Technology

Different goals. The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.

I guarantee you a good chunk of that R&D money is for making ads more profitable and other monetization.

We just have to look at how much the CEO and COO paid themselves last year to know the whole thing is just a huge grift.

The comparison is even more apt when you remember that the official Reddit app also used to be the most popular and great 3rd-party app called AlienBlue, which was purchased from 1 guy and rebranded a decade ago.

It's pretty clear that the reason why the official Reddit app isn't good is because a good experience for their users isn't their goal.

Another difference was I was willing to pay for Apollo, whereas I don’t want to spend a dime on Reddit.

2000

Reddit has over 2000 employees.

Note that this is a "contributor" post, which is essentially their sneaky wording for editorial. It isn't a real Forbes article and anyone that knows the Forbes website won't pay any attention to the article.

"Forbes" is not the Forbes you are referring to. It's a blogging platform that shows the forbes name and claims they're "Contributors" but isn't actually "Forbes Magazine" which is what investors actually trust.

Basically this is just some shitbag pretending to be classy by hiding behind someone who sold him that space. There's a ton of shit Video Game "Articles" on the site too, same story(masquerade), same value (low) , same respectability (none)

One of the most convincing points is ...

competition has had many years to acquire Reddit prior to this IPO and have chosen not too. Acquiring Reddit now wouldn’t create all that much value for a competing social platform.

But you should also take into consideration that this article did not get a huge attention. It is almost a week old and has a few thousand viewers.

A decent search tool is right around the corner.

So, they are likely very poorly managed but, R&D is a common slushfund to keep your profit negative so you don't have to pay taxes.

It's expensive to research and develop Spez's apocalypse bunker.

Or as I like to call it: Super Weenie Hut Jr.

Delivering ads to people who are armed up to the teeth with adblockers requires quite some research effort.

0.031 sounds more realistic

Stocks are basically a percentage of ownership. The share price as a dollar amount is meaningless because it could be 1% of a company or 0.000000001%. The relevant number here is that Reddit is IPOing at a valuation of $5 billion (that stock buys a ¹⁄₁₅₀₀₀₀₀₀₀ interest), which all I can reply with is hahahahahahahaha

It baffles me they didn't take the obvious approach of offering apps/API access for Premium users, only turning it into a billable thing for LLMs. They're not going to pay for the API, they will scrape the site. Your users will! That's a great source of revenue that can last as long as reddit does.

But no, they wanted that LLM money.

The refusal to seriously explore cross API marketing is absolutely nuts to me. That's reddit's billion dollar innovation and it was right there. Everything was in place, and it would have legitimately set reddit apart from every other shitty social media marketing paradigm, and would have been an actual game changing innovation.

All they needed was to put some actual engineering effort into it. Which I guess explains why they didn't even fucking try.

Just imagine having a website that makes no money, and you get paid so much to run it that if you got a 90% pay cut and quit after a year you’d still be set for life.

Dude does NOT like reddit. I wonder which app he liked?