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🍪 Implosion at Reddit

🍪 Implosion at Reddit

Rise and shine, compadres. This is Bite Sized Beta. We’re the lunchables of tech. A complete meal in just a few bites.

Such a classic.

Are kids these days still eating this stuff for lunch, or is everyone plant based now?? Hit reply and let us know if you’ve got kids (serious question!).

Alright, enough of the dilly dallying. Let’s get to the good stuff.

In the oven this week:

💣 Reddit is imploding
🗳️ Poll of the week: will Reddit make it?
🍪 Cookie crumbs: 6 bite-sized headlines
💬 Tweet of the week
🍫 Chocolate chips: our 3 favorite finds of the week
😂 Snickerdoodles: memes for the weekend

FRESHLY BAKED

REDDIT IS IMPLODING

Ever wonder how to drive a gigantic business into the ground? Well, Reddit’s in the middle of showing us how!

Get on board, folks - Reddit's the 6 largest site in the US and it is fumbling the bag.

Like, worse than Mark Sanchez running into his own teammate’s butt.

The play by play:

April 18: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the company is gonna start charging for access to its APIs, which allow developers to tap into Reddit’s data to build apps.

Hmm ok, they’re tryna squeeze out some dough before the IPO, but the announcement is pretty mum on the details….

One of the most famous apps built on top of their API is Apollo, which is basically a beautified reader for Reddit (shows Reddit threads in a prettier UI.)

June 8: The details emerge, and Apollo says it’s gonna have to shut down because Reddit’s pricing is predatory and they can’t afford it.

Apparently Reddit decided to follow Elon straight onto the crazy train and start charging insane amounts to developers:

Twitter: $42,000 for 50 million tweets
Reddit: $12,000 for 50 million requests
Imgur (site similar to Reddit in user base and media): $166 for 50 million API calls

To protest the new pricing and support app developers, subreddits start announcing a “go-dark” period (i.e. making subreddits private).

Uh oh for Steve.

They get tons of traction: 8K subreddits sign on to do it starting 6/12, representing almost a billion subreddit follows.

June 11: Steve Huffman does an AMA and stands by their pricing, saying Reddit needs to be profitable.

June 12: D-day. 8K subreddits go down. Steve sends an internal memo, which gets leaked.

Steve: “don’t worry guys, this will pass, we haven’t even seen any revenue impact!”

Reddit mods: “hold my beer”

They get more subreddits to join in AND extend the blackout indefinitely.

Yikes

Reddit crashes from the flurry of subreddits going dark.

The site’s since come back up, but man - what a dumpster fire.

They’ve got a few weeks to make it right before the changes go into effect on July 1, but developer trust is gone, and usage is definitely taking a hit with so many subreddits now private.

Forget the IPO. Steve’s gotta pull a Hail Mary to save this ship.

POLL OF THE WEEK

WILL REDDIT MAKE IT?

There’s a real time tracker of all the subreddits that are down, and the list keeps growing. Do you think Reddit will make a comeback?

Sound off 👇🏽

COOKIE CRUMBS

BITE SIZED HEADLINES

Tesla is winning the EV charging game, slowly becoming the US standard charging system. Seems like a pretty lucrative business, ‘cause they're projecting Tesla will add $3B in revenue by 2030 and more than $5B in 2032 from non-Tesla vehicle owners. Yeah that’s billions with a B.

If you’ve ever dreamed of being a Youtuber, now’s your chance. Youtube is lowering the bar to get paid as part of their partner program. Previously, your subscriber count needed to be at least 1000, but they’ve now cut that in half to 500 subscribers. You also only need 3K in total watch hours within the last year instead of 4K. Time to start vlogging?? 👀

The EU is comin’ after Google’s ads business. They've filed an antitrust complaint and are hoping to get Google to sell off parts of its ad tech business.

AI is biased af. Stable Diffusion, one of the leading AI text-to-image generators was found to take racial and gender disparities to an extreme, even worse than those found in the real world. In a Bloomberg study, it produced 5K images and the results did not look good:

Only 3% of judges and 7% of doctors were portrayed as women, even though they make up 34% and 39% of those jobs in the real world.
70% of the fast-food workers were portrayed as dark-skinned, while 70% of fast-food workers in the real world are white.
80% of the criminals were portrayed as dark-skinned, even though people of color make up less than half of the US prison population.

If you’re a comedian, you’re in luck, cause ChatGPT sucks at humor. In a study released this week, researchers prompted ChatGPT for 1008 jokes, and of them, 90% were the same 25 jokes. Being funny’s a tough job.

Global inequality is declining, and the world is more equal now than at any point since 1875.

FROM THE COOKIE JAR

TWEET OF THE WEEK

The most effective networking strategy I’ve found has nothing to do with conferences, cocktail hours, cold emails, or any of the common ideas you hear.
1) Do interesting things.
2) Share them publicly.
Like-minded people will come to you.
— James Clear (@JamesClear)
Jun 7, 2023

Couldn’t agree more.

Created a hold co for purple ketchup companies? Got kicked off FB Marketplace for writing a script that re-shares your listings? Starting a mushroom wine business? Share it up and let them come to you.

Way easier than doing the whole awkward networking thing.

CHOCOLATE CHIPS

OUR FAVORITE FINDS

ChatCSV is your personal AI data scientist. Upload a spreadsheet and start asking it questions.
How much money you can realistically raise as a founder based on pedigree and product
8 affordable countries to own a vacation home in. Because we can’t all be billionaires, but we can all pretend :)

SNICKERDOODLES

THURSDAY MEMES

😂

That's all we got for ya this week, folks. See ya next Thursday!

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