Same – I changed jobs since lockdown started, I work for a company now that was 100% remote before all this started. I’ve actually moved halfway across the country and… yeah, other than now I pay state income tax, nothing has changed for me. I have an office, that’s technically a change, I guess.
New York has a similar thing about to take effect, as well.
Someone just made this up so that they could get it away from their kid, didn’t they?
I jest, but that would be funny.
Not just this, it’s AH. Not… terrible, but super hype-y from what I’ve seen.
The bulk of heavy users are on third party apps, most likely.
To some extent, Reddit does get a slice - in the form of user engagement. User engagement is how they generate ad impressions, even if it’s not from the users on the third party apps.
They COULD have simply put ads into the API, or made it a requirement. They didn’t.
Their entire goal is to maximize “value” before their IPO. Control and number inflation. They don’t care about the long term. Spez wants to cash out, and he doesn’t care what it costs the company.
Even worse, their official app uses the same API – and, by estimates, the Reddit app uses more calls than Apollo does.
They wanted more per user than they will ever make. A multiple of that, in fact.
Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can’t just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren’t resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).
If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.
While our exact pacing might be slightly different from the pure extrapolation, human history has been a long, steady increase in the rate of invention. Access to education has meant that more people are making things, and then the next generations build on top of their work to make even bigger things.