Reddit is Destroying Itself

28:22Start it. What do you believe Reddit is? I think Reddit is one of the most popular sites on the internet. It's a bunch of user-generated content and links. Basically, people are posting links and writing content and then they are in individual communities called subreddits where people in those communities upvote and downvote, bring stuff to the top, talk about it. It's a common place to find news, to find stories, to find products, to find information. Our videos get posted to Reddit all the time. And I believe that's actually some of the most valuable, useful feedback that I've gotten sometimes is you get to see comments from people who have never seen the videos before.

28:59So Reddit is a site where you find stuff like that. I see it as a forum of forums. So we used to have individualized forums all over the internet. Like you'd go to this website called GeekHack that I used to use for mechanical keyboard stuff back in like 2011. But then eventually the r slash mechanical keyboard subreddit just way overtook it because it's a centralized place where you can find all of the forums that you would want to participate in. And then aggregate them into one, your homepage. So like imagine if all the different forums you used to be a part of. Also, if you don't know what a forum is, you missed the golden age of the internet.

29:35It was a weird place. All the Zoomers probably did. But so yeah, so then like you can be subscribed to 10 different forums and now they're aggregated on your front page and you can be like, oh, yeah, maybe I should, like I should check the thing about mechanical keyboards today because this post looks super interesting. Yeah. I also like almost think of Reddit as kind of, you said information. We talk all the time about Googling things with just Reddit at the end. It almost feels like the way better conversational version of like Yahoo Answers or Quora. Because you're getting actual people who are answering and a lot of the times there'll be like an ask Reddit question.

30:08They're like, people who have done this or people who are actual doctors in this very specific field. And someone will be like, yes, I'm a doctor in this very specific field and here's a bunch of really specific information. And you can reply to those so people can then talk about that information even further. So it's not just like, here's an answer, this is the best answer. Here's an answer and here's why everyone also is conversation-based. I love it for whenever there's a new Dota 2 patch because people just go off. It's just fun. It's just so fun. Yeah, there's a lot of specific communities I'm in.

30:38I'm in the Ultimate Frisbee subreddit. I'm in the... Man. Like certain car brands will have subreddits where like a new software update for Tesla comes out and then everyone who uses it will post what they found and figure stuff out in the Tesla Motors subreddit. I did an AMA in just the AMA subreddit. People just ask people with interesting experiences anything and then there's a whole threaded conversation with that person. So yeah, there's a lot going on. It's great. Now I have a question for all of you, except Adam. When you use Reddit on your phone, how do you use it? Yes. What app do you use?

31:09So typically I use Relay for Reddit, which is a third-party app, beautiful UI, great UI and sorting and everything just works really well. Android only. Android only. Relay for Reddit. What do you use on your iPhone? I typically don't open Reddit on my iPhone, but I will either Google something with the word Reddit at the end or I will stumble across a Reddit link and just open it in Safari. Yeah, so the annoying thing about opening a Reddit link though in your browser is that it's like, please use the official app. Please use the official app and you can't read more comments unless you... I use Relay for Reddit whenever I'm on an Android phone and I use Apollo for Reddit whenever I'm on an iPhone.

31:49Yeah. I use something... It's just called RAF now, which I learned pretty recently. It was called Reddit is Fun, but I think since they were using the term Reddit in there, maybe there are some reasons for that. Oh, yeah. They did actually make everyone get rid of having Reddit at the beginning. So now it's Apollo Reader, I think, or something like that. And Relay was Relay for Reddit. Yeah, Relay for Reddit instead of Reddit Relay or something. Wait, why didn't we let Adam answer? Because he uses the official app and I don't want to listen to him. The official Reddit app, baby. Although, as of like a month ago or a month and a half ago, I started using the Apollo Reddit app.

32:24And then all this stuff happened. Oh, really? Great timing, Adam. Yeah, perfect timing. What happened? Okay, so. Okay. Reddit. Yes. Decided to make some changes to their API. they're going to start charging man I'm already lost in my notes here but anyways they're going to start charging people for usage of their API because up until now all of these third party apps that we've been talking about were using their API for free and just a little further back there Reddit didn't used to have their own app I've been using Reddit as fun for probably 10 years at this point only a couple years ago was when the official Reddit app became an official app they bought Alien Blue And they bought a third-party app.

33:07Which is a third-party app on iOS. They bought it and they turned it into the official app, changed the color scheme, and made it available on Android. Really quickly, for people that don't know, can you explain what an API is? It's an application programming interface. It's basically a way for that website to access all that website's information. It's like a plug-in that you use. Basically, in all of our apps, every single thing that you do uses the API to contact Reddit and then send back something. And an upvote is an API call. A comment is an API call. Posting something is a call. Reading your DMs is a call.

33:43At least one call every single time. Anything that you do that officially interfaces with the actual website servers is an API call. Yeah. So we have third-party apps on Twitter that have a similar thing. We used to. We used to. We don't anymore. We could make parallels with this. There are a lot of parallels with this, actually. Got it, got it. Yeah, you would like to retweet something and that's an API call and you had a limited number of those. Okay, cool. So I'm gonna go through, I just wanted to like point that out there that like Reddit is insanely popular. Reddit, obviously because mobile phones have become so popular, we use the internet on mobile so much, like you have to give part credit to these third party apps in helping make Reddit so popular because they literally didn't have one.

34:29Like people had to make them in order to have a good experience on mobile. Yeah, they didn't have an official app until a couple years ago. Yeah, it was like very recently. It was all third-party apps for a very long time. They just had like a mobile website, I guess. And it was garbage, yeah. The website's not the... I love how simple the website is, and I still use old.reddit.com. Yeah. Everybody should. Yeah. But like that in a web page is... It's very forum. It's just white with text across it. Yeah, it's good. It's the wrong one to use. The right one to use. Oh, my God. I was literally going to throw you out of this room in a minute.

34:59Okay, so Reddit's going to start charging for API usage. They're going to be charging$0.24 per 1 ,000 API calls. And like we said before, an API call is like literally every single time you interface. Upvoting, downvoting, like most basic thing. So if you make a Reddit app and you have a user, a single user that makes 1 ,000 Reddit calls, then you will owe Reddit$0.24. Correct. So if you have a lot of users making a lot of API calls, you will owe Reddit a lot of money. Yes. Correct. Yeah. And it's really hard to judge the multitude of what 24 cents per thousand API calls is because that seems pretty cheap.

35:37But you have to start getting into the side of these third-party app developers. So a lot of the information we're going to talk about today is from Christian Selig. He's the guy. I think I'm pronouncing that right. I think it's Selig. Selig. Yeah, I think you are right. He's the guy who runs Apollo. We actually, funnily enough, met him at WWDC very briefly. Really randomly. After the whole keynote mentioned Apollo like 100 times and all of us like, ooh, this is a rough week to be mentioning that because all of it just got announced before. And he's come out with some incredible information, a really long run through of kind of this whole story of how Reddit's been communicating with them and charging.

36:14Because I want to go over it. It feels like there's a lot of things that Reddit is doing poorly right now that's led to this really big backlash. and let's kind of go over, try and go over all of it. Okay. All right, so let's go over the story. This might get a little messy because there's stuff kind of all over the place. Also not messy, the soccer player, which I know this is just going to get, it's going to be a little all over the place. But I want to start this out with in January. So a lot of these third-party app developers, they're close with Reddit. Like they talk to them all the time.

36:45They said usually Reddit is pretty good at at least mentioning if a change to the API is coming that might break something in their app, in that sense, they're good at communicating. A lot of other senses with new features they want and stuff, they're pretty poor at communicating is the general overview of what these developers have said. It's tough. Not a lot of companies have third-party apps that they work well with. Yeah, and that's another reason why most of these companies, and Christian very specifically, said that they totally understand getting charged for this. In fact, he said he thought it was weird that for so long they never got charged.

37:20It's still their website. They're creating a better experience for it. They do think they should be charged. And he was talking with Reddit in January, I believe towards the end of January, and they said, we have no plans to change the API, at least not in 2023, maybe years to come after that, but if we do, it'll be for improvements. So that's in January. In April is when they make the first call to people that they are going to start charging for APIs. And that's when Christian and a lot of other developers say, like we get it totally understand like we do think we should be charging for it we are making money off of this like we're using your website it's kind of the uh what's the the remora fish for the shark of apple we talked about that yeah yep totally totally reasonable and i has just perked up he's like oh yeah i understand i'm actually bad at how good you are at analogies sometimes and then correct me if i'm wrong but they basically use twitter as an example of like yeah we will be charging but don't worry we know there's a ton of backlash with twitter and how much they're charging people like we don't expecting it to be they said it'll be based in reality yeah so i might be wrong about this twitter thing but what i understand is that twitter also has an api that you can use it's just that they make the api call costs so ridiculously high that it's sort of like yeah we totally have an api that you can use but like no one could possibly ever afford it And that's part of the reason why all the third-party Twitter apps had to shut down.

38:45I thought they just banned third-party apps. I think that they might have officially banned it eventually, but do you remember the token thing that you used to have to deal with? The token thing, yeah. You would have a limited amount of tokens that you could basically limited the number of users that you could have. So if you had a third-party Twitter app with a million users, it was capped. And then once you reached that number of users, a new person would try to sign up and sign in through the app and it wouldn't work. and they'd have to start a new listing on the Play Store for a new version of the app.

39:15So I was using this old one, Flamingo, because I got a token and I was in and they ran out and they just didn't refresh and it was an old app no one could use unless they had it a long time ago. But now they're just banned. You still can use the Twitter API. Yes, but not for a third-party app. Probably not for a third-party app. Oh, okay. You can use it for research or use it to scrape data to do a project or whatever, but you can't make a new Twitter app. and they're also charging$12 ,000 to$42 ,000 a month for that information. Sure. And lots of them just outright ban. YouTube bans, you can't make another YouTube app, another third-party app for YouTube or Instagram or anything.

39:54But YouTube and Twitter also had apps when they made their own apps. They didn't fully rely on other apps to be made to help make them as popular as they are today. Okay, so they said they would not, they announced the API change. They said it will be pricing based in reality, unlike things like Twitter. Unlike Twitter, yeah. And then also didn't give them a price at that point. So this is in April. Yeah. They said, we'll get back to you in two to four weeks with the price. Six weeks later, that's when they come out with the 24 cents per thousand API calls. And then that's when all of the developers started getting together being like, this seems absurd.

40:36Yeah. Christian did the quick math. it would cost him over$20 million a year based on what they're claiming based on how many people are using the app he gets about 7 billion API calls a month so it's over$2 million a month and then oh a month $2 million a month over$20 million a year that's ridiculous and these changes will be starting the billing cycle will start on July 1st which is 30 days Yeah, and the actual bill will come August first. So it's not like the bill comes right then, but that's still a very, very, very short amount of time. Just for example, remember, I know you remember this, remember when Apple bought Dark Sky?

41:18I don't know what you're talking about. About what? Dark Sky. Oh, Dark Sky? Yeah, yeah. So when they did that, and a lot of people were using Dark Sky's API, Apple gave them 18 months to find a solution, and after that 18 months, they decided to give them another year. so that's how long Apple gave dark sky API users to change this, Reddit is giving these people about 30 days which is for like every third party Reddit app and then do you want to explain why that's such a pain, like there's a reason why for some people that's I'll say the obvious answer and you can say why it's a problem I guess, so like the obvious answer is oh we'll calculate how much each user would use charge based on how much those users would be right, so like If you think one user is probably costing you$1 to$3 a month, you have to also put in Apple Play Store, like App Store, Play Store taxes on that.

42:11Just charge them per month for how much it would be for that. Boom, our app now costs$6 a month just to use it at all. That sounds easy. The biggest issue that Christian said he was facing was that a lot of people on Apollo, like Apollo has different pricing structures. There's a free structure, which most people use, but there are a lot of pro users. and the pro users you can either pay i think you can either pay per year or you can pay monthly i believe so yeah um but there are a lot of users that just pay per year because he gave them like a discount if you paid per year and it was like 12 bucks a year or something right it's like 12 or 20 a year right so he was like you know if i didn't have these yearly users i could just put a thing in the app that says i'm so sorry if you're gonna keep using apollo you have to start doing a subscription um beyond the fact that you know an average user cost him two dollars and fifty cents a month there are power users that cost seven dollars and fifty cents a month right and so he would have to like work out his pricing structure so that it like kind of includes those power users as well as the lower end users and uh but the biggest problem here is that all of those yearly subscribers that paid twelve dollars maybe last month they just subscribed for an entire year, right?

43:24So kind of best case scenario is that you're going to have a number of users whose yearly subscription expires next month, the month after that, the month after that, the month after that. But that means that just for July or just for August, his bill would be about $50 ,000 because the amount of people that subscribed for a year, 11 months ago, you would have to pay for all of those people and that's about fifty thousand dollars with that many people yeah not quite the bill but basically the money he would have to eat because he owes those people the whole year he owes those people their years of subscriptions they paid for already right yeah so there's a feature in these app stores or wherever you're using where you can either charge people every single month or you can charge them a lump sum for an entire year and maybe incentivize that give them a little discount but maybe they would have quit after six months so you got more money out of them this happens a lot more i feel like on the iphone because people realize iphone users have more money and spend more money on apps and stuff so a lot of iphone users will be given the opportunity to pay for a year of a subscription at a slight discount yeah now they have so many people who have paid for an entire year and suddenly are going to cost way more money yeah because they're going to still use api calls and he's just going to have to eat the cost of all the API calls.

44:45So he said the first month is going to cost him about 50 grand. The second month would cost him maybe 45 grand. The third month would cost him maybe 40 grand. Eventually that would run out, but that's still like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah. And it's stuff he believes that he owes to the people because they already paid for it. Like you deserve that service. Like they, they, it is totally fair for them to think they deserve this right. Even though things changed very quickly. And that's another reason why this like telling you nothing's going to happen four months later going completely against what they said and then also six weeks after that charging a price that is like completely bonkers i don't have the exact numbers on here but like i think one thing that was really interesting he mentioned was reddit has a very a limit of api call api calls a like user is allowed to make per day and it was something like, I don't remember the exact number.

45:44It was in the thousands and his average user is making around 300 and they called that inefficient. And he was like, this is a weird thing where it's like, you told me I could borrow your Model S, right? You said, I'm going away for the day. You can use it, just don't drive over 100 miles. And I get back and I drove three miles. And you're like, oh, that's weird. David rent borrowed it last week and he only drove one mile. It's like, why am I comparing myself to David driving? Yeah, I drove more than David. When you said don't drive over 100. Yeah, you said a limit for me. I'm nowhere near that limit, but then you're going to compare me to these other apps or drivers.

46:22So Christian was like, if I had more time, like a couple more months, I could maybe reduce the amount of API calls that are called by preloading pages or things, but I just don't have enough time. And also that's not going to make a huge difference. Well, and you also have the time then for the people who had already paid their year-long subscription to get closer and closer to the end of that. I mean, if you think about the DarkSky API, if they had given them a year to make this transition, he can end giving the year-long subscriptions now, start charging the reasonable prices that will actually pay for this, and then not just eat hundreds of thousands of dollars.

46:55And you'd still honor the people who you gave the year-long thing to. Okay, so in this process, when they were communicating, and this first came out, Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, if you're on Reddit and ever seen someone named Spez comment he is like the head he's the CEO but like a lot of people just see him as kind of like the head moderator on the website he had a call with Christian who they were talking about the new charges Christian mentioned how like based on what they're going to be charges for API calls and his average calls it would cost them about over 20 million dollars so he what he he says he made a joke along the lines of I'm going to like if you were telling me that Apollo for Reddit is going to cost you over$20 million, like, why don't you just cut me a check for$10 million because Apollo's way and make Apollo quiet because it's very noisy compared to what you're saying.

47:50Steve Huffman, I think this is partially due to some connection issues because he made him repeat it a few times, but took that as a threat, made Christian kind of restate what he said, and then immediately realizes it wasn't a threat, that it was a misunderstanding. in the phone call says, I'm so sorry. I misunderstood you. I thought you were threatening us. We've had some bad calls with some other people, but I thought you were trying to threaten them. They both laugh it off because it just seems like a misunderstanding. Then directly after that, there's an internal meeting with Reddit and Steve Huffman tells people in the internal meeting, Apollo is threatening us and trying to coerce us and kind of is using him as the scapegoat to make third-party app developers the bad guy.

48:34And then this gets to Christian. luckily he had recorded the whole call leaks the call because at this point you have this huge company and people inside this company now using you as a scapegoat for something you didn't say very obviously and releases the call and proves that he was not doing that yeah basically he said like the reason that you want to start charging us is because you have an opportunity cost to the amount of users that you could be using on your official app right and say that opportunity cost is 20 million a year if you cut because it costs me about 20 million a year based on your current api cost so that means the cost of apollo to you the opportunity cost of us existing to you is 20 million a year so if you just cut me a check right now for 10 million i will shut the app down like it sucks because i love running this community i love having this app i love interacting with the people who use it um but he said you know you can quiet it you can quiet us down or you can make us go away quietly because no or he didn't say you can make us that's what steve huffman thought he said yeah he said you could quiet us down because but by that he meant we have a very noisy app in terms of api calls being noisy because there's a lot of api calls because seven billion api calls a month so he misinterpreted him but he was like are you threatening us and on the call uh christian's like no no no I'm saying a noisy API call and he immediately goes oh I'm so sorry I completely misinterpreted you I thought that was a threat and he's like definitely not a threat at all and I'm so sorry that you interpreted it that way it seemed fine and then if you listen to the call and then you listen to that call he leaked the call and then immediately Spez just goes and tells everybody he's threatening us like telling us that he's not going to let us go quietly.

50:23I think Christian got like a post on Mastodon like can you confirm you threatening reddit like based on this internal these internal meeting notes on that like we were all told and he's like no no that is not at all what happened um so he releases that we actually met him at wwdc like i mentioned that was on a tuesday and he still felt semi hopeful i think and then by that thursday so this is almost a week ago um apollo reddit is fun and sync which i've not used but apparently is very popular all said they're shutting down on june 30th um apparently it seems like this pricing not just that the pricing and the back pay they would have to make because of all the people with year-long subscriptions or like longer subscriptions stuff like that is just too much for them to be able to handle because these are these are multi is apollo only two people running it it's just two people it's just two christian and he hires an independent web developer and that's it.

51:19Well he has like a guy running as the server. Server engineer. Yeah. It's wild. It's not a lot of people and that happens if you are on Reddit you probably have recognized the last couple days about 7 ,000 different subreddits have gone dark in protest. I just click Reddit all the time on my phone. My Reddit is fun app. I had to take it off because I was going to it so much but I did notice on like Monday I clicked on it and I was scrolling. I was like man all of these posts are from the same subreddit. This is like really really weird and it's because every single subreddit I'm a part of except for one is participating in the blackout Do you want to explain the blackout though?

51:56Yeah pretty much subreddits are the way they're blacking out is by going private we did this with MKBHD subreddit it was initially supposed to be for two days a lot of them are stretching it We also didn't say that like basically everyone on reddit is very angry about this Yeah there's insane backlash Christian made like a whole really long post about it that we read and then And Spez also did an AMA, which people assumed were going to be to talk about the API changes. And he basically didn't address anything. That's just dumb. That's just dumb. He only replied to 14 people and like none of the answers were about any of this.

52:33And so all of the mods on all of the subreddits have basically band together to do a blackout. Yeah. So and in that blackout, they're all you said it's a private. it we did this with mkbhd one and then basically users can't look at those subreddits so like anyone who's even in it can't see it anymore nope okay and if you're a moderator you can see it but that means nothing i actually believe even our videos we all know our videos right they're just straight up shutting down indefinitely indefinitely until this maybe changes well yeah that's if it does but it should probably won't so a lot of them are they were doing it for two days um in that ama that I feel like the initial threat of the blackout is what kind of sparked the API changes AMA, even though, you know, maybe they should have done that to be a little more transparent a little earlier.

53:21So the AMA gets posted, Spez comes in, answers for about 40 minutes worth of questions to the point where it was very obvious that they were all, almost all of the answers were copy and pasted because he posted one comment that had a little, it was like a colon and then the response to it. so it was very obviously copied from a document outside of it. That's the dumbest part of all of this. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I feel like I'm filled in, or I guess I have most of the history leading up to where we're at. So the blackout, you guys are probably listening to this on Friday, possibly later. The blackout was originally supposed to be Monday to Wednesday, but that two-day period was before the AMA happened and before this had gotten a lot of media coverage and a lot of noise.

54:10Now, after the AMA and after this has just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, there are a lot of subreddits that are advocating to just shut down indefinitely until something changes. And part of that is because first of all, he had a couple also just bad responses in his AMA. He very quickly mentioned something about Christian and kind of double downs on Christian threatening him again and about leaking a private phone call, which the reason he leaked it is to defend himself. And then he makes another really snarky comment about third-party app developers. Somebody asked, how do you address the concerns of people who feel Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?

54:51Reddit is also supposed to IPO later this year. So I think that's a very obvious reason why a lot of this is happening. His response is, we'll continue to be profit-driven until profit arrives. Unlike some third-party apps, we are not profitable. So kind of just like a shot at third-party apps making money. Okay, yeah. I think that's like this weird, like we are not profitable, but are also this like evaluated multimillion dollar like giant website. I just don't like that. Like we're not profitable. Obviously, you are making plenty of money at this place. So that happens. But then during the blackout, an internal memo leaks of Steve Huffman writing to Reddit saying like, pretty much along the lines of like, don't worry, we'll make it through this.

55:38this is just a small blip on our radar it will all pass which is like if you're getting protested the last thing you should do is like poke the beehive and be like you mean nothing to me so now all the subreddits are basically not all of them but a lot of these ones that are participating in the blackout are spanning it to indefinitely yeah and trying to make this last a little longer so things could possibly change by the time you hear this but i mean a big possibility is that Reddit will just go full overt control and just take over the most popular subreddits and kick out the current community moderators and just install their own moderators because they can.

56:18At the end of the day, he's not wrong that he says that this will blow over most likely, but it's just like when you had these third-party apps that helped you grow as a company this massively because you just didn't have an app on mobile, which mobile is like the most trafficked, you know, form of accessing the website. And then you just, not even like having a conversation with the third party apps or figuring out a way to make it work for everybody or even offering to buy them out. Just like 30 days notice, pay us a ton of money that is unsustainable or else. It's just kind of like a terrible way to act your community, especially because Reddit, a lot of people don't know this, but like reddit is moderated by people who just random people who don't get paid like the mechanical keyboard subreddit is just like moderated by people who are really into mechanical keyboards our videos is volunteer moderators which is the biggest subreddits on the website are volunteer moderators so even if they do unlock these with their own moderators like they don't have the the power to be able to actually moderate these subreddits unless they find new volunteers but yeah you've upset a lot of the community at this point and it's going to be harder for sure i'm sorry we've you tried to talk like eight different times and david and i have kind of been on the train so i think i yeah no i think i'm getting i'm getting like twitch vibes from reddit which is funny so reddit is weird and i'll now that i have all this information i feel like i'm kind of digesting that it's kind of it's obviously a scummy move to like just sort of boot all third party apps because you're not making any money from them and they're making money from you so That's sort of like the high-level version of why they don't want them to exist anymore.

57:59but also reddit has always been interesting to me because so many of the communities on reddit are super vibrant and active, but sometimes it's easy to think that that is all of the people in the community that cares about the thing when it's a surprisingly small fraction. So I'll try to give an example of like, I could use Sony phones, I could use like any, like our Android even, we'll just go like, all right, this random LG phone came out and we all as a community love this phone. and so we're all going to talk about how much we love this phone but we are a tiny fraction of like the total market the world and we have a hard time seeing that not everyone feels the same way even though this community is very much vibrant about this one thing I have a good example real quick to help you prove that point is we had a there was a video once I remember it was the top of our Android and it was the top of our Android like ever at that point like one of the highest upvoted our Android posts ever.

59:06We looked at the traffic coming from Reddit who watched that video and has less than 1 % of the total views on that video. So yes, I totally agree that this is not indicative of all the people in that community and how they think, but it still is a very good aggregator of places, of people who like to have a little more conversation than a YouTube comment. It's a good window into the 10 % of the most interested people in any topic, which is what makes it so cool. That's why Reddit is dope. But also, 90 % of Reddit users are normal people just lurking around. Not doing too many API calls, not leaving any comments.

59:46They still are. Maybe uploading a few things. Every time you click comments, every time you click a link, every time you click into a subreddit, that still is quite a few APIs. But I would imagine the bell curve of what it looks like to be a Reddit user is a lot of people not making many at all and then a really, really big curve towards the power user end where there's people who are using Reddit the most and have a bunch of communities to subscribe to and commenting and upvoting and doing a whole bunch more activities. And so I wonder, I mean, I'm pretty sure Reddit sees third-party apps as like a tiny blip that they just, we'll get rid of those things.

1:00:20And I just looked it up actually just to see the Reddit official app has 100 million downloads on the Play Store, the Relay app has a million. I looked up some other third-party apps. they had far far fewer so it's like uh let's see sync for reddit 100 000 downloads boost for reddit a million downloads so reddit trying to be this giant site which is one of the biggest sites on the internet and represents like normies is in this like internal fight with itself because what makes it special is the people who care the most and engage the most but what makes them big is all those other people but you know what's interesting is social media overall has this thing called the 99 one rule where 90 of the people are lurkers nine percent participate a little bit and only one percent participate like actually make most of the and make the wheel spin yes yeah like we are the one percent of youtube that actually makes content right and if you did some like imagine youtube did had some stupid decision to like make being a creator awful on the site mathematically they're only upsetting 1 % of the users, whatever, screw those 1 % of people, but those are the people that make the content that make it what it is make it work, and so the 99 % of the people are like, whatever, I didn't care about the feature anyway but now all the stuff you love on the site is gone, so that's kind of what's happening with Reddit, which is the 1 % of people who actually make the subreddits work, are the people you're pissing off and who make the content, and who contribute and who moderate, and who do all this work and we're doing it for free, and even the people who we're making third-party apps for better experiences for Reddit.

1:01:57That is a relatively small number of people that they think that they can just discard because it's a small number. It's a high proportion of activity. But now the 99 % of people who are using Reddit are logging in and just being like, eh, everything's blacked out. Like, what's, I can't, this sucks. So you, Reddit made that like, we need to make more money decision to like get rid of the third-party apps, but that is the perfect wrong thing to do. Yeah, that's what makes this so outsized, especially with something like Reddit. Yeah. Especially with Reddit. And it's crazy. And it also just feels like such poor communication.

1:02:30There's examples of poor communication going on through this also. Apparently, a lot of moderator communities have been asking for specific tools. I believe a lot of them find a lot of these tools in some of these third-party apps to help better moderate. And again, like Reddit is a website where you can post pretty much anything. So like moderation is key to not essentially getting totally shut down. And these people are volunteers. So again, you're exactly what you said. Again, dumb Marques freaking figuring out the best way to explain a thing that David and I have spent a last week talking about, and he hears about it for 30 minutes and explains it better than we do.

1:03:04But just like, yeah, you're making the people who make the entire site run mad and not want to use it anymore. And that's going to make your giant user base have an awful, awful experience. Yeah, so if Reddit thinks the blackout will pass, I don't know if that's as accurate as they think. Yeah. And even if it does pass, like it probably will pass because people want to use Reddit. That's the whole point. We want to use Reddit, but like, damn, that's like the perfect run. Do you know what internet power users have in common? What? They all hold grudges really well. Really, really well. That's true.

1:03:39You should see some of our Android comments. Anytime I said something wrong about a Sony phone, those guys jumped in on that. Something that's kind of like acute to this is like everyone got mad about Twitter when Elon was messing with Twitter, but no one has really fully moved over to any of the other apps. Like they moved a lot of the power Twitter users over to Blue Sky, but they didn't stop posting on Twitter. Yeah. They're now posting on Blue Sky, but most of them are still posting on Twitter too. Twitter is definitely more like it's run in its own stuff pretty easily. And like you kind of, anyone can kind of pop off on Twitter and like they made it paid for.

1:04:15It's kind of weird. Like I don't like it as much, but I still use it. Twitter is also so simple. There were never really any advanced tools you could build for Twitter. It's not like there were some crazy tools where like, oh, I don't have Flamingo anymore. I can't like post the way I used to. Like it's still mostly the same. And now it's at the whim of like, we can screw this up a whole lot and people still have to use the first party app. But yeah, Reddit is different in that there are like huge amounts of tools and UI and sorting and things that you could do in a third party app that, I mean, I don't even use the first party Reddit app, but based on all the blackouts, seems like it's probably not good.

1:04:49If the first-party Reddit app was really, really good, do you think all this blackout would have still happened? All this protest against the third-party apps would have still happened? Ultimately, I think the biggest issues here aren't just one thing. It's just about how these third-party Reddit apps who have dedicated fans were treated and what they were given to try and comply. It just feels like a total breakdown of communication. Remember, they essentially, lot i can only assume lied by telling them nothing is going to change in january oh we're going to charge but not that much and then the way they went about it was terrible awful and then giving you such a short amount of time to make those changes it sounds like if they gave an actual price based in reality and then turned it over to like giving you a year to comply or six months to comply with this i bet sync reddit is fun and apollo would have figured out how to do things and we've mentioned here before like I would be I don't pay for Reddit is fun but I'd be willing to pay a dollar or two for a third party app because that's just what they have to do in order to survive I think the experience is better on that than the normal the default app I hate the default app so I'd be willing to do that but you put back people into a corner where they're not going to be able to survive to that point and now they have to die which is awful if they gave them a year then Christian could have let people's yearly thing expire and he wouldn't he could just tell people now, like, by the way, I can't offer a yearly subscription anymore and this is going to have to go paid but, you know, I kind of understand that and let's move on through that.

1:06:20But it seems like Reddit just, if they are actually trying to IPO this year, this is probably why they rushed it out the door. Or you think about, are they trying to make their app the most popular? Are these actual bad business partners? Which it already is by far. It is by far already. Do they want even more people on there? So then when they show the numbers for IPO, invest in it. That's kind of what it feels like. I was about to say like this. Does it feel like Elon secretly is also now running Reddit where it's like, we need to just cut all expenses as fast as possible and that's kind of what happens when you're like, oh, we need to IPO.

1:06:49We need to make our numbers and our books look nice. Yeah, the Twitter worth is totally skyrocketing and that seems like a great way to do it. Well, that was also like, we have a lot of bills to pay, so is anything costing us money? Yeah, stop doing that. And is anything making us money? Let's maximize that. Where Reddit is like, oh, third-party apps? yeah we could we could just get rid of those and then everyone will have to use our app and see more ads okay yeah let's do that boom yeah not not the greatest it feels like there's a lot of ways they could have went about this that wouldn't piss off so many people like you mentioned are the most important people on the website yeah yeah because if they're so worried about not making the ad revenue because they can serve ads within their app charging for the api is basically a way to make up for that ad revenue you know they could just do that they could also christian did mention that Reddit just doesn't offer an API call to bake their ads into a third-party Reddit app.

1:07:38That's just something they've never done. So none of them have ever gotten the opportunity to even possibly make Reddit some money. Yeah, offer that, and then the third-party apps will let us pay money to not see those ads. It'd be great. It seems crazy, but I do want to say there's so much behind this. I'm actually pretty proud of how calm we stayed during that. But I'm going to link, we will link in the show notes Christian's post on the Apollo subreddit that subreddit is still open because almost everything about that is actual information based on everything that's happening Christian also did an amazing interview with Quinn from Snazzy Labs that's on there and he also did an interview with The Verge a lot of this information we're getting for him because he's been the most open during all of this but it seems like all of the Reddit third party app developers are pretty close with each other so I think they're all sharing a very very similar viewpoint on all of this yeah not all third-party apps are shutting down it seems like some think i think relay actually is going to stay alive because they i guess have made it into a way with maybe not as many users or just no um overtime payment like that so where they can just charge money now and don't make up for it i think that the person that runs that said that that's something that that they might do but oh might a decision okay yeah hopefully something like that happens but We'll post all that in the show notes.

1:08:56Anything else anyone else has to say? I just want to say. Fuck Steve Hoffman. Fuck Steve Hoffman. Fuck Steve Hoffman. But also, Apollo's a great app, but Christian makes an app called Pixel Pals, which is adorable, and I highly recommend everyone check it out. We've talked about this on it, actually. So he makes the app, remember when Dynamic Island came out, and you could get the app where these little animals would play on the Dynamic Island. Oh, yeah. That sounds pretty sick, too. In Apollo, the Pixel Pals are baked in. Oh, are they? Yeah, you can just turn a setting on where they're hanging out on your dynamic island while you're using Apollo.

1:09:31I love that you pull up Apollo and it says Reddit is killing third-party applications and it sells. That's our pics. That's the top post on our pics. That's wild. And it's pinned. But yeah, anyway, the Pixel Pals, they're really cute. They hang out on your dynamic island. I don't have a dynamic island, but they still hang out on my lock screen. Yeah. It's really cute. So he makes a third-party app now called Pixel Pals that you can use and you can buy different animals and stuff. He said he's making a decent amount of money from that so he's not terrified. I hope he's making a decent amount because he's going to have to refund everyone now that he's shutting down the app.

1:10:03Because through the app store you can just request a refund since you didn't get the full year's worth of stuff. So he's going to get screwed. A lot of refunds. That stinks. Anyway, trivia.

1:10:16Alright. Question number two. Andrew, David, real proud of you for wrapping that up. Thank you. Alexis Ohanian is one of the co-founders of Reddit. Can you name the other two founders and you get one point per founder? Nope. See, I feel like I just read this. I read this on Wikipedia a couple days ago. You read it on Reddit? No, on Wikipedia. You read it on Reddit? No, on Wikipedia. Did you forget it? No, on Wikipedia.

1:10:46Be right back. I don't remember.

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1:11:52eligible port in a new line. $100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required. Check out in 15 minutes or less per line. Visit T-Mobile.com. Support for Waveform comes from Wealthfront. It's time your hard-earned money works harder for you. With Wealthfront's cash account, you can earn a 3.5 % APY on your uninvested cash from program banks with no minimum balance or account fees. Plus, you get free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts every day, so your money is always accessible when you need it. No matter your goals, Wealthfront gives you flexibility and security. Right now, open your first cash account with a$500 deposit and get a$50 bonus at Wealthfront.com slash wave.

1:12:32That's Wealthfront.com slash wave. Bonus terms and conditions apply. Cash account is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA slash SIPC, not a bank. The annual percentage yield on deposits as of November 7th, 2025 is representative, subject to change and requires no minimum. Funds are swept into program banks where they earn variable APY. All right, nerds, we're back. So YouTube has changed their eligibility requirements for creators to be able to be partners and make money. They call it lowering the requirements. I have some mixed opinions on this. You just can write it to it. Yeah.

1:13:08Most people would probably agree. Let's say the old ones were and what the new requirements are. Okay. Yeah. So the old requirements were having 1 ,000 plus subscribers and either 4 ,000 watch hours in the past year or 10 million shorts views in the past 90 days, which was tacked on as soon as shorts were made pretty recently. Which makes sense. So if you just, this just having both makes it harder to like spam bot your way to making money. So if you just like signed up yesterday and spam boted your way to 1 ,000 subscribers, you also need to get people to watch your stuff. Yeah. Or if you just bought your way into getting a lot of views, but nobody subscribed, it's obviously you're a bot.

1:13:49So that made sense. I will say 4 ,000 watch hours is not that hard to do because one watch hour is from one user. If you make a, let's super simplify, you make a 10, no, that's not simple. Okay. You make a 15 minute video that gets four views. That's one watch hour. Yeah. If you get 16 ,000 views, that's 4 ,000 watch hours. Yeah. Yeah. So not super hard because that's just like the minimum requirement to become a partner. New requirements. 500 subscribers instead of 1 ,000. Okay. That's lower. Better. Lower. Three public uploads in the last 90 days and either 3 ,000 watch hours in the last year or 3 million shorts views in the last 90 days.

1:14:40that is definitively a lower requirement well it's a lower requirement okay it's a lower requirement by a thousand watch hours it is a lower requirement by 500 subscribers half yeah however and for shorts before you get into that shorts is like wildly less 3 million shorts fees in the last 90 days versus 10 million yeah 70 % sounds like 10 million like what yeah that's that doesn't seem much more attainable reality at all uh okay my thing and i think that most people will disagree with me so i'm willing to be the devil's advocate here okay um i already have a neutral view on this okay great yeah we got all three going on here so the three public uploads in the last 90 days is what i mostly take issue with interesting um because there are multiple youtubers that i watch that only publish a video like every two one video like every two months and if because their videos are really long really well researched that kind of stuff and they have like Patreons that will like you know pay them every month because they're yeah they're only publishing every two months but their videos are insane and the Patreon sort of helps like keep them afloat because they're not publishing enough to have that be their main source of revenue there's huge ones too Mark Rober Simone Yetch Michael Reeves yeah they're like eight months in between videos right Mark Rober is once a month yeah oh is he yeah okay okay but say he was slightly less than once a month say he missed the mark by like a day then he couldn't become a partner and start making money if he if he started his channel like this i know you only have to do it once this is what it comes down to because this is so i guess the eligibility requirements are really just at the very beginning is why it's so uh it almost doesn't matter like if you are only making 4 000 watch hours and whatever 10 million shorts views you are either going to make five dollars or six dollars like it's the fact that you are in versus you weren't in means you either make$5 or zero.

1:16:39So yeah, the requirements changed, but like the threshold just moved a little bit in the gray area of$0 or$5. But I think in order to like start building up a channel, you do have to make more than three videos in 90 days. I have a question. Yeah. Could you like make that one video that took you two months, publish it, and then just publish two videos that are one minute long being like, hey I'm just doing this to get my thing to get in the partner program and then delete them and then okay well I mean you can put them up apply get accepted and then delete them yeah okay you know yeah so in that case then yeah maybe I would do that yeah maybe I'd do that I feel like my like in between this is like I totally understand that if like Marques said you only have to do this once so if you're at that point where you're like you made a video and it's doing really well you made a second video and it's because it's it's watch hours in the past year so then you just have to hit this like 90 day streak of three public uploads so like maybe you've hit 500 subscribers and 3000 watch hours like just for three months make some videos that are maybe not to your full magnitude of what a video is it's to do it one time and everybody will understand and then go back to one every six months I'm just trying to help myself cope because it has been you're in the 14 months since I've published a YouTube video I know I am, but still.

1:18:06I do think, though, it is. I know I wrote that in here. How much money are you really making at 3 ,000 watch hours? Not very much. There is a time period of when you get eligible, then they need to approve you, and you get into the monetization. Is it a day, or does it take a couple weeks to get that all set up? I couldn't tell you today. It's much shorter than when I did it, but yeah, it's definitely not. It's pretty quick for me. I do think there's that potential of if you're starting to see some momentum on your channel and then maybe you are posting quite a bit and now with half the subscribers and a thousand less watch hours maybe you hit that monetization get it all signed up like you have that potential where that next video does pop off or like your videos are starting to pop off because of the momentum and now you're just a little sooner getting into that monetization and it's adding up a little quicker and ultimately it's still probably going to be a pretty minuscule amount of money but like it is nice to get there yeah if it was at some like life-changing number where because you keep you don't get like kicked out the second you stop uploading like you're still in so at the very beginning like i just looked it up three three million views on a short for our channel which is pretty good shorts uh 179 so oh you might miss out on 179 if you didn't get in yeah and you just make another video and then you're in yeah for shorts I also have a wait do public uploads count as shorts shorts count yeah you make three shorts make one video that gets it and then make two shorts it does just say three public uploads and it's counting shorts I didn't realize that YouTube actually can I also want to say it makes sense for them to half the amount of subscribers you need because over the last couple of years YouTube has deprioritized subscribers so much because their algorithm has gotten so good that videos can just blow the heck up from people that have like a thousand subs and they can get multiple millions of views.

1:20:10And just because the algorithm is so good at serving good content now. Subscribers are really now just like a nice bonus. Like if you just strictly algorithmically speaking, the advantage to having subscribers is those people ideally watch your video quickly at the beginning and then sort of like heat soak the information about the video to the algorithm so that it knows how it'll perform when they start recommending it. So at the beginning, when you first upload, YouTube's not recommending it. And they're sort of like waiting for it to populate a little bit. So they go, oh, I think it'll respond well with this group and then start recommending it to that group.

1:20:47If you have a lot of subscribers, YouTube knows very quickly who it will work well with and can start recommending it very quickly. That's the benefit. I got started a video yesterday from some girl who made a video called like how to live a happy life and it's like a four minute video of her just kind of like talking in front of a camera being like I got rid of social media and now I'm feeling better and blah blah blah and she has she had 17 subscribers and the video had 2.3 million views Jesus that's actually impressive and it was her only video too I would be very pissed if that was me I couldn't have hit this a little later 2.3 million subscribers and to only get 17 subscribers is actually very impressive it's crazy see.

1:21:27But it was her only video too so it's possible that people were just like, there's no history. If I saw a channel that had its first upload got 2 million views, I would be like, I need to subscribe to see what this person does next. Yeah, like Strange Parts. That's what happened to him. His first video got like 10 million views. Jesus. Building an iPhone in China from spare parts. Oh yeah. It got so many views and it was like his first upload. Incredible. I think this ultimately just looks good for YouTube also because there's so many people who want to start, who want to make YouTube videos and maybe a thousand subscribers, he's a little unobtainable.

1:21:59It's funny that we're debating this and we look over the fence and Twitch is burning down everything over there. YouTube's just chilling. Reddit is literally on fire. Well, YouTube changed stuff a little bit. YouTube made it easier for people to make money. How dare they? I definitely think that YouTube wants to start enticing people to keep making YouTube videos. They are pushing shorts a lot, but there's a barrier right now to being able to actually make money on YouTube and I think they're trying to get people to be like no it's not that hard and now that there's all these cameras out that like there's that new Sony camera that it has a uh it has a what is it called it's not depth of field mode it's blurry background mode which is a button you press that literally just lowers the aperture nice it's called blurry background everybody that's like when we talked a long time ago about how cell phones and portrait mode are making people not understand that it's a depth of field.

1:22:54That it's just, they just call weird. DSLRs or mirrorless cameras have portrait mode. So this now literally does sort of. Yeah, the Sony camera, it's for people that they just want to democratize making content so much that, yeah, there's so many people consuming content and there's not enough people making content. So they're just people like, they're just like, you can make a video about anything. Just like use blurry background mode on the Sony camera. Or serve it to people, just use the tools. We make them. After looking through all the footage from our WWDC blog, which also subscribe to the studio.

1:23:25It's been just straight heat lately. And we have a great video we're going to record right after this. I'm excited for. But Ellis should make a channel because I just watched. I think I'm going to have to make a director's cut version of that blog eventually because the amount of Ellis clips in there that are just pure gold we did not have time for. It's obscene. The man is a content machine. He is a machine. He needs like a 24-hour live stream. Just a strap to his back at all times. But not on Twitch. Not on Twitch. Or Reddit. Sick. All right. So that's pretty much our time. We could talk forever about how normal people see Lory backgrounds as pro, but I will cut myself off from that rant right now and just not even get into it.

1:24:07But that's it for this week. There will, of course, be a lot more updates on pretty much all the stuff we've talked about, including whatever happens with Reddit, whatever happens with Volvo's$35 ,000 EV. and so we'll keep you guys posted on that but the show notes are filled with the stuff that's most useful right now so check that out either way until the next one thanks for watching thanks for listening catch you later peace trivia trivia no no I actually thought you were screwing with us I thought I remember you guys both leaned in a little bit I was like that's too much engagement for a normal outro I actually also forgot about the trivia if it makes you feel I never forget about the trivia It's because Ellis isn't here and we don't have his crazy questions that burn in your brain I was just trying to get out because I know I don't know any of the answers Trivia Okay Question number one I don't know Mine still says Wavecast on the back That's a funny throwback Yours says Vergeform What year was Blue Microphones founded?

1:25:13Lord. Is this highest without going over? Closest without going over? Closest without going over. I'm just going to get 1 ,900 in this. Closest without going over.

1:25:27Without going over? Without going over. I don't like Price is Right rules. Me neither. I like Price is Right. I like Delta rules. That requires too much math. It does. It's just a difference. That's a lot. Flip and read. What do you got? Oh, wow. Yeah. All right, over. I said 1969. I wrote 2009. I wrote 1992. Whoa. It was 95, but David's the closest. What? They came out in 95? 95. 1995. I don't want to talk about it. David's just the closest period. Yeah, yeah. Delta or. Yeah, it doesn't matter how. By all mathematical accounts. Do you have like their first product? I do not The snowball I'm assuming it was Because it was 25 year old Because it was created When the earth was created Honestly I should have put Zero BC Second question Besides Alexis Ohanian Can you name the other Two Reddit founders One point Per founder And I will accept Just first name as well Gosh I read this on Wikipedia Yeah picking names that feel foundry John Mohammed just the most common names on the planet Jesus David David for sure David's number 6 I believe I think it's the 6th most common male name on the planet alright flip him and read what do you got

1:27:06Chris and Evan is that two names Marquez, what do you got? I said Chris and Evan. Wait, you can put two names? There's two other founders. There's two of them. He said a point for each one. I only know one of them, so I wrote one as fuck and two as Steve Huffman. Do I get double points for that? No. Okay. Wait, was Steve Huffman right? Yes. Oh, I also put Steve Huffman. Okay, cool. So you both get one point. The other founder was Aaron Swartz. Yeah, I wouldn't have got that. Yeah. They went to Y Combinator and pitched a different idea together first before they made Reddit, I believe. I was looking this up during all of this research, but I did not remember Aaron.

1:27:49Every startup. Evergreen. That happened with Twitch too. Trivia question. How many gills does a shark have? 16. Wait, like gills counts as both sides of their neck? On each side. On each side? Seven. Eight. 16. Those are really interesting answers. Thanks for watching. wait what is the answer? thanks for listening it depends on the type of shark 6, 7, and 8 are all correct really? sharks can have up to 7 external gill openings but most species have 5 5, 6, and 7 are correct anyway thanks for watching thanks for listening in the next one I'm in a time loop I gotta get out of here waitform was produced by Adam Alina and Ellis Dervin We're partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network, and our intro and outro music is from Vane Sill.

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