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exeggcute · 1 year ago

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the great reddit API meltdown of '23, or: this was always bound to happen

there's a lot of press about what's going on with reddit right now (app shutdowns, subreddit blackouts, the CEO continually putting his foot in his mouth), but I haven't seen as much stuff talking about how reddit got into this situation to begin with. so as a certified non-expert and Context Enjoyer I thought it might be helpful to lay things out as I understand them—a high-level view, surveying the whole landscape—in the wonderful world of startups, IPOs, and extremely angry users.

disclaimer that I am not a founder or VC (lmao), have yet to work at a company with a successful IPO, and am not a reddit employee or third-party reddit developer or even a subreddit moderator. I do work at a startup, know my way around an API or two, and have spent twelve regrettable years on reddit itself. which is to say that I make no promises of infallibility, but I hope you'll at least find all this interesting.

profit now or profit later

before you can really get into reddit as reddit, it helps to know a bit about startups (of which reddit is one). and before I launch into that, let me share my Three Types Of Websites framework, which is basically just a mental model about financial incentives that's helped me contextualize some of this stuff.

(1) website/software that does not exist to make money: relatively rare, for a variety of reasons, among them that it costs money to build and maintain a website in the first place. wikipedia is the evergreen example, although even wikipedia's been subject to criticism for how the wikimedia foundation pays out its employees and all that fun nonprofit stuff. what's important here is that even when making money is not the goal, money itself is still a factor, whether it's solicited via donations or it's just one guy paying out of pocket to host a hobby site. but websites in this category do, generally, offer free, no-strings-attached experiences to their users.

(I do want push back against the retrospective nostalgia of "everything on the internet used to be this way" because I don't think that was ever really true—look at AOL, the dotcom boom, the rise of banner ads. I distinctly remember that neopets had multiple corporate sponsors, including a cookie crisp-themed flash game. yahoo bought geocities for $3.6 billion; money's always been trading hands, obvious or not. it's indisputable that the internet is simply different now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that monetization models themselves have largely changed as well (I have thoughts about this as it relates to web 1.0 vs web 2.0 and their associated costs/scale/etc.), but I think the only time people weren't trying to squeeze the internet for all the dimes it can offer was when the internet was first conceived as a tool for national defense.)

(2) website/software that exists to make money now: the type that requires the least explanation. mostly non-startup apps and services, including any random ecommerce storefront, mobile apps that cost three bucks to download, an MMO with a recurring subscription, or even a news website that runs banner ads and/or offers paid subscriptions. in most (but not all) cases, the "make money now" part is obvious, so these things don't feel free to us as users, even to the extent that they might have watered-down free versions or limited access free trials. no one's shocked when WoW offers another paid expansion packs because WoW's been around for two decades and has explicitly been trying to make money that whole time.

(3) website/software that exists to make money later: this is the fun one, and more common than you'd think. "make money later" is more or less the entire startup business model—I'll get into that in the next section—and is deployed with the expectation that you will make money at some point, but not always by means as obvious as "selling WoW expansions for forty bucks a pop."

companies in this category tend to have two closely entwined characteristics: they prioritize growth above all else, regardless of whether this growth is profitable in any way (now, or sometimes, ever), and they do this by offering users really cool and awesome shit at little to no cost (or, if not for free, then at least at a significant loss to the company).

so from a user perspective, these things either seem free or far cheaper than their competitors. but of course websites and software and apps and [blank]-as-a-service tools cost money to build and maintain, and that money has to come from somewhere, and the people supplying that money, generally, expect to get it back...

just not immediately.

startups, VCs, IPOs, and you

here's the extremely condensed "did NOT go to harvard business school" version of how a startup works:

(1) you have a cool idea.

(2) you convince some venture capitalists (also known as VCs) that your idea is cool. if they see the potential in what you're pitching, they'll give you money in exchange for partial ownership of your company—which means that if/when the company starts trading its stock publicly, these investors will own X numbers of shares that they can sell at any time. in other words, you get free money now (and you'll likely seek multiple "rounds" of investors over the years to sustain your company), but with the explicit expectations that these investors will get their payoff later, assuming you don't crash and burn before that happens.

during this phase, you want to do anything in your power to make your company appealing to investors so you can attract more of them and raise funds as needed. because you are definitely not bringing in the necessary revenue to offset operating costs by yourself.

it's also worth nothing that this is less about projecting the long-term profitability of your company than it's about its perceived profitability—i.e., VCs want to put their money behind a company that other people will also have confidence in, because that's what makes stock valuable, and VCs are in it for stock prices.

(3) there are two non-exclusive win conditions for your startup: you can get acquired, and you can have an IPO (also referred to as "going public"). these are often called "exit scenarios" and they benefit VCs and founders, as well as some employees. it's also possible for a company to get acquired, possibly even more than once, and then later go public.

acquisition: sell the whole damn thing to someone else. there are a million ways this can happen, some better than others, but in many cases this means anyone with ownership of the company (which includes both investors and employees who hold stock options) get their stock bought out by the acquiring company and end up with cash in hand. in varying amounts, of course. sometimes the founders walk away, sometimes the employees get laid off, but not always.

IPO: short for "initial public offering," this is when the company starts trading its stocks publicly, which means anyone who wants to can start buying that company's stock, which really means that VCs (and employees with stock options) can turn that hypothetical money into real money by selling their company stock to interested buyers.

drawing from that, companies don't go for an IPO until they think their stock will actually be worth something (or else what's the point?)—specifically, worth more than the amount of money that investors poured into it. The Powers That Be will speculate about a company's IPO potential way ahead of time, which is where you'll hear stuff about companies who have an estimated IPO evaluation of (to pull a completely random example) $10B. actually I lied, that was not a random example, that was reddit's valuation back in 2021 lol. but a valuation is basically just "how much will people be interested in our stock?"

as such, in the time leading up to an IPO, it's really really important to do everything you can to make your company seem like a good investment (which is how you get stock prices up), usually by making the company's numbers look good. but! if you plan on cashing out, the long-term effects of your decisions aren't top of mind here. remember, the industry lingo is "exit scenario."

if all of this seems like a good short-term strategy for companies and their VCs, but an unsustainable model for anyone who's buying those stocks during the IPO, that's because it often is.

also worth noting that it's possible for a company to be technically unprofitable as a business (meaning their costs outstrip their revenue) and still trade enormously well on the stock market; uber is the perennial example of this. to the people who make money solely off of buying and selling stock, it literally does not matter that the actual rideshare model isn't netting any income—people think the stock is valuable, so it's valuable.

this is also why, for example, elon musk is richer than god: if he were only the CEO of tesla, the money he'd make from selling mediocre cars would be (comparatively, lol) minimal. but he's also one of tesla's angel investors, which means he holds a shitload of tesla stock, and tesla's stock has performed well since their IPO a decade ago (despite recent dips)—even if tesla itself has never been a huge moneymaker, public faith in the company's eventual success has kept them trading at high levels. granted, this also means most of musk's wealth is hypothetical and not liquid; if TSLA dropped to nothing, so would the value of all the stock he holds (and his net work with it).

what's an API, anyway?

to move in an entirely different direction: we can't get into reddit's API debacle without understanding what an API itself is.

an API (short for "application programming interface," not that it really matters) is a series of code instructions that independent developers can use to plug their shit into someone else's shit. like a series of tin cans on strings between two kids' treehouses, but for sending and receiving data.

APIs work by yoinking data directly from a company's servers instead of displaying anything visually to users. so I could use reddit's API to build my own app that takes the day's top r/AITA post and transcribes it into pig latin: my app is a bunch of lines of code, and some of those lines of code fetch data from reddit (and then transcribe that data into pig latin), and then my app displays the content to anyone who wants to see it, not reddit itself. as far as reddit is concerned, no additional human beings laid eyeballs on that r/AITA post, and reddit never had a chance to serve ads alongside the pig-latinized content in my app. (put a pin in this part—it'll be relevant later.)

but at its core, an API is really a type of protocol, which encompasses a broad category of formats and business models and so on. some APIs are completely free to use, like how anyone can build a discord bot (but you still have to host it yourself). some companies offer free APIs to third-party developers can build their own plugins, and then the company and the third-party dev split the profit on those plugins. some APIs have a free tier for hobbyists and a paid tier for big professional projects (like every weather API ever, lol). some APIs are strictly paid services because the API itself is the company's core offering.

reddit's financial foundations

okay thanks for sticking with me. I promise we're almost ready to be almost ready to talk about the current backlash.

reddit has always been a startup's startup from day one: its founders created the site after attending a startup incubator (which is basically a summer camp run by VCs) with the successful goal of creating a financially successful site. backed by that delicious y combinator money, reddit got acquired by conde nast only a year or two after its creation, which netted its founders a couple million each. this was back in like, 2006 by the way. in the time since that acquisition, reddit's gone through a bunch of additional funding rounds, including from big-name investors like a16z, peter thiel (yes, that guy), sam altman (yes, also that guy), sequoia, fidelity, and tencent. crunchbase says that they've raised a total of $1.3B in investor backing.

in all this time, reddit has never been a public company, or, strictly speaking, profitable.

APIs and third-party apps

reddit has offered free API access for basically as long as it's had a public API—remember, as a "make money later" company, their primary goal is growth, which means attracting as many users as possible to the platform. so letting anyone build an app or widget is (or really, was) in line with that goal.

as such, third-party reddit apps have been around forever. by third-party apps, I mean apps that use the reddit API to display actual reddit content in an unofficial wrapper. iirc reddit didn't even have an official mobile app until semi-recently, so many of these third-party mobile apps in particular just sprung up to meet an unmet need, and they've kept a small but dedicated userbase ever since. some people also prefer the user experience of the unofficial apps, especially since they offer extra settings to customize what you're seeing and few to no ads (and any ads these apps do display are to the benefit of the third-party developers, not reddit itself.)

(let me add this preemptively: one solution I've seen proposed to the paid API backlash is that reddit should have third-party developers display reddit's ads in those third-party apps, but this isn't really possible or advisable due to boring adtech reasons I won't inflict on you here. source: just trust me bro)

in addition to mobile apps, there are also third-party tools that don’t replace the Official Reddit Viewing Experience but do offer auxiliary features like being able to mass-delete your post history, tools that make the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, and tools that help moderators of subreddits moderate more easily. not to mention a small army of reddit bots like u/AutoWikibot or u/RemindMebot (and then the bots that tally the number of people who reply to bot comments with “good bot” or “bad bot).

the number of people who use third-party apps is relatively small, but they arguably comprise some of reddit’s most dedicated users, which means that third-party apps are important to the people who keep reddit running and the people who supply reddit with high-quality content.

unpaid moderators and user-generated content

so reddit is sort of two things: reddit is a platform, but it’s also a community.

the platform is all the unsexy (or, if you like python, sexy) stuff under the hood that actually makes the damn thing work. this is what the company spends money building and maintaining and "owns." the community is all the stuff that happens on the platform: posts, people, petty squabbles. so the platform is where the content lives, but ultimately the content is the reason people use reddit—no one’s like “yeah, I spend time on here because the backend framework really impressed me."

and all of this content is supplied by users, which is not unique among social media platforms, but the content is also managed by users, which is. paid employees do not govern subreddits; unpaid volunteers do. and moderation is the only thing that keeps reddit even remotely tolerable—without someone to remove spam, ban annoying users, and (god willing) enforce rules against abuse and hate speech, a subreddit loses its appeal and therefore its users. not dissimilar to the situation we’re seeing play out at twitter, except at twitter it was the loss of paid moderators; reddit is arguably in a more precarious position because they could lose this unpaid labor at any moment, and as an already-unprofitable company they absolutely cannot afford to implement paid labor as a substitute.

oh yeah? spell "IPO" backwards

so here we are, June 2023, and reddit is licking its lips in anticipation of a long-fabled IPO. which means it’s time to start fluffing themselves up for investors by cutting costs (yay, layoffs!) and seeking new avenues of profit, however small.

this brings us to the current controversy: reddit announced a new API pricing plan that more or less prevents anyone from using it for free.

from reddit's perspective, the ostensible benefits of charging for API access are twofold: first, there's direct profit to be made off of the developers who (may or may not) pay several thousand dollars a month to use it, and second, cutting off unsanctioned third-party mobile apps (possibly) funnels those apps' users back into the official reddit mobile app. and since users on third-party apps reap the benefit of reddit's site architecture (and hosting, and development, and all the other expenses the site itself incurs) without “earning” money for reddit by generating ad impressions, there’s a financial incentive at work here: even if only a small percentage of people use third-party apps, getting them to use the official app instead translates to increased ad revenue, however marginal.

(also worth mentioning that chatGPT and other LLMs were trained via tools that used reddit's API to scrape post and content data, and now that openAI is reaping the profits of that training without giving reddit any kickbacks, reddit probably wants to prevent repeats of this from happening in the future. if you want to train the next LLM, it's gonna cost you.)

of course, these changes only benefit reddit if they actually increase the company’s revenue and perceived value/growth—which is hard to do when your users (who are also the people who supply the content for other users to engage with, who are also the people who moderate your communities and make them fun to participate in) get really fucking pissed and threaten to walk.

pricing shenanigans

under the new API pricing plan, third-party developers are suddenly facing steep costs to maintain the apps and tools they’ve built.

most paid APIs are priced by volume: basically, the more data you send and receive, the more money it costs. so if your third-party app has a lot of users, you’ll have to make more API requests to fetch content for those users, and your app becomes more expensive to maintain. (this isn’t an issue if the tool you’re building also turns a profit, but most third-party reddit apps make little, if any, money.)

which is why, even though third-party apps capture a relatively small portion of reddit’s users, the developer of a popular third-party app called apollo recently learned that it would cost them about $20 million a year to keep the app running. and apollo actually offers some paid features (for extra in-app features independent of what reddit offers), but nowhere near enough to break even on those API costs.

so apollo, any many apps like it, were suddenly unable to keep their doors open under the new API pricing model and announced that they'd be forced to shut down.

backlash, blackout

plenty has been said already about the current subreddit blackouts—in like, official news outlets and everything—so this might be the least interesting section of my whole post lol. the short version is that enough redditors got pissed enough that they collectively decided to take subreddits “offline” in protest, either by making them read-only or making them completely inaccessible. their goal was to send a message, and that message was "if you piss us off and we bail, here's what reddit's gonna be like: a ghost town."

but, you may ask, if third-party apps only captured a small number of users in the first place, how was the backlash strong enough to result in a near-sitewide blackout? well, two reasons:

first and foremost, since moderators in particular are fond of third-party tools, and since moderators wield outsized power (as both the people who keep your site more or less civil, and as the people who can take a subreddit offline if they feel like it), it’s in your best interests to keep them happy. especially since they don’t get paid to do this job in the first place, won’t keep doing it if it gets too hard, and essentially have nothing to lose by stepping down.

then, to a lesser extent, the non-moderator users on third-party apps tend to be Power Users who’ve been on reddit since its inception, and as such likely supply a disproportionate amount of the high-quality content for other users to see (and for ads to be served alongside). if you drive away those users, you’re effectively kneecapping your overall site traffic (which is bad for Growth) and reducing the number/value of any ad impressions you can serve (which is bad for revenue).

also a secret third reason, which is that even people who use the official apps have no stake in a potential IPO, can smell the general unfairness of this whole situation, and would enjoy the schadenfreude of investors getting fucked over. not to mention that reddit’s current CEO has made a complete ass of himself and now everyone hates him and wants to see him suffer personally.

(granted, it seems like reddit may acquiesce slightly and grant free API access to a select set of moderation/accessibility tools, but at this point it comes across as an empty gesture.)

"later" is now "now"

TL;DR: this whole thing is a combination of many factors, specifically reddit being intensely user-driven and self-governed, but also a high-traffic site that costs a lot of money to run (why they willingly decided to start hosting video a few years back is beyond me...), while also being angled as a public stock market offering in the very near future. to some extent I understand why reddit’s CEO doubled down on the changes—he wants to look strong for investors—but he’s also made a fool of himself and cast a shadow of uncertainty onto reddit’s future, not to mention the PR nightmare surrounding all of this. and since arguably the most important thing in an IPO is how much faith people have in your company, I honestly think reddit would’ve fared better if they hadn’t gone nuclear with the API changes in the first place.

that said, I also think it’s a mistake to assume that reddit care (or needs to care) about its users in any meaningful way, or at least not as more than means to an end. if reddit shuts down in three years, but all of the people sitting on stock options right now cashed out at $120/share and escaped unscathed... that’s a success story! you got your money! VCs want to recoup their investment—they don’t care about longevity (at least not after they’re gone), user experience, or even sustained profit. those were never the forces driving them, because these were never the ultimate metrics of their success.

and to be clear: this isn’t unique to reddit. this is how pretty much all startups operate.

I talked about the difference between “make money now” companies and “make money later” companies, and what we’re experiencing is the painful transition from “later” to “now.�� as users, this change is almost invisible until it’s already happened—it’s like a rug we didn’t even know existed gets pulled out from under us.

the pre-IPO honeymoon phase is awesome as a user, because companies have no expectation of profit, only growth. if you can rely on VC money to stay afloat, your only concern is building a user base, not squeezing a profit out of them. and to do that, you offer cool shit at a loss: everything’s chocolate and flowers and quarterly reports about the number of signups you’re getting!

...until you reach a critical mass of users, VCs want to cash in, and to prepare for that IPO leadership starts thinking of ways to make the website (appear) profitable and implements a bunch of shit that makes users go “wait, what?”

I also touched on this earlier, but I want to reiterate a bit here: I think the myth of the benign non-monetized internet of yore is exactly that—a myth. what has changed are the specific market factors behind these websites, and their scale, and the means by which they attempt to monetize their services and/or make their services look attractive to investors, and so from a user perspective things feel worse because the specific ways we’re getting squeezed have evolved. maybe they are even worse, at least in the ways that matter. but I’m also increasingly less surprised when this occurs, because making money is and has always been the goal for all of these ventures, regardless of how they try to do so.

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alpconsulting · 2 years ago

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mortalityplays · 17 hours ago

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Forgive me if I'm mistaking you for another person, but I remember you speaking at multiple points on the unsustainability of free social media services (I think especially in response to the cohost collapse?), and I'm curious on what your thoughts on bluesky are so far. I'm not an expert on the subject, but from what I've read previously it seemed like they were on track to be financially sustainable, but I don't know if the recent floods of users has thrown those projections off. Sorry if I'm mixing you up with someone else on my timeline, in that case just ignore me.

bluesky will almost certainly follow the same trajectory of monetisation => bloat => enshittification => decline as every other major platform built on venture capital and user hoarding. it's a terrible model that only works in the short term as a mirage for attracting funding and making founders look good for a year or two before they sell.

you can see the same effect in the decline of all the subscription box services that came into vogue just before covid: they feel great to use for as long as the initial injection of venture funding lasts, because the purpose of that funding at that stage is to attract users and impress the next round of funders with how pleasant/intuitive/efficient/ethical/good value the service is. that's the stage where they're handing out freebies and bowling over influencers, and every ingredient in the box is fresh and high quality and locally sourced. wow what a good deal, what a great system!!! why hasn't anyone done this before? the answer is because it's unsustainable by design. they rack up good reviews, sign on a billion new users, attract new funding from a bunch of much more credulous investors, and then gut all of the expensive parts. portions get smaller, ingredients get worse, packaging gets flimsier, prices go up, freebies turn into "5% off your first 9 boxes when you invite 3 friends", and customer service vanishes.

with social media (and platforms like discord) the logic is the same, it's just a little less glaringly obvious to the end user because they're not coming home to leaking packages of rancid chicken on the doorstep. bluesky has an advantage over tiny operations like cohost because it was founded by a billionaire making a point for the sake of his own image. it got a really significant chunk of startup funding, and the owner had existing connections and rep in the space to attract more. That's why it has survived the goldrush period, why it still feels good to use, and why users who have been burned so many times before are finally accepting it as a stable, reliable option. It's still in its venture capital honeymoon phase where the only thing worth spending money on is making the service attractive to users.

What I expect we will see next, with another mass influx of users from twitter and new funding from a rogue's gallery of tech venture sickos led by Blockchain Capital is a strong ramp up into monetising that userbase. They've already been pretty forthright about how they plan to do this, and I think it's a solid roadmap of how Bluesky will bloat and decay over the next few years:

this is a huge lol. don't worry, we're not going to hyperfinancialize the social experience through NFTs. the thing even crypto freaks started feigning amnesia about a year ago. real "our health conscious sodas are 100% arsenic free" messaging here. They know perfectly well that rubes users are suspicious of their typical 5 dimensional tech finance chess games and are patting our hands about last week's bogeymen so nobody worries too hard about whatever 'decentralised developer ecosystem' just happens to be helmed by a bunch of crypto guys. this definitely means something good and based and not a google-like single sign on user data harvesting operation.

This is the same shit that's currently rotting the floorboards of discord. Bluntly, there is no way to run a platform on this scale without gating functionality behind paid services. Discord has been squeezing free-tier file uploads and call quality etc. down steadily and cranking up subscription costs over the last year or two, throwing in chaff like animated avatar frames to try and justify the user cost. They're also doing the same misdirection thing again here, pointing to Thing We All Hate to deflect from thing we might not like very much when they do it. Booo elon booo we all hate elon!!! wait how do we feel about subscription models again,

watch out for this to kill porn on bsky like it has killed porn on every other social platform 👍 boooo we hate elon boooo stupid idiot and his 'everything app' booooo wait why do you need my tax information, what's that about mastercard,

Look, we are all aware social media is a money pit. Let's not forget dorsey was looking to sell twitter in the first place, long before elon's very public plunge into total online derangement. Subscription services are not going to plug the hole, so we are gradually going to see more and more spaghetti thrown at the wall while early funders shuffle cards and do their pyramid scheme bit bringing in stupider and stupider investments. this is the window in which bluesky will be temporarily worth using for us, for the idiot public, the poorly rendered crowd jpegs in the background of their venture capital MOBA. it's in their interests to slow and pad the decline as much as possible, because that is how they get maximally paid.

Given the scale of the money involved, and dorsey's weird ego investment, I think bluesky will probably manage a controlled drift for a good few years before it gets really bloated and painful. and by then we will all be so used to the *checks notes* decentralised developer ecosystem that we'll just be posting through it, watching another generation of columnists call another collapsing platform 'their beloved hellsite' and passing around that meme about not getting out of our chairs no sir until idk we all get on a fediverse neurolink alternative to stick it to the elongated muskrat and our brains pop peacefully in our sleep. which I guess is the closest thing to viability any social media platform can achieve.

anyway diogenes the cynic is also on bluesky

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azuremist · 7 months ago

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Cohost sucks, too (but not for the reasons that one user said)

So, you may recall a person on tumblr saying that Cohost sucks, which accused a transfem on the cohost team of predatory behavior. That was transmisogynistic bullshit, and was blatantly untrue.

But cohost does suck. Just for reasons unrelated to that.

Listing everything loosely in an order of “weird and sort of annoying” to “holy fuck”:

Tag capitalization is determined by how the first person who used the tag capitalized it

You have to personally email support and wait for them to get back to you if you want to delete your account

They call themselves a “not for profit” or “non profit”, despite being registered as a for profit LLC

There is only one moderator for this site of 30k+ users, which means reports aren’t responded to for weeks at a time

Staff and the userbase have a very odd parasocial relationship. The staff chronically overshares, call users their ‘friends’, and have gotten mad at users for reporting too many things on weekends, after hours, or holidays (with the subtext being that you should not expect them to do anything after hours). They even publicly post about how they are worried about paying rent because of the site’s financial situation, which is frankly disgusting. Especially when you see people in the comments barely able to scrape up the $5 USD to give them for the subscription service.

A member of staff publicly bragged about how Cloudflare forgot to bill them for hosting, which is not only wildly unprofessional, but could likely get them sued. (And Cloudflare could, at any time, ask them for the money they owe, for the record.)

Staff say that they want to be transparent with financials, but are incredibly inconsistent about financial updates

The platform is losing $10k-40k USD each month

Meanwhile, staff currently pays themselves $94k USD a year, per person. Sure, that’s not as much as the average person with their job title… but Cohost is losing tens of thousands of dollars each and every month, so that doesn’t really apply.

On top of the previous two points, staff doesn’t accept volunteers, and they’ve consistently implemented features that make no difference to the financials of the company

TL;DR:

The cohost staff are tech people who wanted to do a startup, got a loan from a rich friend, and is doing nothing to make the site sustainable. Meanwhile, they’re paying themselves almost $100k USD a year while still guilt-tripping their dirt-poor, largely queer userbase.

It sucks, because I really believe Cohost could succeed. You know what, no — I know Cohost could succeed. Between the Elon Musk-ification of Twitter (who has deemed Tweeting “I hate trans people” fine, but automatically blocks people from Tweeting “I hate cis people” for hate speech), and the owner of tumblr going mask-off transphobic Zionist… Right now, maybe more than ever, there is a serious niche of ‘social media for queer fandom nerds’, just waiting to be filled! And on the surface, Cohost is perfect!

And I like everything about Cohost… except for how it’s being managed. I want to see it succeed, because it could be amazing, if the people behind it just made better decisions. But, ultimately, I do not trust the people running Cohost to help it realize its potential.

Alas, it seems this isn’t the tumblr alternative we are looking for.

#cohost #tumblr #tumblr alternative #long post #azure does a thing #this one’s been cooking for a lil while #hellsite tag

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thequeensthroat · 1 month ago

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it may seem like I am constantly contemplating richie it movies (real guy who is my friend etc) but rest assured I am also contemplating eddie it movies. I think eddie it movies briefly had a subscription to some sort of awful startup meal replacement protein shake company. I wanted it to be “huel” but the timeline doesn’t work out. which means probably it was “soylent” which means he had a very very bad time when the news broke that soylent is like insanely full of lead and cadmium. thanks for following my blog

#it tag #a friend of mine in college very eagerly informed us all they were getting in to huel #and it was so transparently a symptom of acute depression I have never forgotten the bolt of fear this conversation sent into my heart

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slitherpunk · 1 year ago

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i remember in college i had to take a few shitty business classes for some reason. i think this was because they expected and wanted us computer science majors to go into some enterprise field. anyway. just remembering about one of the classes. it was supposed to be about like, learning how to come up with business ideas. (this i assume is because business majors have no inherent creativity and have to be told how to come up with something) and it was the whole, like "invent a problem your product can solve" shit. about half way through we all had to pitch something to the class, then get into groups and go forward with one idea for the end of the class. i remember my idea was the "adventure bus" which was a bus you could get on, and using the app, you vote on what turns it makes. i pitched it because it was stupid and made me laugh. for some unknown reason, people loved this idea. our group ended up going with another idea though of course. we were told that at the end of the class we'd actually have to pitch to a panel of investors that would come into the class. our idea was, for the lack of a good explanation (i don't think we'd even be able to explain it) was basically like, github for writers. not sure how that makes any sense. hardly made sense then. since we had to monetize it obviously, we came up with some sort of subscription idea. i don't remember how it worked exactly, but i remember it was nonsense that none of us really believed in because we just wanted to pass this class we had to take. for some reason, after that presentation we had to give, the investors wanted in on our idea. we had some time to decide. we didn't take the offer obviously. but that confuses the hell out of me to this day. were we that good at actually pitching this nonsense bullshit? is that how all these shitty startups happen?

#story time #idk where im going with this #feel free to extrapolate a lesson from my tale #ramble

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frances-baby-houseman · 6 months ago

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Adam's cousin's husband is a startup guy who like, hit it big and basically retired (we think he did like, pixel tracking in email marketing or some shit like that) and then was like, I'm ready for act II using today's brilliant technology!!

and he wants us to be "alpha testers" for his new app which is

an AI storytelling app for kids where they create characters and then the AI writes a 12 chapt book for them, all for a monthly subscription fee

and we said we couldn't do it because we don't have an ipad and we were on the spot

but if he asks again I am going to tell him I don't want my children's creativity and ideas to be used to train his learning model and that there are infinite human brains out there writing every kind of story for children and that we are very happy not involving AI in anything involving our kids or ourselves, if we can help it, we don't even have a smart speaker, and also that he has come up with the most cynical craven use of AI I've heard yet.

He's obviously never going to ask again but if my mother in law offers her ipad we're going to give her this speech.

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gabessquishytum · 1 year ago

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From the horny discord chat today, someone posted a picture of Trader Joe's trail mix, branded the "Omega Trek" mix. It snowballed from there.

Scheduled subscription boxes for omegas in heat! All the most cutting edge nutritious and tasty snacks and over the counter remedies to make the process more bearable for unpartnered omegas. But what happens if your heat comes early and your goodies aren't there yet?

So. Dream is a loner alpha who runs a company that makes products for these boxes, and omega Hob has signed up to be one of his product testers, but his heat comes and the shipment has gotten lost (or whatever we like.) Fortunately Hob happens to be in the same city as Dream and he could just drop by with the items he really needs tested! It's just... there's a deadline, right? And he really needs this data. Very important data! He can't wait another 3 months or whatever or take the time to have new volunteers do the legal paperwork needed to be his product testers or he won't make the production deadline.

So he'll just drive the snacks over to this guy himself, no problem! What could possibly go wrong?

Actively yelling over the idea of Startup Company Guy Dream. His siblings laugh at him because what does he do for a living?! Put nuts and seaweed and chocolate into boxes?? Spend hours calculating the vitamins and minerals needed for a healthy heat?? Even his kinder family members think it won't last a month.

But Hob saw the product advertised on tiktok or something and thought it was a great idea!! So he signs up to test it about 6 months before the product is launched, and agrees to fill out a bunch of questionnaires and do an interview.

...and the data really IS important, which is how Dream ends up standing on Hob’s porch, waiting for him to answer the door. He should probably just drop the box there and leave but... it seems polite to at least check in with this guy who has agreed to help him out!

Unfortunately when Hob cracks open the door, he gets a whiff of yummy snacks AND yummy alpha. His mouth starts watering, and he accidentally swings the door wide open. It all goes a bit downhill from there.

Well, not downhill. But Hob’s experience of taste testing the snacks mostly involves him sitting on Dream’s knot and being lovingly fed in the brief periods when they're not fucking hard. So Hob probably can't give an entirely objective review of Dream’s project, but he can say with absolute certainty that everything Dream has given him tastes absolutely divine. Not just the snacks 😉

The snacks give Dream and Hob a great opportunity to stay in touch, because Hob does genuinely want to help because the product was yummy and left him feeling much better than usual after his heat. Every time they meet up to discuss the product though, it inevitably turns into another excuse to fall into bed together!

When the snacks finally launch to be sold on the open market, they're obviously a total success! At the launch party Hob finally, timidly suggests that maybe he and Dream should start seeing each other like... normal people? Not just under the guise of business stuff?

And Dream shyly hands him a personally curated box of snacks with all his favourites, and asks if Hob would consider sharing his next heat with Dream? As boyfriends this time?

And then they fuck in the bathroom, and Dream is late to give his speech, but it's totally worth it <3

#karalynlovescake #the sandman #dreamling #nsft #cw omegaverse #cw food

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alpconsulting · 2 years ago

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What is Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)?

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is when a company uses third-party services to handle the recruitment function as a whole or partially. With the help of RPO, you can get experts to take care of sourcing, screening, hiring or onboarding of talents while focusing on the core business areas.

Such recruitment solutions make use of talent analytics, recruitment technology and effective sourcing strategies to make sure you get the best candidates. Engaging the services of an RPO provider can bring down the hiring time by 40% and cost savings by up to 50%.1

The external recruitment specialists take into account your requirements, company goals and all other recruitment challenges you may be facing before zeroing in on the right resource.

Research shows that around 43% of top companies are likely to partner with an RPO provider and that they see it as a strategic partnership for talent acquisition.2 The RPO solution can give your company a competitive edge if implemented in the right manner.

When the recruiting and hiring process is seamless, you can ensure that the right people are in the right position. This creates a work culture and environment that is conducive to growth. In this way, your company is better poised for success.

Different Types of RPO Models

Companies usually decide to opt for RPO when they are met with challenges like a sudden rise in recruitment demand, the technical complexity of roles, lack of geographical coverage or performance issues within the internal recruitment team. The key thing to understand is that recruitment process outsourcing is not a one-size-fits-all hiring solution.

There are various RPO models that you can consider. The particular RPO model that you decide to go with should be in line with the needs of your company. Let’s look at some of the most popularly seen RPO models out there:

On-demand model: used to meet the immediate hiring needs of a company. Companies can save a lot of money and time when they entrust this with an RPO provider that is already familiar with the company processes.

Function or project-based model: when the hiring is outsourced for a particular division or for a new project. This end-to-end approach can be specifically used for a new product launch or the opening of a new branch.

Full RPO model: when the RPO acts like an internal recruiting team and takes care of all the hiring decisions, processes or strategies.

Selective RPO model – In this model, only specific components of your internal recruitment process will be effectively taken care of by the RPO provider say just sourcing, screening or candidate management.

What do RPO Services Include?

Under recruitment process outsourcing, the scope of services can vary according to the needs of your company and as per the RPO model that you choose to go with. Some of the services can include:

Workforce Planning

Strategic Sourcing

Pre-employment Screening

Talent Engagement

Candidate Management

Recruitment Analytics Support

Compliance

Risk Management

What are the Benefits of RPO

By choosing the recruitment process outsourcing, the internal HR department at your firm can be free of some responsibilities and utilize the time for other critical tasks. When you are able to fill open positions faster with the help of RPO services, this can also greatly reduce the number of HR resources spent on sourcing candidates. RPO providers are measured based on time to hire, cost of hire and quality of hire. A plethora of benefits are there for RPO services and these could have a direct bearing on your company’s bottom line as well. Here are some of the top benefits of engaging RPO solution providers;

Improved Candidate Quality: recruitment agents follow their own set of processes to make a decision on the candidates that could be the right fit for your company. This is not just based on experience and education.

Cost Savings: the recruiting costs along with average costs per hire can be significantly reduced by engaging an RPO

Time-Saving: RPO reduces the time to hire by 40% and this, in turn, reduces the organization’s lost productivity when many open positions remain to be filled.

Consistency & Predictability of Process: you will not risk losing good candidates when they are left in the dark without consistent updates. They are always well informed as to where they stand in the recruiting process.

Access to talent pools: experienced recruiters can help leverage untapped sourcing channels or networks to access additional candidates and even have access to candidates with niche skill sets.

Better Scalability: opting for RPO can help with the changing needs of your company making it easier to scale up with and ensuring that talent acquisition is up to speed.

Reporting Transparency: regular reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs) and service level agreements (SLAs) can make it easier to measure and track performance. This can help to identify process improvements and have a better idea of future hiring needs.

Page Source: https://alp.consulting/what-is-recruitment-process-outsourcing-rpo/

#RPO services #RPO for startups #subscription based recruitment services #subscription based RPO services

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smidge-j · 7 months ago

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Introducing a new tech startup!

Watr!

For a monthly subscription $39.99, we will deliver fresh bottled water directly to your door! No more drinking from council pipes.

In a few more months, we'll begin to automate the delivery process using vacuum sealed high pressure tubes, with a network connecting all our customers directly to the source. Using robots and AI, we will be able to deliver Watr directly to your door, on demand!

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janetjacksonseo · 1 year ago

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sumikatt · 11 months ago

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frankly, i think your point about "some people train their own AI art models" is inherently flawed because rhe vast majority of people are not training their own model. they are paying for a service which was trained on art that was taken from the internet and used without permission in order for a machine to try snd recreate something similar bit by bit. i havent gotten a commission from someone who isnt a friend of mine in well over a year because people are just choosing to generate art with AI. i dont think AI art isnt "real" art because yeah, i agree with you, the whole idea of real art or not is complex. however, it is an undeniable reality that AI is trained on the work of artists all over the world who do not even get asked for permission before a tech company makes money off of their hard work.

I agree it’s a small, small portion of people making their own models that ensure that all art involved is used with consent. Many people buy a subscription or credits to generate what they want. Most people probably use free credits on Discord to make a meme or anime girls. Many people use it many different ways, yes.

I’m sorry you’ve lost a client over it. I know commissions are hard. Freelancers without dedicated clients would be the ones to suffer most from the popularity of AI art. I can’t say I’ve felt the impact myself, since it’s also very popular to be anti-AI.

Actively searching through job boards, I also feel like it has barely affected those listings. Maybe one of like 300 art jobs in the USA/Sweden asked for AI experience (Prompt Artist), and it was an AI startup. The “normal” art jobs like UI/UX, Environments, Materials, Concept, Technical, Animator, etc all still asking for 3 years experience for entry level lmao. Saw an intern position that required an “industry-standard” portfolio. So still a pain as it was before advanced AI gen.

Many paid AI art services have takedown options for their training sets and can block names from being prompted. If you were a popular enough artist to be in a training set, you can remove it and block the majority of AI art users from copying you—like you said, a majority of people use these services instead of self-hosting.

(Sending DMCA takedown requests are actually pretty easy. I had to send one to an old teacher who reposted my art and a bunch of classmates’ art on her ArtStation. that was funny lol)

I’m not sure how I felt when I went to search up my art on haveibeentrained. Because I’m a nerd, I’d preemptively blocked scrapers on my portfolio, so nothing was there when I looked. Searched up my legal name, my old Twitter (which had some popular pieces), my old DeviantArt usernames. Nothing there, either. I was probably pruned from the set for being low-quality. Kinda funny, I thought I’d be good enough to include at least once. Maybe next time.

.safetensors / .ckpt files (which are the models Stable Diffusion runs) have no image data in them, by the way. It is all math and numbers in there. There is no way of telling what was included in the training set, unless the dev(s) that made the model release it publicly. The models themselves are usually around 3–6 GB, though there’s larger ones and mini ones.

Like my own silly brain, there’s no way of tracking down the exact art pieces the software was referencing off of when it generates something. Am I making money off of another artist’s hard work when I remember how to draw heads from a Proko video? Am I ripping off photographers when I recall their pictures when drawing my characters? I’m not a tech company, but I still make money off of the things I copy and filter through my mind and hand.

I’m rambling at this point, sorry. Of course, the core issue is capitalism. How different would people see this medium if money were not an issue? How futuristic, how exciting it is to visualize something from words alone. It’s that art machine I’d always wanted as a kid, where I think of something and it pops out on the page finished.

I think it is worth to uplift those who use the medium as ethically as they can, as @are-we-art-yet is doing—having a do-not-use artist list, avoiding corporations, don’t try to undercut traditional artists. Like with any medium, there’s a variety of artists. Some are nice and do their best to have a good impact, some don’t care at all about the ethics of their art.

I’m still pretty firmly a “traditional” artist. I won’t stop drawing or give up because of AI. I play with AI on my own hardware and power for fun and for getting ideas (is that stealing?). It’s mostly replaced scrolling through Pinterest for me, but I still save people’s art and photos that I like in my computer, so I can look at em later, maybe get inspired. And steal like an artist, I guess.

#.s #ai art #long post #sorry. i have thoughts syndrome and on painkillers 👍#anonymous

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