#how much it cost to make an app

[moonsidesong]

i think its kinda funny that ibis paint is regarded as the Broke Artist App or whatever (as opposed to more mainstream programs like csp or procreate) because its free and because of how popular it is with phone + finger artists while im jusg sitting here having used ibis for a cool eight years on purpose.

like i have an ipad and an apple pencil and all theyre very nice and i absolutely could move to a more powerful program i have the resources to do so but my change averse brain has decided they like it here a lot and im not leaving

[blyszczopies]

tbh i would like to start taking commissions for full pieces so like. fully shaded, with a background or with characters interacting. you know i like to make more detailed drawings too. the problem is i never have enough examples and it would take me so long to make enough for every single type of drawing. i would probably also have to stick to one style as not to make a lot of types of commissions to choose from where they dont even differ that significantly.

in theory i could go with some sort of "heres what i can do for 30$" but the drawing quality would still very much differ on how many characters would be in a piece or if there would be a detailed background or not. i tried collecting my existing drawings that could theoretically be drawn for the same prices and looking at them i think that would be too confusing for everybody

this is why i offer one single type of a commission at a time. even though i could and would like to draw other stuff too...

either way the post advertising these pagedoll commissions will be up soon therefore i will be officially open for them (thumbs up)

[nightmareonpeachstreet]

Social media apps really out here like “oh oopsie poopsie 🥺 you forgot to turn on notifications~ you wanna know what’s going on with me 24/7, right??? 🥴🥴🙈”

I want it to send a message to the ceo every time I say ‘see less often’ that says “no bitch she hates you specifically. Actually she tweeted last week that she hopes someone pisses in your egg salad sandwich every day”

[girlwiththegreenhat]

tell me you've never had to use skype without telling me you've never had to use skype: you complain about discord

[glacioclasm]

i hope all companies that charge money for proper aac apps die and go to hell forever

[overly-distressed-mouse]

Having enrichment time in my enclosure (Planning out entire outings down to the smallest details)

[insanechayne]

~ ~ ~

[foldingfittedsheets]

When deciding who to work for there is a sliding scale of employers that goes from lil mom and pop shops up to corporate monoliths. I have worked at both ends of the spectrum and I can pretty definitively say that tiny businesses are hands down the most insane employers.

The sweet spot is a place that has like 10-20 stores; that’s the best possible work environment. They’ll be polished enough to have protocols that make work structured, but not so bogged down with bureaucracy that nothing can ever get done.

This story is not from that sweet spot. This story is from my time working at Oil and Vinegar. Now, like many little franchise stores, the idea was solid. There was on tap imported olive oil and vinegar and it was really delicious. Top shelf. Unfortunately, each location was like the Wild West because owners varied wildly.

My owner was the human embodiment of Mr. Krabbs. His eyes were just constant dollar signs. Throughout my training he informed me of the price of every single piece of equipment I touched and how much it cost to replace it.

He had cameras set up to watch us, and an app on his phone to access the live feed. He’d call us to ask what we were doing when he’d just checked a camera to make sure we were being honest.

Now, the trouble was he had two locations. His location further south did amazing. It was way more centrally located and got three times the foot traffic. The one I worked in was in the snottiest mall possible in Arizona and consequently the rent was through the roof.

It was not going well for my store. We didn’t get as much traffic, so there was only so much I could do in a day. I could dust, sweep, and wait for customers. I read a lot and was frank when he called to interrogate me. I always asked for additional tasks but he never had any. What could I do to prop up a failing business?

But this man was convinced there was some Secret Reason that the store I was in was doing worse. He crunched numbers, looked at staff, and eventually hit upon the most insane possible solution.

We used too much toilet paper.

We were probably stealing toilet paper! Bleeding him dry one single ply square at a time! How dare we need to use the bathroom?! His south location used half as much toilet paper as we did, we must be thieving little monsters!!!!

Friends. The south location was populated entirely by men. My location had three people on staff who had to sit to pee. It was so blindly transparently the source of the discrepancy but this man was convinced we were making off with toilet paper to bankrupt him.

So he implemented what he believed to be an entirely reasonable response to this base treachery. We were allowed to have one roll of toilet paper. At any given time, one roll was permitted to us. This was so transparently unhinged that we protested but he insisted. If we were low on toilet paper we needed to call him to drop off a roll that he brought from his home. Smiling jovially, he assured us he lived so close by that it would be no problem!

When we needed to call him often for more he started tearing his hair out. What were we using toilet paper for?! Why wasn’t his genius plan to stop our scandalous waste working??!

Finally, the manager, the only man on staff had to pull the owner aside and be like, “Look, man, their bladders are smaller. They need to wipe every time they pee. They need to pee even more on their period. Is this really the hill you want to die on?”

Yes. It was. The manager was fired unrelated reasons and denounced as a traitor. The toilet paper ration lasted until I quit and probably until the store closed six months later.

[inkskinned]

i think a lot about exactly 1 thing from the roman empire: the concept of bread and circus. the idea was that if your population was fed and entertained, they wouldn't revolt. you are asking us to give up our one small life, is the thing - for under 15 dollars an hour.

what would that buy, even. i am trading weekends and late nights and my back health. i am trading slow mornings and long walks and cortisol levels. i am trading sleep and silence and peace. for ... this. for what barely-covers-rent.

life really is more expensive right now. you aren't making that up. i make almost 3 times what i did 5 years ago, and despite an incredibly equal series of bills - i am still struggling. the most expensive line item i added was to own a dog. the money is just evaporating.

we were okay with it because it's a cost-benefit analysis. i could handle the customer harassment and standing all day and the manager's constantly changing temperament - i was coming home to hope, and my life planned in a blue envelope. three hours would buy me my dog's food for a month. i can give up three hours for him, for his shiny coat and wide, happy mouth. three days could be a new mattress, if i was thrifty. if i really scrimped and saved, we could maybe afford a trip into the city.

recently i cried in the car about the price of groceries.

business majors will be mad at me, but my most inflammatory opinion is that people should never be valued at the same place as products. your staff should not be a series of numbers in an excel sheet that you can just "replace" whenever you need something at that moment. your staff should be people, end of sentence.

it feels like someone somewhere is playing a very bad video game. like my life is a toy. like someone opened an app on their phone and hired me in diner dash ultra. they don't need to pay me well or treat me alright - they can always just show me the door. there is always someone more desperate, always someone more willing.

but i go to work and know i could save for years and not afford housing. i am never going to own my own home, most likely. i have no idea how to afford her ring, much less the wedding. my dog doesn't have his own yard. everything i love is on subscription. if i lose my job, i have no "nest egg" to catch my falling.

this thin life - they want me to give up summer for it. to open my mouth and throat and swallow the horrible hours and counted keystrokes. they want me to give up mountains and any non-federal holiday. to give up snow days. to give up talking to my mom whenever i want. to give up visiting the ocean and hearing the waves.

bread and circus worked for a while, actually. it was the kind of plan that would probably now be denounced by republicans as socialist commie liberal pronoun bullshit.

but sometimes i wonder if we should point them to the part of the history book that says: it worked until it didn't.

[sagxshi]

i fucking hate everything about applying for mcat fee assistance this shit fucking sucks fuck the aamc

[glasseswearingrabbitdetective]

Tbh I feel like I spent a ton of money lately in general … it’s very dangerous gkakva this is meant to be my LIFE SAVINGS GKAKVK Aka money which is in my bank, stays in my bank and adds up… NOT decreases… meanwhile my ACTUAL wallet balance is… pitiful… hence why I have to keep dipping into money I rly don’t have gkakcka and this is probably why I STILL haven’t moved house- given how insanely expensive it is… >> mcfucking help me gkakvka

[bisexualbaker]

Why do people keep recommending Dreamwidth as a Tumblr alternative, when Dreamwidth and Tumblr are so different?

To be flat-out honest, it's because Dreamwidth has so many things that Tumblr users say they want, even if it's also lacking a lot of features that Tumblr users have come to love:

Dreamwidth has incredibly lax content hosting rules. I'd say that it's slightly more restrictive than AO3, but only just slightly, and only because AO3's abuse team has been so overwhelmed and over-worked. Otherwise, the hosting policies are pretty similar. You want to go nuts, show nuts? You can do that on Dreamwidth.

In fact, Dreamwidth is so serious about "go nuts, show nuts", it gave up the ability to accept transactions through PayPal in 2009 to protect our ability to do that. (It's also one reason why Dreamwidth doesn't have an app: Dreamwidth will never be beholden to Apple's content rules this way.)

Dreamwidth cares about your privacy; it doesn't sell your data, and barely collects any to begin with. As far as I'm aware, it only collects what it needs to run the site. The owners have also spoken out on behalf of internet privacy many times, and are prepared to put their money where their mouth is.

No ads. Ever. Period. They mean it. Dreamwidth is entirely user funded.

Posts viewed in reverse chronological order; no algorithm, opt-in or otherwise. No algorithm at all. No "For You" or "Suggested" page. You still entirely create and curate your own experience.

The ability to make posts that only your "mutuals", or even only a specific subset of your "mutuals", can see. Want to make a post that's only open to Bonnie, Clyde, Butch, and Cassidy? You can do that! Want to make a post that's only open to Bonnie and Butch, but Clyde and Cassidy can't see shit? You can do that, too!

The owners have forsworn NFTs and the blockchain in general. Not as big a worry now as it was even a year ago, but still good to know!

We are explicitly the customers of Dreamwidth. Dreamwidth wants to make us happy, so any changes they make (and they do make changes) are made with us in mind, and after exploring as many possibilities as they can.

Dreamwidth is very transparent about their policies and changes. If you want to know why they're making a specific change, or keeping or getting rid of a feature, they will tell you. You don't have to find out ten months later that they're locked into a contract to keep it for a year (cough cough Tumblr Live cough cough).

So those are some things that Tumblr users would probably love about Dreamwidth.

Another reason Dreamwidth keeps being recommended is that a significant portion of the Age 30+ crowd spent a lot of earlier fandom years on a site known as LiveJournal. Dreamwidth may not be much like Tumblr, but it it started out as a code fork of LiveJournal, so it will be very familiar to anyone who spent any time there. Except better.

Finally, we're recommending Dreamwidth because some of the things that Tumblr users want are just... not going to happen on the web as it is now. Image hosting is the big one for this. Maybe in the future, the price of data will be much cheaper, and Dreamwidth will be able to host as much as we all want for a pittance that a fraction of the userbase will happily pay for everyone, but right now that's just not possible.

Everywhere you want to go that hosts a lot of images will either be running lots of ads, selling your data, or both.

Dreamwidth knows how much it costs to host your data, and has budgeted for that. They are hosting within their means, within our means.

Dreamwidth is the closest thing we may ever get to AO3 as a social media platform. One of the co-owners is from, and still in, fandom; she knows our values, because they are also her values. It may as well be the Blogsite Of Our Own.

[esperderek]

I have to have a chuckle at the Screenrant article posted recently about the Galactic Starcruiser, which totally wasn't about Jenny Nicholson's video honest.

In part, because early in Nicholson's video, she talks about how unnatural it is to have your influencers speak in adcopy and copyright rather than the more colloquial nicknames, and how it makes the people speaking about the product seem very insincere and, well, paid off. Because normal humans don't speak that way, but advertising does.

What's the first two lines in this article?

"As a life-long fan of Star Wars, there was nothing quite as exciting as finding out that I would be working on the immersive Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser experience. Located at the Walt Disney World Resort, the Galactic Starcruiser opened on March 1, 2022, and welcomed passengers to board a two-day, two-night cruise through the stars, during which they could live out their own Star Wars adventure."

No one talks like this naturally. No one writes like this naturally.

This is supposed to be your passioned defense of the place you worked at, the people you worked with, and the memories you made along the way. C'mon! Why don't you open with a story, perhaps an anecdote about the best moment you had working there, or the devastation of the day you lost your dream job. We need to feel your humanity! But there's nothing of that here, to the point where you can just hear the TM behind Galactic Starcruiser.

The first half of this article continues in this vein, reading like a press release Disney marketing put out, just with past tense rather than present or future tense:

"Essentially, the Starcruiser experience was a 48-hour movie that passengers were actually a part of. It was all facilitated through the "datapad," which was accessed through the Play Disney Parks app."

"To facilitate the overarching immersive experience and storytelling, the Starcruiser built a jam-packed itinerary for each and every guest that would consist of a variety of important activities: the captain's toast at muster, a bridge training exercise, lightsaber training, and more. These types of events were essential to understanding what was happening, as they would give passengers the chance to interact with characters and build their story. This is why the Starcruiser could never be just a hotel; every part of it was designed for enthusiastic interaction."

Like, c'mon. I used to work in television. I've seen and used adcopy in my former job, and this is some serious adcopy. It honestly wouldn't shock me if the author dredged up some old adcopy they had lying around about the topic and just transferred it over, changing the tense. You're not here to sell us this product, because there is no product to sell. It's gone, it's been gone for a year, you don't have to sell us on IT. Speak about your experiences.

The next part is yet another topic that Jenny Nicholson pointed out, the bad faith excuses that influencers and advertisers made for the extreme price point:

"What many people don't know, however, is that the price included much more than just a room. The passengers' food, park tickets, recreation activities on board, non-alcoholic drinks, and more were all included - with merchandise being one of the few additional costs on board."

Which is absolute bad faith reasoning, especially when there are plenty of other vacation options that are ALSO all-inclusive, but are MUCH cheaper and offer MORE amenities than the Galactic Starcruiser did! Including Disney Cruises, owned by the same company! Seriously, you can go on a halfway decent sounding cruise or all-inclusive resort somewhere warm for, like, a week or two and spend far less than GSC cost.

Then the last part is essentially: "All the workers liked working there and the bad reviews afterwards make the workers who worked on it feel sad. :("

Which, like, companies have been hiding behind that reasoning for ages. Curiously, the author never offers....any reasons or stories. WHY did working on it impact you so much? What set it apart, what were the people like, what did you like about working there, why are you so passionate about it even a year later? There's nothing, just a generic sort of "We worked hard." and "We're sad it's gone." Why? How? What happened? The video you're obviously writing this in response to is filled with personal anecdotes and stories, it's the backbone of the video! Again, you need to give us something to show your humanity!

Especially when you consider that Nicholson repeatedly points out that the only highlight about her experience, the only thing that kept the damn thing going was the workers.

She had nothing but praise for them, and nothing but contempt for the higher ups who wasted and abused that enthusiasm, to the point where one of her last points was "Hey, Disney is basically exploiting labor."

Much like Jenny, I'm also not condemning anyone who had a good time working there. Good! If you were having a good time at work, that's great. If you have good memories about the people, awesome. But I'll note two things:

a) That doesn't meant you weren't being exploited, and

b) That doesn't mean you have to be a useful idiot for the corporation you worked for afterwards.

I'm not conspiracy brained enough to go "Oh, Disney TOTALLY forced this article into being.", because a cursory examination of the author's prior works and such suggests a lifelong passion for Star Wars, she did work at the hotel, and she's a Star Wars Editor (whatever THAT means in this day and age) for Screen Rant. Apparently one of the heads of Screen Rant says that Disney had no hand in it either.

Though, I can see why people would think that way. It READS like a press release, not something a normal human being would write about an experience they feel passionate about.

[thehauntedetheral]

Yan Sugar Daddy

Requests are open!

• You were a broke college student even after doing part time job. You wanted to earn more money so asked your friends for suggestions.

• One friend of yours suggested to get a sugar daddy from website. You were a bit scared as you have no idea and experience about this but after much convincing from your friend you made an account on the app.

• After scrolling a bit you thought It's very unlikely for any sugar daddy to show interest in you when the website was filled with drop dead gorgeous sugar babies available. You felt insecure and deleted the app forgetting to delete your account.

• You continued your college and part time job. Forgotten about your account still being active.

• While Yan Sugar Daddy scrolled through the app and your account caught his attention especially your photo. He thought you were beautiful and so simple. He sent you many messages on app but no reply. He would check the app many times a day in hope of seeing your reply. After many days passed and nothing from you he decided it's time to finally meet you in person.

• He got details about you through his mens. Your address, your college schedule, your part time job location, your birth place, your date of birth, your zodiac sign, your favourite ice cream flavour everything. This man made sure his team didn't leave anything.

• And hence here he is waiting for you at your college campus radiating money, power and glory through his work suit, and handsome face. Hell even the watch he is wearing is of the cost of your years of salary you thought.

•"Ms y/n?" He approached you while you were just stood like a statue there mouth open. How come this man is here you thought. You remember seeing his profile in a blur on app before deleting.

"Close your mouth, love. Or people might think I said something offensive to you" he said chuckling looking at your expression.

Seeing your uncomfortable expressions he offered to talk to you over a lunch in a nearby restaurant rather than in your college campus. You accepted it not wanting to create any gossip at college.

You both wear sitting in a fine dining one of the most expensive restaurant in city whose reservations are hard to get even for some elites. By saying a near by restaurant you thought about some local restaurant near your college campus not this. But nevermind it's his money not yours. His money his choice you thought.

• He explained how he wants to be your sugar daddy. When you didn't reply his next sentence was "I can double the weekly allowance if you want". But you still didn't accepted it. You told him how the account and everything was a mistake and that he should find some one else you explained and left. You were scared about this whole relationship even though you needed money.

• You left the place but not his mind. He would send you expensive flowers with notes, perfumes, wines of old collection to your address in hope of you accepting. He never got a no as answer. And he will make sure to convert your no to yes. no matter what it takes.

• What in the fifty shades of grey Christan grey the fuck is happening? You thought while continuously getting gifts from him.

• He even paid your college fees in advance for upcoming years.

• By all the constant stuff he was doing you finally said yes and signed a contract with him.

• You entered his world.

• Yan is definitely dominant and rough in sheets.

• Would tie you up, blindfolded you,pull your hair, overstimulate you until you are a begging, crying mess.

• Is kinky. Would put a vibrator in your cunt and control the speed via remote kept in his pocket while you both are dining outside. Enjoying seeing you trying to control your moans.

• Is very protective of you. Someone tried to flirt with you? Would definitely make his security team beat him up till they are unconscious.

• You liked him while this man was crazy in love with you.

• Would spoil you with gifts, jewellery, dresses, perfumes, flowers, dates, vacations, handbags, shoes anything you want. Hell even his black card is with you most of the time because he says so.

• Kisses you any chance he gets.

• Makes you move into his penthouse so that he could spend more time with you.

• Carriers you in his arms whenever you are drunk afraid that you will fall with your high heels.

• Helps in wearing your heels.

• Is a gentleman in public and an freak in sheets.

• You looked at something for too long during shopping next day it's getting delivered to you. ( This man is god level rich and doesn't even think about the cost when it comes to you)

• You always wanted to go to paris? Well let's go darling his private jet is ready.

• This man is utterly whipped for you. Would do anything for you.

• You came into this arrangement to pay off your college and since your graduation is near and so is the contract expiry.

• You decided to part ways after graduation and contract expiration. When you tell him about your decision. He is absolutely devasted. Did he not love you enough? You are his everything. How could you even think about leaving him??

• This man has hired a professional proposal planner to propose you to be his wife and you are thinking about parting ways? Good joke baby. Good joke. But this is not gonna happen. The only way you are leaving this contract is with your last name changed to his and your finger bearing his engagement ring.

• And even if you rejected the proposal despite all of it he can trap you with him by his baby he thought with an evil smirk.

Requests are open!

For more yandere reading:

[exeggcute]

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.