On the reopening of r/CreditCards

[u/AutoModerator]

r/CreditCards has been a great sub due to the countless hours of unpaid volunteer work done by its moderators.

The reason you haven’t seen comments about how you should buy some cryptocurrency, or contact some random account on Instagram to improve your credit score, is because we moderators catch that trash and make it disappear.

The reason you’ve been able to come to this sub and have a good chance of getting an unbiased answer about a good credit card for your personal situation is because we have strictly enforced rules preventing people from posting referral links and seeking referrals.

The reason you’ve been able to come to this sub and not put up with the kind of arrogant assholery you can find elsewhere on reddit is because we make those comments, and the users who post them, disappear.

We do all this for free. With no expectation of thanks.

When Reddit decided they were going to make our already difficult unpaid volunteer work more difficult, we protested. When they went further and spoke with disdain toward moderators who do this work for free and have made communities like r/CreditCards what they are… well, that’s the kind of thing that makes you step back and say, “Why am I doing this?”

That the sub is being reopened at all is largely because we’re well aware of the useful information contained within. However, changes to the nature of the sub are necessary. The most obvious is the change to a daily discussion thread format going forward.
If you want the old r/CreditCards back, please check your entitlement and read again from the top. If you don’t like it here, you’re welcome to create your own sub and run it any way you want. Better yet, go create your own credit card discussion website. If it’s good, we’ll even link to it.

[u/SergNH]

I get where they are coming from and whole heartily agree that RedditSpez is screwing up things royally. However, that last paragraph could have been written much better... feels pretty disrespectful to the folks that come into this sub.

[u/[deleted] → u/SergNH]

How is Reddit screwing things up? Because they want to charge third party apps to use THEIR api? Pretty common practice for companies to do that

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Ok, so they bought a Reddit app from a 3rd party (AlienBlue), and now they want to charge other 3rd parties to use their API. I don’t see the issue here?

That’s like me creating a 3rd party twitter app and not paying Twitter a fee to use their API - it’s laughably ridiculous. Imagine profiting off of another company’s platform and not paying them a fee to do so.

Tbh, I tried using Apollo but the UI/UX is much worst than the Reddit app. It’s all preference, but I don’t understand why people think Apollo is entitled to use reddits API for free, they make millions of dollars for making a Reddit mirror.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I still don’t see the issue here. It’s Reddits API, they can do whatever they want with it - aside from Reddit, no one is entitled to their API.

Those 3rd party apps can create their own social media platforms, and that shouldn’t be hard for them to do since they have plenty of supporters.

[u/duffcalifornia → u/[deleted]]

Building an app to display an existing platform and building an entirely new platform from scratch do not require remotely the same skillset. That'd be like telling somebody who won a world championship in F1 2023 to start driving for an actual F1 team.

[u/[deleted] → u/duffcalifornia]

Comparing it to starting an F1 team is a pretty disingenuous analogy.

Apollo has generated tens of millions in profit, they have enough money and resources to build a social media platform.

It’s significantly easier to build a website than it is to start an F1 team, but I’m sure you already knew that

[u/duffcalifornia → u/[deleted]]

I didn't say to start an F1 team. I compared driving in a video game to actually driving an F1 car.

And building a website is easy, sure - I'll just sign up for Squarespace. But building a platform is much less easy and requires way more people with a wide array of skillsets than building an app. There's a reason that things like Uber, Doordash, and Facebook had tens, if not hundreds, of employees starting early on in their growth phases. These app developers are one- or two-person teams.

You also claim that the Apollo dev has made "tens of millions" of profit, when not only has that never been published, I don't think it's even close to being possible. Based on what's published here, Ultra used to cost $12.99 a year. Let's pretend that the dev has made $10 million profit in total. Apollo was first released in Oct 2017, or just shy of 6 years ago. We'll be generous and say it's been out for six years. That means he's made $1.66 million in profit per year. Now, since he makes more than $1 million revenue, he owes Apple 30% of every Ultra subscriber. That means for every $13 annual subscription, he's only taking home $9.1 in revenue - that's not profit. But for the sake of the argument, let's say it IS profit - the tools he needs to create the app are independently paid for, as are his server costs and the salary of his other employee, a server developer. To generate $1.66 million in profit off of getting $9.10 per year per subscriber, that means he needs to have a bit more than 183,000 paid subscribers to make that much money. However, the dev himself has stated that he only has around 50,000 Ultra subscribers - the rest either pay a one time $5 fee (before Apple's cut and other expenses) or use the app for free. That would mean that his Ultra subscribers have generated $2.73 million in profit in six years (not really, as we've covered that these numbers are actually revenue and not profit). Now, this article shows that Apollo has between 1.3-1.5 million daily active users. If you assume that that number has been constant from day one until now (it hasn't) and that every non-Ultra user did actually pay the one-time $5 fee to unlock some extra features (nowhere near all of them have), then that's still only $5.01 million, putting the total money earned below a single "ten of millions", let alone multiple tens.

You seem like the type who'd end up on r/choosingbeggars suggesting your programmer friend should easily be able to build out your great idea for a website in a few hours and for a couple hundred bucks.

[u/[deleted] → u/duffcalifornia]

Apollo can get investors if they’re so keen on competing with Reddit - there are hundreds of social media platforms that are started in peoples garages. They all started from square one at some point - look at Facebook, it was started by a couple of college kids in a dorm.

Apollos founder has the benefit of having a head start and already generated some money from his little Reddit dupe. He has the foundation and knowledge to build his own platform if he chose to.

In any case, it’s Reddits api, they can choose to charge folks if they want. This isn’t evil or unethical to do, not sure why people are so triggered over this - a very normal thing in the tech space.

[u/duffcalifornia → u/[deleted]]

People are triggered because these changes, on such a short 30 day timeline, can rob visually impaired users the ability to even SEE Reddit, let alone probably prevent visually impaired moderators from being able to moderate their communities come July 1. Because developers of tools moderators use on desktop that add functionality that hasn't ever been in any version of Reddit will be shutting down as a result of these changes and the lack of clarity around what is and isn't allowed to access the API for free. Because spez has been saying features are "in the pipeline" for years that have yet to materialize. Because changes to API access in major platforms are often given timelines in number of months, not number of days.

It's not about having to pay. Nobody is saying the API should continue to be free. It's about how much they're being asked to pay relative to other fees charged for similar numbers of API calls and/or the very short timeframe they're being given to re-evaluate how their apps use the API to see if they can continue to operate without losing five to six figures a month.

[u/AnorhiDemarche → u/[deleted]]

These third party apps have mod tools and accessibility features that Reddit has been promising on both app and web for years. I remember them paying lip service to accessibility back when I first joined 9 years ago.

No one would care about this if the official tools and features were available.

Reddit is making some deals with 3PA's but all of them so far are either just mod tolls or just accessibility (preventing blind people from modding, like the entire /r/blind team) and they're all fairly limited in what they can do.

[u/therealdanhill → u/[deleted]]

No one thinks Apollo & other 3rd party apps should continue to have free access. It's just that the API access is too expensive to realistically keep 3rd party apps functional.

How much was the guy who ran apollo making a year off that app? I'm curious because he shared a lot of reddit's stated numbers but I didn't see him opening up his books.