• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle









  • There are conspiracy theories on the Internet that Google and Facebook were created to centralize control of the Internet in a few large corporations, who then would be able to control what information people see. You also have to think bigger than government. Who has more influence? The President? Or the CEO of Blackrock and other large hedge funds, who control all the voting shares in pretty much every public corporation?

    For example, if you control the mainstream media and big tech, you can make an issue seem like a huge problem by overhyping it everywhere. You can cover up real problems by never mentioning them at all. The CEO of Google is NOT elected. A couple of hedge fund managers get to pick the CEO of Google.






  • There are lots of mistakes Reddit made that shows they aren’t trying.

    • They could have given more advance notice for the API price increase. This would give apps more time to update their code to use fewer API calls. Many apps are subscription-based, so it would give them more time to update their subscription price.

    • The price should have been based on Reddit’s actual costs, actual revenue, and actual profits. I.e., if it costs Reddit $0.10 per user per year and their revenue per user is $0.15 per user per year from ads, then the API price should have been $0.15-$0.25 per user per year. The actual pricing shows they made it artificially high to kill the 3rd party apps. (I don’t know what the actual numbers are.)

    • Even if Reddit really did want to charge $5 per month for API users, the right way to do it is to start from a lower price and increase it 20%-50% per year until they get to their target price.

    • If a user had Reddit premium, they should have been given extra API call tokens they can give to their 3rd party app.


  • Here’s one way to realize why Reddit should not be taken seriously: Suppose that the head moderator position for r/politics was put up for open auction. How much would it sell for? It would be purchased by someone who was interested in controlling what information people see.

    Subreddits are moderated on a first-come first-serve basis. If you were the first one to squat a name 10 years ago, you get to be the head moderator, even if someone else might do a better job. This is the “landed gentry” comment Reddit’s CEO was referring to.