't want to mess it up. Someone somewhere has good judgement against short term profits for long term?
> HN is possible because it's not optimised to it's full monetary potential.
This sounds eerily similar to congestion-based breakdown in data networks, or the impossibility of a 100% efficient windmill. If you squeeze too hard, you end up with ~nothing.
Not necessarily, when the price isn't "free" there's a margin to compete on price and quality.
For example, when the thing is not free the onboarding of new users would be much smoother for the non-tracking platform because they won't have to show GDPR and Cooke banners.
Not being able to profit from "internet money" was probably a good thing. Remember the South Park episode where the Numa Numa guy together with among others Canada demanded the UN giving them their internet money?
I'm curious how the laud power users would react to this though. I suspect they won't like it because it's not the same as using the product on VCs dime.
The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money or creative people's content. Unfortunately, the VCs are not into philanthropy but in money making and the creative people need to be compensated too, so this can't last.
I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standart. Paying through extra steps(advertisement) or paying through political power transfer(free curated content with agenda) is bad for the society.