Disconcerting responses on Reddit over blackout
Apologies if this is the wrong place for this. A few subs opened up and were discussing the possibility of extending the blackouts. The majority wanted the blackout to end to keep the influx of content. That was to be expected.
There was a disturbing tone in some of the messages though. It was a form of cynicism essentially backing Reddit to do whatever it wanted to the devs, and that it was wrong to protest the rule changes as we should be okay with whatever Reddit wanted. It was almost like learned helplessness. I genuinely found it to be disturbing. Is anyone else noticing this in their communities/subs?
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I’ve noticed some of this in non-reddit forums, where we’ve discussed the situation at some length. I agree; it’s quite disconcerting.
Some people have even made it clear that they’re incensed at Christian Selig, like the situation is somehow his fault, and they consider him to be a gold digger who is just profiting off of the platform that Reddit generously provided, and they even go so far as to suggest that Selig needs to “pay his dues!!!11!!1” Even a well-reasoned argument (including a full explanation of the actual math) was ineffective at convincing them that maybe they don’t quite grok the situation… one person actually stated bluntly that he doesn’t even care; he basically just wants his subreddits back.
The mindset behind these kinds of comments just utterly baffles me. (shrug)
That is what shocked me the most. They are going out of their way to make him look like a gold digger who apparently made a fortune. This is insanity. What’s more is that they think that the charges are good business for app devs to pay up. The issue is that if the apps are gone, no one is paying Reddit anymore. It’s odd how they skim over that part.
Well... I think your conclusion is absolutely right, but it's actually more complicated than that.
Executive summary of the math from the conversation to which I alluded: If all things went absolutely perfectly for Selig, he couldn't possibly have made more than about $450K per year, (gross) at the peak of Apollo's popularity. The app was around for less than six years. Therefore, excluding expenses, his maximum theoretical gross income was still somewhere short of about $2.5 million. (There was a lot of math stuff that led to that figure.)
Reddit is demanding fees essentially equivalent to seven times that figure... per year.
That math doesn't add up -- unless you assume that those existing third-party devs aren't the target audience at all, for that proposed fee structure. At no point did Reddit ever think that these small time devs were going to be able to cough up those exorbitant fees; the target audience is and always has been large language models.
The thing is, I don't actually think there is much chance that the LLMs are going to be any more likely to accept the new fee structure than those third party add on developers. Thus, as you've stated, there will ultimately be no payday for Reddit.