edited to meet rule #3!
I don’t think most people left solely because of 3rd party apps being killed. I think they left because of the loss of trust that move and the subsequent negative PR created.
It’s natural people are looking for something new, even though the quality of life is lower for now. Some things are more important than convenience.
Edit: I forgot to answer the question. No, I don’t think it’s ironic. I think it’s telling.
Well for me it’s that Reddit simply won’t have any third-party apps in the near future (because of the pricing), while fediverse apps like lemmy and kbin, despite not having a wide range of options for them right now, can have as many as it wants and have no way to kill them.
Plus if they’re wiling to do this, who knows whether they’ll keep old.reddit.com around in the near future as well?
Do you really take a pragmatic stance like this for everything in life, or do you just not like to talk about abstract concepts like emotions, trust, having principles etc.?
What I’m really asking is, does being treated like shit and taken for an idiot by a huge company have any bearing on your decision or is it truly only about the user experience of using said company’s services?
Uh… I suppose I am taking a pragmatic stance? At the end of the day it’s just an internet service, I don’t have any “personal connections” with Reddit so I don’t feel anything remotely close to “being treated like shit and taken for an idiot”.
They’re doing stuff that’s inconveniencing and disrupts my expected flow, so I’m leaving the platform - that’s more or less the whole situation for me.
To a certain extent (almost) every large company treats it’s consumers poorly. I would argue it tends to start around the time the company starts thinking of the shareholders above everything else.
Ethical consumption (as I’ve heard it called) is difficult, if not impossible, to completely perform. I think most of the time, you take the company that fits your needs the best and rarely do you inconvenience yourself in order to boycott a company that takes unethical (or similar) actions. Even if you do, usually the replacement company (or going without that product if there is no acceptable replacement) has some sort of new benefit.
Note: I am not super educated on this topic and am mostly talking out of my head.