Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Reddit is Destroying Itself

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

So much happened this week! After talking about a grab bag of news, Andrew and David take turns explaining what exactly is going on with Reddit and the Apollo app. Then they go over some changes with the YouTube monetization program that makes it easier for new creators to become partners. Finally, we wrap it all up with trivia. Enjoy! Editor's note: For some reason, our feed was getting messed up with the episode from last week so sorry for the confusion! This should (hopefully) be the right episode! If it isn't, Adam might cry a little. Links: Volve EX30: https://bit.ly/wvfrmvolvo Prius review: https://bit.ly/autofocusprius Christian Selig interview with Snazzy Labs: https://bit.ly/snazzyinterviewwithChristian Christian Selig interview with Verge: https://bit.ly/vergeinterviewwithChristian Pixel Pals: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6443919232 YouTube monetization changes: https://tcrn.ch/3CusDhF Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Twitters: Waveform: https://twitter.com/wvfrm Marques: https://twitter.com/mkbhd Andrew: https://twitter.com/andymanganelli David Imel: https://twitter.com/DurvidImel Adam: https://twitter.com/adamlukas17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Details at Fizz.ca. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at fizz.ca. What is going on, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. This week, we've got a bit of a variety pack, a grab bag, if you will, but it's some fun stuff. So first, we got to talk about a new cheap EV that looks like a pretty promising competitor. Also a tech company that a lot of us know and love. We're going to say goodbye to. Also, we're going to talk a little about social media and how things are happening with Reddit and Twitch. And these two companies just can't stop making the right choice over and over again. So we're going to talk about how great they've

been lately. Controversial. Yeah. And then we've got a bunch of other stuff. But first of all, let's talk about this Volvo EX30. Kind of just popped up out of nowhere. I wasn't really expecting it. Yeah, Miles just posted it in one of our Slack channels.

Yeah. And I was like, I didn't think of it. And then I was like, wait a minute, does this say 35K? Yeah. I was like, oh, word? Volvo? Cool. So Volvo, for those of you who don't know owns the polestar brand so whenever we see a new polestar that's sort of

part of volvo group this is a common thing with car companies uh so i didn't expect because volvos are typically pretty high end i didn't expect a new electric volvo to be inexpensive but the headline reads 35 00035,000 Volvo EX30 is a high-tech, sophisticated EV for urban drivers. It's not out yet, but if you see the pictures and the sort of spec

as it's revealed, for those who don't know, the EX30 is like a small crossover from Volvo. It's not as big as the XC40 or the XC50 or the bigger versions that they have. It's pretty small. I looked up what I think are the dimensions and it's like just a bit smaller than like a Subaru Crosstrek, if you know what that is, which is pretty much just a hatchback

Impreza lifted. So we need a bunch of other, we need a bunch of car brand equivalents because all the Subaru people are nodding like, ah, yes, of course I get it. But I'm like, the Crosstrek is probably like one of the most popular crossovers like in the U.S. it is stupidly popular okay I'll throw in I'll throw in Kia EV6 and I'll throw in Genesis GV60 yeah as like similar size things I can't confirm because I don't know the exact measurements of that but I looked at the cross track measurements I think it's smaller than a Model Y. A small Model Y. It's small.

It is a small SUV. But it's still higher off the ground than a car. They're saying 275 miles of range on the single motor variant, about $35,000 starting price. That's crazy. Zero to 60 in three and a half seconds. That's a dual motor, so they're going to also make a dual motor version of this that's a little more peppy and a little less range barely though 265 miles versus

275 like that's not a bad trade-off i couldn't figure out what the price on that was because when you go to their site and click reserve rather than picking one it just shows two drop downs and for whatever reason it wasn't letting me choose one i can only assume the dual motor is going to be a little more expensive yeah what would we guess like 40 it might be there i just missed it i is making me pick a dealership yeah i picked a dealership and then i went to that and then it like let's go angle then i was just clicking on two different ones and so single motor extended range i see 35 000 msrp so i don't know exactly what the price of the all-wheel drive version is um the weird thing is that there's two drop downs that just show the details specs but

you can't pick the one you want and it just continues to say 35 000 yeah which is i mean common you typically get ev manufacturers touting their starting price, and then you option your way up to something else. But it's cool to see something starting at $30-something thousand dollars. And this is the single, the rear-wheel drive version is 0 to 60 in 5.1. Yeah, cool. So still great for, I mean, still great for a $35,000 car. I won't say great for an electric car, but it's going to be way peppier than any $35,000 car.

Yeah, it's a good baseline. I also really like volvos in general like i really like pull stars and i think i mean volvos obviously have like a very similar design aesthetic these look fantastic yeah i've loved the volvo suvs that are coming out and this looks just like that just smaller like the really cool kind of like sideways t headlights that like come into the front of the car. They have the completely flat grille with just the Volvo logo and a diagonal pattern. It's a good-looking car.

Do we know if it uses Android Auto or CarPlay? If I was guessing, because I can't see in the spec, I would guess yes. It looks like it has Android Auto or Android Automotive in the photos, but when I search Android, nothing comes up. When we had the xc40 recharge which is another electric volvo suv they were very happy to point out all the android automotive stuff and that seems to be the thing that they're going with with yeah volvo stuff yeah polestar also uses and polestar even though they're also adopting carplay i think yeah yeah

not bad apparently they're also releasing a cross-country version of this in 2024 which says it's uh geared towards outdoor adventures with more ground clearance, skid plates on the front and rear and the side, and back panels on the bumper. The small hood-mounted Swedish flag is the cherry on top. And it looks like it just has like... Hood-mounted Swedish flag? It's cool.

It looks like it has way bigger wheels. I think people who just curb their wheels all the time should get this one instead. Just drive it like normal. This is kind of interesting. Like Subaru is also doing this now. Yeah, they're making the wilderness version of the Outback and the Forester, which does all this, gives you worse gas mileage because like your bigger wheels, you have like a heavier skid plate.

I was going to say, I think I'd rather have this than a Subaru. It depends on like how far you're going, I guess, because it's still 270 miles of range versus a full gas tank well it's the solterra range oh it's subaru ev yeah yeah a thousand times over yeah i'm talking about like but like i see all these people driving the wilderness on the road all the time and like trust me i wanted it like every bone in my body was like that looks sick yeah i like to go outside once in a while and that would look cool but like it's mostly commuting on 78 and then i'm just getting worse gas mileage out of it that's true so that's that's

good to know good to see i also have you guys seen the prius uh reviews like blowing up we kind of predicted this dude because like the i i made a review for those who don't know i we were talking about how sick the new prius kind of looks and And we're like, is it sick? Like, is it actually a kind of a nice car now? And so we got it and we reviewed it. And it is confirmed a pretty fun car. And so I ended up making the video talking about how it's a hybrid, but it's a nice like stop gap in between.

Because a lot of people, believe it or not, are just not ready for an EV yet. There's a lot of places where the infrastructure doesn't make sense yet. But if you have a short-ish commute, you can use the Prius Prime, which is a plug-in hybrid, as an EV and a backup gas tank. Just have a little backup gas tank. So it's a nice looking Prius. Just a little backup 400 miles of range on gas. But it has solar panels on the roof as an option, which we're gaining in a sunny... Eight miles a day.

Four miles a day. Four miles a day. Adding four miles a day to your range, which is better than trickling away your range. That's true. You'll never have a dead battery if you leave it in the sun. That's true. What if you don't drive it for like three days? Does that mean you get 12 miles?

If it's a sunny day and you leave it in a place that gets sun all day, yes. What's the maximum capacity? About 40 to 45 miles of electric only driving. That's not bad because I only live like 11 miles away from here. You could conceivably use it as a fully electric car. Yeah. 11 miles of driving, like actual driving, yeah. You could actually leave it out in the sun.

If you only get four miles a day, then it's like... Let's say you start with 44. Yeah, you don't drive it on the weekend. So you start with 44 miles of range. You drive to work, you end up, let's say, with 30. You drive back, you end up with 10. I'm being conservative. It was in the sun all day, so maybe you actually end up with 15.

And then you have to plug it in. So you will have to plug it in, but you can use it as a full EV and never use the gas if i had anywhere to plug it in i would do that but i can't yeah yeah and then you know go on a road trip one day you just use it as a gas car yeah i like what toyota's doing with their prime because like the prime line seems to be just they're like better plug-in hybrids because they have a rav4 prime that's similar it's like about 40 miles of range on a battery that also has gas. So I believe the Prime specifically means plug-in hybrid.

And then they have like regular hybrids that are not. Yeah, they have a ton. They have a hybrid of like every single car they make. And then they have the plug-in hybrid of, I think only the Prius and the RAV4. I wanted the RAV4 Prime very badly. But when I was buying my car, the only ones I could find were like 60K.

And at that point, that's the price of a full unit. Yeah, that's always the X factor. It's like anytime you talk about the price of my car, the only ones I could find were like 60K. And at that point, that's the price of a full EV. Yeah, that's always the X factor. It's like anytime you talk about the price of a car, you always have to go, but can you get it for that price? Yeah. Is there like a huge dealer markup right now? It's probably not as bad now. I still think the RAV4 Prime is awesome.

I wish they would just make an EV of it. Toyota, come on. You're doing great with these things, but like, come on, step it up. EV stuff more. All right. One quick little news article here that kind of isn't even really news, on you're doing great with these things but like come on step it up ev stuff more all right one one quick little news article here that kind of isn't even really news but but blue the company everyone knows and loves from like the blue yeti the blue snowball you have ever created content you probably owned one of these if you created content like six to seven years ago it was like

the cheapest best microphones that you could get this is a fun fact a long time ago i used to be really into like series and like playlists of videos and i started a series called like youtube gear where i was going to review specifically gear that i thought was great for youtube and i probably only did like two or three of these before i stopped but i'm pretty sure the first one i ever made was reviewing the blue Yeti or Snowball. I think it was a Snowball because I use that mic a lot. It was a circular one.

Okay, this is a Snowball, yeah. Yeah, and that thing was like 99 bucks and it was just a great plug and play USB mic that you could recommend to anyone. Gaming, streaming, screen recording, anything you need a mic for that can be on camera right in front of you that was iconic if you've like tried to start streaming you probably owned a snowball or a yeti

um and so blue the company is going away but that's just because logitech bought them a while ago and logitech wants to integrate it into their logitech g brand which is like their gaming specific brand um wow the blue snow Snowball is only $50 now. That's crazy. Still a great deal. Yep. That's awesome. That's wild.

They'll probably be even cheaper because now they're not going to say Blue, they're going to say Logitech on it instead. Oh, but the ones that still say Blue will be like collector's items now. That's a fair point. And if you get a renewed one, it's only $20. That's wild.

Best mic, great audio price. Plug and play, simple. So it'll probably all be exactly the same just with Logitech branding on it anymore. But it still feels like a sad day when the Blue Yeti is, I know some people hate them, but it's iconic.

Yeah. Yeah. Shout out to the Blackout Edition. They made an all matte black Yeti. That's kind of weird that Logitech isn't just keeping the brand because I feel like it's got like a big cult following. Blue.

Yeah, Blue has an interesting set of things they basically just make microphones yeah and they had these like bottle these like high-end XLR mics too that I eventually started messing with ranges there's like the $50 snowball to the like $3,000 like XLR microphone yeah so there was a healthy range of people to like get into mics for the first time and then experiment with like features and high-end audio range stuff so i thought that brand was pretty strong i guess you know logitech wants their own brand to be pretty strong so they'll bleed those into their own products but yeah that was interesting rip blue rip blue riparoni riparon All right. Can we talk about Twitch controversy,

which when I first wrote this down, then they like totally backtracked the day after. But I still want to talk about it very quickly. Okay. Yeah. So Twitch, you know, beacon of good ideas, you know, never any. Seems like they can't miss.

They can't miss. Has never angered any creators ever. I feel like I have to bring this up because i've talked about like the streaming wars a thousand times on this podcast that i'm always trying to like kind of see where it's happening um so twitch basically made a statement a couple weeks ago about how for creators on the platform in order to kind of like embed sponsored logos into their stream they had to be smaller than 3%

of the entire screen real estate. 3%. And when people started doing mock-ups of this, we're talking like- Really small. Very, very, very small. Yeah, I can't even picture 3%, but it sounds small.

It was like a totally ridiculous, out of nowhere change that they wanted to make. And streamers' livelihoods are pretty much baked into these sponsored streams i mean like all creators kind of have sponsored integrations that is a large large portion of their revenue and this is coming after not too long ago them taking the revenue split of subscriptions and like dicing it real real hard yeah so they come out with this and then i was gonna talk a little bit about how ridiculous this was because universally everyone was there was backlash about it within 24 hours they released

a statement that said yesterday we released new branded content guidelines that impacted your ability to work with sponsors to increase your income from streaming these guidelines are bad for you and bad for twitch and we are removing them immediately. Nice. And that sounds like we also fired the person who wrote that. Wow. So, like, I mean, that's insane. It was, like, the next day. It was literally in the release. It says, yesterday we released this,

and it was bad for Twitch. That's crazy. Good to know. I feel like this is just another blip in the Twitch radar of, like, I've talked a bunch about why i'm surprised youtube doesn't feel like it's fighting twitch harder for a live streaming platform used to it felt like it did this just is more i'm more and more because a lot of partners threatened to leave twitch over this immediately like very very big streamers oh and youtube is the obvious next choice i mean yeah

that's why youtube doesn't have to fight twitch exactly i i'm now 100 in this whole like mindset of youtube doesn't care anymore because they know twitch is going to destroy itself they just five years yeah like youtube is so youtube makes a lot of money and youtube is so stable that twitch is sort of like flailing as the second place obvious streaming thing where like they're being attacked from both sides if you're a if you're Twitch you have this small upstart streaming services threatening to eat your lunch and then you have the looming like how do we become bigger than YouTube in streaming over the top yeah I would I would argue Twitch is the number one streaming platform and then is that is- Is that by what metric?

By people who, when you want to watch a live streamer, you're going to Twitch. It's just because like it's focused around it. It's the discoverability is better on it for funding. I think everyone would argue Twitch is the number one streaming platform on the internet.

I would say there's probably more concurrent streams going on on Twitch than there are. I think 100% I think inside those streams there's more concurrent viewers per stream. I would say so too. So I think that's probably true. I mean, especially in the way of when you think of streaming creators, definitely. I always think of Twitch. But also like whenever there's a new tech event, whenever there's a new Apple stream,

whenever there's a new SpaceX launch, whenever there's a new car launch whenever there's a new apple stream whenever there's a new spacex launch whenever there's a new car launch it's always youtube let's let's call it then the like creator creator live stream for sure like twitch would love all of the live streaming pie but like that i i can't ignore that like there's i watch a spacex launch i have like a million concurrent viewers or something crazy wow Just weird things happen. But also, yeah, like you want to be able to offer creators as much as possible, but you also need to make money to exist. And those are like almost opposing when you're Twitching or trying to grow.

It's not like Amazon owes them or anything. Yeah, they do have Amazon money. But you know they're screwing that Amazon money up because they already cut so much of the revenue split between them so hard i i still potentially i would like to see the numbers but like there are those million stream tesla things but then there's also xqc and hasan and stuff on twitch who have like two to four hundred thousand people watching them eight hours a day every day stuff like that so like i still think the numbers might be bigger on twitch but i don't think youtube is worried at all because they have numbers like that

and then they also know twitch is inevitably probably going to twitch just screw up apparently has 140 million monthly active users um youtube they don't split it out into which ones of those are live streaming yeah that's the issue because youtube it says 2.1 billion and i'm like but what percentage of that is live stream very different so it's hard to like by the numbers instagram might have just as many live streaming as youtube and twitch but i have no idea it'll be hard to find hard to tell yeah that's the problem yeah i think i think youtube's going to take over the creator space the individual creator live streaming space eventually from twitch there's places like state coming up but they're just a total mess

and i don't think anything will happen with that there's some other weird ones but like yeah if microsoft can't figure it out with microsoft money and amazon's screwing up with amazon money uh you don't even remember it was called i forgot the name microsoft made one and then they get ninja to go to it and shroud and it had a moment and then oh my god i forgot about this they paid ninja you remember yeah i remember they paid ninja like a bazillion dollars it was called mixer ah that was what it was i think yeah with just an r how did ninja each made close to 30 million i think and then it just shut down within like within their contract so they literally got to get paid and break their contract and go back and they got like crazy reunion this is like the live

golf pga tour thing this is like you took your money and then you just came right back yeah totally fine sorry that's a reference you guys don't even worry about it i'm sure some will understand i sort of kept up with that over the weekend, yeah. Oh, the live stuff? The live stuff. That's for the Waveform Golf Podcast. The Waveform. Here's a little quick summary.

The PGA Tour has been the biggest golf league in the world up until- Pro Golf Association. Exactly, Professional Golf Association. And then very quickly, a bunch of Saudiudi investment firms with a lot of money decided they wanted to sort of improve their image by sponsoring a new golf tour so they paid a lot of money to a bunch of high-end golfers to leave the pga tour to start up this new

tour they successfully did it they ran it for a little bit some of the biggest pga tour golfers stood loyal to the pga tour and turned down three four five six seven hundred million dollar deals uh a year later out of nowhere random announcement we're merging okay but here's the worst part about that is that the ceo of pga was telling all the players stand by like it's's bad to go play for the Saudis. He was shaming them. He was shaming them. He was saying, you gotta stick with us. We got values.

Think of the values. And then he convinced them to not leave. And then he just sold the company. And now the values aren't so important. And was negotiating behind their backs. How messed up is that? How backstabbed would you feel if you turned out? Dude, if you turned out like $700 million

and then you had no option anyway and it was like, now we're the same company. And now all the dudes who did take the $200-$300 million are coming back like, hey, what's up guys? Yeah, how's it going? Want to play some golf this weekend? While we're talking about random sports, Messi coming to MLS, baby.

What happened? All I see is like he went to Miami. Yeah, he's going to inter-Miami. And the only quote that I saw was like, I saw that my teammates would have to take a pay cut to pay me a billion dollars

and I didn't like that. Basically, but it's more so that Apple's giving him a cut of their streaming revenue, basically. Supposedly. We don't know. I don't think we know

for real. Apple's got that kind of money? They have a, I think it was $2 billion. Yeah, they did a $2 billion deal with Apple TV and MLS to do MLS season pass. And then they signed Messi. Which is like a big reason to watch the MLS.

So numbers going through the roof now. Yeah, you all make fun of me for Taylor Swift resale tickets. The tickets going for any game Messi's going to pay in that play now is like $5,000. I know, I'm trying to get one. So if anyone knows. Just saying. Messi, Taylor Swift,

fair, fair. I'm going to the finals. Messi, Taylor Swift. I'm going to the Dota 2

International Finals this year. How much were those tickets? Did you pay five grand for a ticket? No, they're like $7.

You just have to be super toxic and then you get in for free. Wow. Okay. I hope they just invite people for free. like, oh. $7. You just have to be super toxic and then you get in for free. Wow. Okay. I hope they just invite people for free. No, yeah.

That's Twitch, man. Twitch. Twitch is doing stuff. Twitch. Can't miss. Rumble. Where do we put them in the tier list? Because I know YouTube is S tier

and people always roast me for saying that, but let's be honest. Well, okay. I also think the reason people roast you for that is it's like- I didn't say they're flawless. No, no, no, no, no. And I don't think anyone thinks you said that either.

I think it's just like the social media tier list is like, am I talking about social media where I post like my personal stuff and follow other personal people or just like social media in general? Social media as a creator wanting to make a living. For sure. I think if you say as a creator, it's undisputed. Undisputed. YouTube's S tier.

It's the highest, no doubt. There's nothing below it. TikTok. You don't make money on TikTok. It doesn't matter. Like 35 bucks for a million views. I went to a dinner last night with some people who are all over TikTok, and they just kept repeating this, like,

they were, like, repeating this catchphrase of this TikToker from, like, Hong Kong or something. And they were like, oh, he's so famous, he's so famous. I'm like, okay, but, like, how is this making him any money whatsoever? He's probably trying to drive as many people as possible off of TikTok to make money. He's a tailor. A tailor. Yeah, he does like, he tailors suits and stuff.

That probably makes more money in the videos. I thought he was a Swifty. Yeah. Tailor. Anyway. I just, yeah, if you want to make money on the internet like doing things on the internet like there's nothing better than youtube facts let's take a quick break we got to talk about another company making lots of great decisions be right back oh trivia whoa of course we skipped it last week and

now my brain melted out of my ears and i forgot about trivia. No more trivia. Trivia. Dude. Let's do it. Okay. So, update on the score. Marquez has 19. Andrew has 16. David has 20. First question.

That's right. I feel like Blue Microphones has been around forever, but obviously that's not true. What year was the company founded? Hmm. Think on it. Hmm. I always like these questions because it's always way earlier than I thought.

Yeah, but Adam said that's not true. They haven't been around forever, but they've been around for some amount of time. We just don't know that amount. And we'll have to think about that. Wait, so Adam, say that again. You always felt like they had been around forever, but it's not true.

I feel like Blue Micro microphones has been around forever, but obviously that isn't true. Why? Obviously, because at some point they were founded. They weren't around forever. Yeah. Like literally they were not around.

Like Jesus. King Arthur in the castle was using his blue snowball for $49. On the first day. 49 shekels. Adam was near the tree. Exactly. On the second day. They dug up the dinosaurs and there's like a T-Rex and like a blue Yeti. H was near the tree. Exactly. They dug up the dinosaurs,

and there's like a T-Rex and like a blue Yeti. Hanging from a brontosaurus. Adam goes to take the apple, but he accidentally takes a blue Yeti. It's a snowball hanging. The earth was formed, and it spins around this core of molten blue Yeti. Anyway, okay.

We're going to think about this. The answers will be at the end, but we'll be right back. The earth's core of molten blue. Anyway, okay. We're going to think about this. The answers will be at the end, but we'll be right back. The Earth's core is a snowball. Bet MGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League and has your back all season long. From puck drop to the final shot, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

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guest star sarah michelle geller with patrick denzi and michael c hall as dexter's inner voice i wasn't born a killer i was made dexter original sin new series now streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus, a mountain of entertainment. All right, welcome back. I meant to ask you guys because I've seen sort of murmurings about it a little bit. I assume there's like a little bit of stuff going on. What's going on with Reddit right now? Anything I should know about? A couple.

That's how I feel. That's how I feel. That's how I felt for like four days at this point. Yeah. Sorry if we scared you in your car right now. Anger. There is. Anger. I almost wonder,

there's like, there's a long timeline of things going on here. Yeah. Do you think the best way I, so yesterday when I sat down to write the outline of this, I was like, I'm just gonna write an outline, like a TLDR of it. and then we can follow it.

It's three pages long. So we have a lot to talk about. Is the easiest way for me to just start doing it and interject at any point possible with a question or a comment or anything? I have my understanding of what I believe Reddit is, and I think that that's a good foundation. Start it. What do you believe? 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. So 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 and then aggregate them into one your home page then 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 it was a weird place all the zoomers probably did um 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 which is reddit at the end it almost feels like the way better conversational version of like yah 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. They'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 like a bunch of really specific information. And you can reply to those so people can then like 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 yeah yeah i love it for whenever there's a new dota 2 patch because people just go off it's just fun it talks about what they found yeah there's a lot of

specific communities i mean i'm in the ultimate frisbee subreddit i'm in the uh man like certain car 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? So 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. Okay. Yeah. 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 like 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. 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. Sure. 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 and then all this stuff happened oh really great 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. 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. Yeah, and they bought a third-party app. Which 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 way for that website to access that all that website's information yeah and so like it's like a plug-in that you use basically in all of our apps every single thing that you do contact goes uses the api to contact reddit and then send back something and like that is an upvote is an api call or like a comment is an api call posting something is a call reading youring something is a call. Reading your DMs is a call. At 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 got it got it yeah you would you would you would like your retweet something and that's an api call you had a limited number of this okay cool yeah um so and 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 yeah they literally didn't have one like 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 yeah it was like very recently it was all third-party apps it was had like a mobile website

i guess and it was garbage yeah 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 that in a web page is... It's very forum-looking.

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. Okay, 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 literally every single time you interface. Upvoting, downvoting, 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. So if you have a lot of users making user, that makes 1,000 Reddit calls, then you will owe Reddit 24 cents. So if you have a lot of users making a lot of API calls, you will owe Reddit a lot of money. Yes, correct. And it's really hard to judge the multitude of what 24 cents per 1,000 API calls is because that seems pretty cheap, but 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 selig selig yeah i think you're right he's the guy who runs apollo we actually funnily enough met him at wwdc very briefly really after the whole keynote mentioned apollo like a hundred times and all was like oh this is a rough week to be mentioning yeah because all of it just got announced before. Um, 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, because I want to go over, it feels like there's a lot of

things that Reddit is doing poorly right now that's led to this really big backlash um and let's kind of go over try and go over all of it okay okay all right so let's 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 gonna get it's gonna 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. They 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. It's still their website. They're creating a better experience for it. They do think they never got charged. It'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, we get it. Totally understand.

We do think we should be charging for it. We are making money off of this. We're using your website. It's kind of the, what's the remora fish for the shark of Apple? We talked about that. Totally, totally reasonable. And I- i has just

perked up he's like oh yeah i understand i'm actually bad at how good you are at analogies 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 that. 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. I 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 limit 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. They'd have to start a new listing on the Play Store

for a new version of the app. So 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 like lots of them just outright ban third like

they're you youtube bans third you can't make another youtube app another third party app for youtube right instagram or anything but youtube and twitter also had apps when they they made their own apps they didn't like fully rely on other apps to be made to help make them as popular as they are today. Yeah. Okay, so 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 to four weeks with the price six weeks later that's when they come out with the 24 cents or 24 cents per thousand api calls and then that's when all of the developers started getting together being like this seems absurd yeah christian did

the quick math it would cost him over 20 million dollars a year based on what they're claiming based on how many people are using the app yeah he gets about 7 billion api calls a month so it's over 2 million dollars a month okay yeah and then oh a month a month 2 million a month over 20 million a year got it yeah that's ridiculous and these changes will be starting the the billing cycle will start on july 1st you know we are 30 days yeah and 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 i don't know what you're talking about what dark sky dark sky yeah yeah so when they did that and a lot of people were using dark skies api apple gave them 18 months

to find a solution and after that 18 months they decided to give them another year yeah so that's how long apple gave dark sky api users to change this reddit is giving these people about 30 days 30 days which is for like every third party reddit app yes and then do you want to explain why that's such a pain like there's a reason why for some people that's it's i'll say the obvious answer and you can say why it's a problem i guess so like the 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 one to three dollars a month you know you have to also put in like apple

play store like app store play store taxes on that just charge them per month for how much it would be for that boom our app now costs six dollars 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. 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 going to keep using Apollo, you have to start doing a subscription. Beyond the fact that, you know, an average user cost him two dollars and 50 cents a month. There are power users that cost seven 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? So 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 $50,000 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 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. So 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 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,

like user is allowed to make per day and it was something like i don't remember the exact number it 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 like you told me i could borrow your uh your model s right you said i'm going 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 but you said don't drive on over 100 yeah you set a limit for me i'm nowhere near that limit but then you're gonna like compare me to these other apps or drivers so 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 like pre-loading pages or or things but i just don't have enough time and also like 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 dark sky 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 i mean like and you'd still honor the people who you gave the year-long exactly thing too yeah okay so in this process when they were communicating and

this first came out steve huffman the ceo of reddit um if you're on reddit and ever seen someone named spez comment he's 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 dollars like why don't you just cut me a check for 10 million dollars because Apollo's way and make Apollo quiet because

it's very noisy compared to what you're saying Steve 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 uh restate what he said and then immediately realizes it wasn't a threat that 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 like we i thought you were trying to threaten them they both like 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 like using him as the scapegoat to make third-party app developers

like the bad guy and then this gets to christian luckily he had recorded the whole call leaks the call because he's 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 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, 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 7 billion API calls a month.

So he misinterpreted him, but he was like, are you threatening us? And on the call, 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 he's not gonna let us go quiet i think christian got like a post on mastodon like can you confirm the uh 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 multiple 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 well He has like a guy running the server. 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 a 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.

So it's only- Do you want to explain the blackout though? Yeah, 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 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 only he only replied to 14 people and like none of the answers were about any of this

um and so all of the mods on all of the subreddits have basically banned together to do a blackout yeah so and in that blackout, you set it to private. We did this with the MKBHD one, and then basically users can't look at those subreddits. Anyone who's even in it can't see it anymore? Nope. 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. 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.

In that AMA, 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. So the AMA gets posted you know maybe they should have done that to be a little more transparent a little earlier um so 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. 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 like a lot of media coverage and a lot of noise. Now, 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 like 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 is to defend himself. And then he makes another like 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? This is Reddit 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 i think that's like this weird like we are not profitable but are also this like evaluated multi-million 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 um so so that happens but then during the blackout an internal memo leaks of uh Steve Huffman writing to Reddit saying like pretty much along the lines of like don't worry we'll make it through this this 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, like, overt control and just take over the most popular subreddits and kick out the current community moderators. And unlock them again. And just install their own moderators because they can.

Because they own it at the end of the day he's not wrong that he says this will probably blow 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 yeah 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 moderator 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 taken it all in 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 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 but also reddit has always been interesting to me because so many of the communities on reddit uh 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 gonna 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 ever at that point. One of the highest upvoted our Android posts ever. We looked at the traffic coming from Reddit who watched that video and it was 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 yeah which is what makes it so cool that's why reddit is dope yeah but also 90 of reddit users are normal people just lurking around, not doing too many API calls, not leaving any comments. They 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. And I just looked it up actually just to see the reddit official app has a hundred million downloads on the play store the relay app

has a million uh i looked up some other third-party apps they had far far fewer so it's like let's see sync for reddit a hundred thousand 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 99-1 rule where 90% of the people are lurkers, 9% participate a little bit, and only 1% actually make most of the content.

And make the wheel spin. Yes. Yeah. Like we are the 1% of YouTube that actually makes content. Right. And if you did some, like imagine did had some stupid decision to like make being a creator awful on the site mathematically they're only upsetting one percent of the users whatever screw those one percent of people but those are the people but those are the people

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 future anyway but now all the stuff you love on the site is gone. 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 are making third party apps for better experiences for Reddit, that 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. But now the 99% of people who are using Reddit are logging in and just being like, 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.

There'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 like again you're exactly what you said again dumb marquez 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 but just like yeah you're 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 you know what internet power users have in common what they all hold grudges really well really that's really well

that's true you 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 it'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 were 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 if 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 i think so ultimately i think the biggest issues here aren't just like one thing. It's just about like how these third party Reddit apps who have dedicated fans were like treated and what they were given to try and comply. It just feels like a total breakdown of communication.

Remember, they essentially lied. 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, I don't pay for Reddit as 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. But it seems likedit just if they are actually trying to ipo this year this is probably why they rushed it out the door well or you think about are they trying to make their app the most popular are these actual which 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 like that's kind of what it feels like i 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. We 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 stop doing that. And is anything making us money? Let's maximize that. Where Reddit is like, oh, third party apps? Yeah, 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. 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. 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. 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. That'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 Reddit app. That'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. I'm going to link, we will link in the show notes um christian's post on the apollo subreddit um that subreddit is still open because almost everything about that is actual information based on everything that's happening um christian also did an amazing interview with quinn from snazzy labs nice that's on there and they also 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 um not all third party apps are shutting down it seems like some i 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 they might make a decision okay yeah hopefully something like that happens but we'll post all that in the show notes um anything else anyone else has to say i just want to say fuck... 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. He makes that app also. 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.

I love that you pull up Apollo and it just 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. Yeah. 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. Because 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 yeah that stinks anyway trivia yeah all right 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 this is funny I feel like I just read this I read this on Wikipedia a couple days ago you read it on Reddit? no on Wikipedia did you forget it? no 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.

Be right back. I don't remember. You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus. You never know.

Ambition is on the inside. So that thing you love, keep doing it. Drive your ambition. Mitsubishi Motors. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed? You're not alone. If you ask nine experts, you're likely to get 10 different answers. So unless you're a fortune teller and it's perfectly okay that you're not, nobody can say for certain. So that makes it tricky to future-proof your business in times like these. That's why over 38,000 businesses are already setting their future plans with NetSuite by Oracle.

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so uh youtube has changed their eligibility requirements for creators to be able to be partners and make money they call it lowering their requirements I have some mixed opinions on this write it to it yeah uh most people would probably agree

let's say the's say the requirement yeah let's say what the old ones were and what the new requirements 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 uh making money so if you just like signed up yesterday and spam bodied your way to a thousand 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

so that made sense i will say 4 000 watch hours is not that hard to do because a watch hour one watch hour is from one user yeah if you get 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 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. It'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. That is definitively a lower requirement. Well, it's a lower requirement. Fight!

Okay. It's a lower requirement by 1,000 watch hours. It is a lower requirement by a thousand watch hours uh it is a lower requirement by 500 subscribers half yeah uh however and for shorts before you get into that shorts is like wildly less three million shorts views in the last 90 days versus 10 million yeah that's 70 sounds like 10 million like what yeah that's that doesn't seem much more reality at. That doesn't seem reality at all. 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.

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. 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. Yeah, this is what it comes down to.

So I guess the eligibility requirements are really just at the very beginning is why it's so, 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 $5 or $6. Like it's the fact that you were in versus you weren't in means you either make $5 or zero.

So 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 you, like Mark, I 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. Just at the beginning. And everybody will understand.

And then go back to one every six months. Every single person will understand. I'm just trying to help myself cope because it has been 14 months since I've published a YouTube video. I know I am, but still. I do think though, it is, I know I wrote that in here,

like how much money are you really making at 3, 3000 watch hours? Like not very much. There is, there is a time period of like when you get eligible, then they need to approve you and you get into the monetization. And it does it, is it like a day or does it take like a couple of weeks to get that all set up? I couldn't tell you today.

It's probably, it's much shorter than when I did it, but yeah, it's definitely not. It's pretty quick for me. Okay. I do think there's like that potential of like 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 dollars so oh you might miss out on 179 dollars if you didn't get in yeah and you just make another video and then you're in yeah for sure uh i also- Wait, do public uploads count as shorts? Shorts count, yeah. Oh my God.

You make three shorts. You make three shorts or three videos or whatever. Make one video that gets it and then make two shorts. Do shorts count as regular public uploads? Yeah, I think so. It does just say three public uploads and it's counting shorts. Yeah. I didn't realize that.

I didn't realize that either. YouTube actually can. My opinion has changed. No, they can, but- I also want to say um 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 get they can get multiple millions of views and just because the algorithm is so good at serving good content now yeah subscribers are really now just like a nice bonus like if you just strictly algorithmically speaking yeah 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. If you have a lot of subscribers,

YouTube knows very quickly who it will work well with and can start recommending it very quickly. Yeah, 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. 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. Wow. But 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 two million views i would be like i need to subscribe to see what this person yeah like strange parts that's what happened to him yeah his first video got like 10 million views but building an iphone in china from oh yeah it got so many views and it was like his first upload incredible yeah 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 like maybe a thousand subscribers. He's a little unobtainable. It's funny that we're debating this and like we look over the fence and Twitch is like 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, there's that new Sony 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 jesus it's called blurry background that's like when we talked a long time ago about how cell phones and portrait mode are making people not understand that. What depth of field is.

They just call DSLRs or mirrorless cameras have portrait mode. So this is now literally. Yeah, this 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 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 it's been just straight heat lately and

we have a great video we're gonna record right after this i'm excited for but ellis should make a channel because i just watched i have i think i'm gonna have to make an uh like director's cut version of that vlog 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 i did's in there yeah he needs like a 24-hour live stream, just a strap to his back at all times. But not on Twitch. But not on Twitch. Or Reddit. Sick. All right, well, that's pretty much our time.

We could talk forever about how normal people see Bori backgrounds as pro, but I will cut myself off from that rant right now and just not even get into it. But 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 you later. Peace. Trivia. Trivia. Trivia. You guys thought I was... No, no. I actually thought you were screwing with us.

I thought you remembered and you were going to... The way 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 like it. 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. Yeah, okay. So I was just trying to get out because I know I don't know any about the trivia. It's because Ellis isn't here and we don't have his crazy questions that burn in your brain. Yeah, okay.

So 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. Oh, yeah. That's a funny throwback.

Just leave it. Yours says Vergeform. Eh, it's fine. What year was Blue Microphones founded? Lord. Is this highest without going over? Closest without going over? Closest without going over. Closest without going over.

I'm just gonna guess 1900 and assume you guys went over. Closest without going over. Without going over? Without going over without going over I don't like Price is Right rules me neither I like Price is Right

we should just use Delta I like Delta rules I do too that requires too much math it does it's just the difference that's a lot flip it and read

what do you got oh wow yeah alright over I said 1969 I wrote 2009 I wrote over. I said 1969. I wrote 2009. I wrote 1992. Whoa.

It was 95, but David's the closest. They came out in 95? 95, 1995. David's just the closest period. Yeah. By all mathematical counts. Do you have their first product? I do not.

The snowball. I'm assuming it was my phone. Because it was created when the Earth was created. Honestly, I should have put 0 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. Writing names that feel founder-y. John. Mohammed. John. Just the most common names on the planet. Yeah, just pick the most common names.

Jesus. Jesus. David. David for sure. David's number six, I believe. Is it really? I think it's the sixth most common male name on the planet. Wow.

All right, flip them and read. What do you got? Do you know number one? Chris. Chris and Evan? Do you want to read yours? Is that two names? Marcos, what do you got?

I said Chris and Evan? Is that two names? Marcus, what do you got? I said Chris and Evan. Wait, you can put two names? There's two of them. He said point for each one. I only know one of them, so I wrote one as and two as Steve Huffman. Do I get double points for that?

No, but correct. Wait, was Steve Huffman right? Oh, I also put Steve Huffman. Okay, cool. So you both get one point. The other founder was Aaron Swartz. Yeah, 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. Every startup. Evergreen. That happened with Twitch too. Trivia question. How many gills does a shark have?

16. Gills counts as both sides of their neck? On each side. On each side? 7. 8. 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? thanks for watching wait what is that thanks for listening it's actually it depends on the type of shark oh my god six seven and eight are all correct really yeah sharks can have up to seven

external gill openings but most species have five oh five sorry five six and seven are correct anyway

thanks for watching thanks for listening catch you guys wait what about trivia in the next one I'm in a time loop I gotta get out of here waveform 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 Vain Sill Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok