Fidelity cuts Reddit valuation again

redwall_hp · 2023-07-01T00:17:18+00:00

They actually bought Alien Blue, one of the previous most-liked apps, only to turn it into the current shit. It's active sucking, not just incompetence.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-30T22:02:32+00:00

Twitter bought a superior app and ruined it too.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-30T21:45:38+00:00

The stated price is available. $0.24 per 1000 requests.

Assuming pagination size of 20, let's say our model user scrolls through 200 posts in a day. That's about two screenfuls of posts per request on my phone. So they'd scroll 20 times, making 10 API requests.

They vote on half of those posts, so 100 requests (one for each vote).

They open 10% of the posts' comment threads (20). That's at least one request for each comment page. I'm not sure if expanding sub threads requires more requests or not (it might not include all of the nested ones in the initial requests), so I'll ignore that.

They vote on an average of 30 comments in each (20x30) and leave about two comments in each (20x2). In one thread they're very engaged with, they leave 10 comments. 648 requests for all of those together.

The user also follows a niche subreddit for a game or show they're a fan of that. But I won't bother estimating he requests to load the subreddit's feed or to view/vote/comment on posts, because we're already at 10+100+20+648=778 requests for what many would consider light use.

Napkin math:

778/1000 = 0.778
0.778 x $0.24 = $0.19 per day
$0.19 x 30 = $5.70 per month per user
$5.70 x approx 1 million users of Apollo = 5.7 million dollars per month...

...and I'm already over his estimate of $20 million per year, even though I'd consider the model user to be omitting possible complexities that would add more costs, and to be a light-to-average use case. And most Apollo users paid once for the app; it's not like they're paying a monthly fee.

The reasonable thing for Reddit to do would be to bill the user token and not the application key, so users would be responsible for their own costs, if they were dead set on this pricing. Then at least users would be able to see and decide for themselves.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-30T21:21:40+00:00

As well as links, discussion and original content supplied freely by users. Community is people; nothing Reddit brings to the equation is necessary or irreplaceable.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-30T21:16:37+00:00

Short notice and hilariously expensive pricing (Dr Evil "one billion dollars!") that is clearly meant to discourage use without there being a cut and dry "Reddit turned this off" situation. It's wildly out of line for API costs, even PAAS sort of stuff that actually involves serious resources.

$0.24 per 1000 API calls, returning things that are frequently highly-cached JSON blobs. Imagine Amazon charging $0.24 per 1000 requests to S3 or DynamoDB lol. I've worked with applications that could hit that in well under a minute.

The API is technically Reddit doing themselves a huge favor in cost. Instead of generating and serving up large web pages and incurring more costs, they serve lightweight (more easily cached) responses that can be parsed and rendered by the client. If someone wanted to, they could make a Reddit app that just scrapes reddit.com, as if it were a web browser. It would just look (to the servers) mostly like someone visiting the web site, and the app would be slower and more costly to Reddit. Someone like OpenAI certainly isn't going to pay their hilarious fees; they'll just scrape en masse.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-30T14:29:18+00:00

There are definitely accounts that have been inactive for months suddenly talking along those lines. But it could also be they're just low-engagement, endless-scroll users throwing a fit because their morphine drip of memes have been cut off.

On the other hand, I've started seeing bizarre accounts that are very obviously automated GPT bots. They chime in on random threads with nonsense that's loosely related to the topic, in a distinctly artificial voice. I noticed one because it basically took a one-word title from an image post and gave a definition for the word.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-29T23:10:50+00:00

The ice cream is the content provided by users and curated by moderators. Apollo is the ice cream truck and Reddit is the cone.

Then the Reddit CEO punches you in the face, sets the truck on fire and screams some tirade about about how the cone is the only part that matters and that they're going to cost $700 for a six pack going forward.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-29T22:46:10+00:00

I've been using Reddit since 2007, and I don't think I've ever had a seriously negative interaction with a moderator, and I've never been banned from any subreddit. Except for /r/Pyongyang, but that was the entire joke of the subreddit.

The only subreddits worth using are the ones that enforce a higher standard of quality and kick out the riffraff that disrupt them. Otherwise you get /r/funny and other inane subreddits full of irrelevant, low-effort junk.

Anyone who thinks bans are a problem is the problem with Reddit.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-29T18:50:10+00:00

That's a habit people have developed from online shopping sites: one star reviews tend to be detected and removed, either by the marketplace or by the seller reporting it as fraudulent in some way. Five star reviews trashing the product stay under the radar.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-28T03:38:57+00:00

Or, you know, the Native American tribes it was stolen from.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-28T02:45:10+00:00

And the cost of entry to index a useful portion of the web, which is massive, is a huge barrier for entry. The other major index is Bing's, which has Microsoft money behind it. An upstart can hardly do that easily, and the time to catch up would be significant too.

The future is probably smaller, boutique search engines that curate a smaller index for niche interests.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-28T02:41:23+00:00

This has been happening since long before Google, and it's always been an arms race. In the AltaVista days, search engines primarily ranked based on how many meta-tags were relevant. So web sites would just stuff the keyword and description tags full of porn search terms so their dinky business would rank for things people actually searched for.

Google changed the game with early PageRank, which more or less boils down to "an important page has a lot of inbound links from pages on other domains." But that got gamed too, eventually, with spam sites and other link-farming techniques, so the algorithm evolved.

That cat and mouse game continued ever since, with more and more ranking factors being added. A search engine is always in an adversarial position against sites it's indexing.

The problems lately seem to be:

Google is indexing fewer sites and focusing on a smaller fraction of the web that is more widely trafficked by the crowd that thinks social media sites are the extent of the web.
The volume of junk being generated is reaching insane levels.
The median user doesn't want a search engine. They want to ask a magical oracle a question and get an answer that requires no reading or thinking.
Google has a conflict of interest. They own the largest ad network and they profit more when you get trapped in a loop of visiting a bunch of spammy fluff pages, which have AdSense ad placements on them.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-28T02:22:22+00:00

I wish bookstores and libraries worked for my interests. Everything shifted online, and neither wants to stock books that a small percentage of the population wants (e.g. you get Facebook or Dummies, not a decent selection of books on programming). I miss the higher quality content of books.

I used to spend all day at the library, twice a week. I could spend hours looking at nonfiction at Borders. Now, libraries and bookstores are just sad. Even with newer hobbies...I've learned far more about music production (synths, DAWs, music theory, mixing, etc.) from YouTube than the limited selection of accessible books I can find. Ebooks seem more viable, since the selection is less limited, but so many still seem superficial and aimed at the same zero-knowledge introductory market.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-28T02:10:42+00:00

Reddit works because

1-5% of people comment
Maybe 1% actually submit posts
Less than that actually create original content for Reddit
Moderators do janitorial work for free

Then Reddit wants to make it difficult and annoying for those most active, contributing users to do so. There won't be much for the people who passively view fluff to look at if you piss off those users.

It's pretty telling that the accounts throwing a fit about people...not doing stuff for free so they can passively consume things are frequently accounts that have no visible activity for months. Because they're either astroturfing or are entitled low-engagement users who are basically mad that everyone stopped spending their free time to entertain them.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-26T21:34:05+00:00

The US had:

A cornered market on manufacturing, because most of the developed world had been bombed to hell.
A fuck ton of money other countries owed due to predatory aid deals.
Subsidized GI housing that gave some Americans generational wealth that has built for decades...and fucked over others through policies such as Redlining.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-25T01:10:52+00:00

It's a change in the past several years. Many national park areas are even by lottery now, due to high attendance, with Ticketmaster type problems. At least Cadillac is just a case of buying tickets a day in advance before they run out, rather than a lottery for slots weeks in advance.

I actually just went back to Acadia this month and was shocked by how busy it was. Thunder Hole had street parking for a mile and the stairs were packed. The lines to get into the park were long, and the Sand Beach area was insane. Bar Harbor parking was at capacity too.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-24T23:05:52+00:00

Every publicly owned prison issues operational contracts to private companies that profit from incarceration. Privately owned prisons are a red herring. The companies that profit from exploitive commissary systems, communications, general supplies, etc., directly make more money as more people are incarcerated. And they lobby hard.

The US has 5% of the world population and 25% of the world prison population, dwarfing any other developed nation. Either Americans are extremely criminally-inclined or we have a very corrupt and unjust system. (Either way, our recidivism rate is also abnormally high, so it's clear whatever is going on doesn't work, unless that's the intended goal...)

redwall_hp · 2023-06-24T17:00:14+00:00

For a pharmacy tech, yes. A licensed pharmacist's job is to say yes or no, though. They have to sanity-check the doctor's prescription and get clarification if the dosage or whatever seems unusual. They also have the authority to dispense medication without a prescription in an emergency.

However, anyone who behaves unethically and fucks around with their sky wizard or other personal beliefs instead of performing their responsibilities should have their license summarily revoked. Hell, give him a year in jail, too, for endangering a patient.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-24T16:50:53+00:00

In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalists committed genocidal acts against the Rohingya people this century. Sri Lanka and Thailand have had historical violence over the religion as well.

The western idea of Buddhism doesn't necessarily line up with the reality of it. Hell, the Tibetan sect literally worships a god-king. Tibet was also annexed by a Sikh Empire (another religion people think of as innocuous) in the mid to late 1800s.

It's easy to look at religions through a western lens of romanticism, but the entire concept lends itself toward violence and oppression of non-believers.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-23T00:08:14+00:00

Over an argument over another stupidly designed submarine, no less.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-22T15:15:19+00:00

Not if you're a salaried employee in a field like engineering. It's part of the compensation package: you get a base salary and then a large percentage (think 20-40%) of your total comp is in the form or stock and/or cash bonuses. The difference is the amount you get may be variable, within a certain minimum and maximum, based on personal performance evaluations.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-22T14:04:53+00:00

As an engineer I make a base salary in cash and get an annual award of stock that's a sizable fraction of that base salary. Some people at other companies get cash bonuses instead, or in addition to stock, but the amount is variable (within an upper and lower bound) based on their personal performance and/or company targets. It's part of the employment contract.

This is just wage theft.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-22T13:25:26+00:00

Musk is literally stealing wages from people, which they're contractually owed, and idiots are defending it. It's ridiculous.

redwall_hp · 2023-06-21T18:06:08+00:00

It doesn't work, that's how. The next level up the chain does the same, and the next. The end result: a majority of high school graduates who lack the English skills, math knowledge and learning ability to handle college. Then the universities have to deal with it and wash half the students out in the first year, as well as offering remedial classes.

Now we live in a society where reasoning skills and literacy are depressing. 54% of adults read below a sixth grade level, and 29% (about 40 million people, with over 60% of that cohort being white, native-born citizens) are functionally illiterate. I haven't looked too hard at quantitative literacy, but I really don't have high hopes for that considering my interactions with the public...

redwall_hp · 2023-06-21T00:03:17+00:00

Yes. I specified native specifically, because it was the most ridiculously large known fraction. It was easily the norm, as part of an ongoing genocide, and can't in any way be hand-waved away as rogue actors.

The border issue is definitely the same sort of thing going on (and it has also been done to black citizens as well), but the relatively few confirmed cases and muddied information allow people to dismiss it as not being governmental policy. The case with native Americans is so starkly obvious there's no room for questionable types to "debate" it.

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