The crisis of Reddit and Twitter is resurrecting an age-old Internet problem: if you don’t behave like Facebook, you don’t make money.

Can a private technology company decide to change its availability to other participants? Even if it affects your users who are the creators of your product and whose influx makes them money? To what extent can we, as users, complain about a service that has so far been mostly free? Are we heading towards social media, and the internet in general, locked up under continuous paywalls?

The crisis of Reddit, which for weeks remained caged in a dispute between its management and its community after the closure of its API, and Elon Musk’s 100th time unexpected tweeting open up endless questions. Let’s assume that the ones we listed in the previous paragraph are only the most obvious ones.

Reddit and Twitter symbolize the end of open content… Even if that content is user-generated?

We put the background starting with Twitter, whose latest move is the most recent. After changing the terms of access to his public API, drastically reducing his restrictions, and his comings and goings with Twitter Blue, Musk announced a few days ago that, at least temporarily, Twitter users would be restricted from reading tweets.

For recent new unverified users (not paying Blue): 500 tweets per day, 1000 for unverified with old accounts and 10,000 for Blue subscribers:

For many, this change in practice means paywalls, similar to paywalls in many online media or shareware platforms, although there are some important nuances to consider: Musk called this measure temporary, he attributes it to avoiding recycling by bots and AI tools.and it is estimated that reading these 1000 open tweets takes about 2 hours.

That is, if it was a paywall, it would be very flexible. One way or another, the measure was not accepted from an aesthetic point of view, as one might expect, and within a few hours Actual topic binomial “DEP Twitter”. Hundredth death of the social network.

From my side, on Reddit, the facts are more extensive. It all started when its co-founder and current CEO, Steve Huffman, also announced a few weeks ago that he was shutting down his API. The first impact was that a Reddit reader, a third-party Apollo app, announced that it was shutting down or becoming profitable with new API costs. And that Apollo was already making money from the premium reading version it offered to its users.

The widespread reaction on Reddit from many redditors has been to shut down groups and forums that have so far been open to the public. In a not-so-smart move, Huffman, the CEO, snubbed the work of the editors – those in charge, in practice and out of an altruistic approach to making Reddit work as well as it does now – and ruled out replacing the part. his work with artificial intelligence. That’s one of the reasons why they shut down their API like Twitter.

The consequences of closing both APIs had side effects. unexpected. Like tectonic movements, Google, which has stopped counting its results, has degraded its search results, and many apps and businesses are reeling from the changes.

A response to the advertising model… Or its inability to do business?

Reddit and Twitter end up looking for other companies to use their product, which, depending on how you look at it, seems unreasonable, which they still haven’t done.

Google indexed millions of tweets and subreddits throughout its history, and the ChatGPT case has shown everyone how information from the web can be used to create something that is currently a new product.

The details of where this might leave safeguards or ethics for the users who create this content are endless, but in the first place, both companies have cut off the capabilities of other services that have so far relied on them for free.

So, it would be naive to deny that, as in almost everything, there is an economic reason. It is well known that Twitter accounts were a disaster before and after Musk. These restrictions could be the mogul’s latest attempt to boost Blue subscriptions.

When Reddit, the accounts are similar, the only difference is that he also wants to go public and he needs to promote them. Forum owned Pre-publications(also owner Conde Nast), tried many ways to monetize my platform without having to click on a key in a profitable way.

Despite having a premium version, Reddit’s primary focus is advertising. Of course, Reddit earns a lot less than its competitors despite the same advertising model as platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

Facebook, Instagram or Youtube, a model that Reddit or Twitter didn’t reach

If we look at revenue per user or ARPU, both will be losers. Reddit’s revenue per user per month is about $1.19, compared to $10 per month per active Twitter user, $45 on Facebook, and $35 on Instagram.

Facebook and Instagram (meta) managed to make a lot of money from ads partly due to the fact that they did not pay any attention to the data they shared and the technology that allowed segmenting to the minimum expression. Twitter and Reddit have had far less advanced targeting models so far.

But despite this, changes such as new Apple policy, general awareness or laws such as the European GDPR mean that the Meta platform business is no longer one. Hence his leap into the metaverse, AI and augmented reality.

Against it, Twitter and Reddit, platforms like YouTube they need their users to be who they are and maintain their popularity, they are on their way to a hybrid space: charging those who use material generated by its users.

Now, wouldn’t it be logical to have a pricing model that would better distinguish between large companies and small developers? Twitter seems to have tried to do just that with a new pricing scheme that was announced a few months ago.

In parallel, another way of doing business is to charge users themselves, which Twitter is now starting to explore and implement. systems for paying money to creators at any time which provide greater retention: the model is very similar to YouTube, and Musk did not promise anything to the company, but did not deliver.

Users and data are no longer enough

In essence, the debate that is opening up is as deep and broad as we want it to be, but it summarizes that social media platforms and those based on user-generated content are no longer enough to visit and get data, they need a new model.

Faced with them, open-source solutions such as Mastodon have been proposed without running. And in favor of Twitter and Reddit, it seems only that they have already become places of transit so important to the network that their many deaths never go beyond the announcement.

Or perhaps we are users who need to change and appreciate paying in exchange for more functionality and a system where the product is no longer our data?

Who knows. MySpace, Tuenti, Geocities or Yahoo! They show that being a giant does not guarantee anything on the Internet if you do not transform at the same time as your users. The question is, now that platforms are transforming, how will users react?