somebody else pointed this out, but it’s honestly bizarre he’s going in on the “we aren’t making any money” ploy in preparation for the ipo
what’s the pitch to the investors? “please by shares in this unprofitable company, in the hope that we can become profitable by pissing off our userbase”?
“We’re not afraid to make the tough decisions and purposefully alienate our longest-standing users, the ones who know about things like adblock and try to hold us accountable to things we said a decade ago. Please give us money for this new sleeker userbase without any of those pesky olds.”
Completely agree. They want a tiktok or Instagram clone except for link aggregation. Happy people mindlessly scrolling and eliciting predictable reactions and emotions.
Cats -> 🥰 News -> 🤔 Injustice -> 😡 Helping others -> 🤗 Cool gadgets -> 🤯
No thinking just liking
In Reddit’s defense (I’m team Apollo, for the record), it is a legitimate concern to become profitable. But drastic changes that infuriate the community with little time to adapt is very questionable. It’s weird to me that Reddit just blindsided Christian like that after he’s had many years of good collaboration with them and always showed good faith. I feel like there would have been a lot of more beneficial alternatives. From how they responded to the community outcry it’s clear that they want to ban third-party apps without downright saying it.
Reddit could have charged the actual lost revenue plus a reasonable mark up. Then the 3rd party apps could have survived on a paid subscription basis, and Reddit would’ve made more off those users than if they’d moved to the official app.
Now a bunch of them, like us, are jumping ship instead. It was a dumb business decision. And this kind of stubborn disregard for their users is the kind of thing that destroys companies.
The reason Reddit doesn’t want to do that is they can harvest and sell so much more user profile data if they funnel everything through themselves. That is what they are selling to investors.
I’m also thinking about what is the proper way to handle this LLM situation and how should the maybe grown threadiverse react to it. Mastodon actively resisted the attempt of building a central search service but a dataset builder can go stealth.
It’s not actually about the money in that sense. Don’t be fooled.
No, they want to kick out third party apps because that cuts costs and the first party app is way better for pushing ads onto users. That’s the real investor pitch, they just aren’t saying it out loud.
If it was about being profitable, why charge such outrageous prices?
If it’s about covering costs created by these apps, why suddenly drop such a huge change on them with an timeframe that can’t possibly be met? Why don’t they work together with app developers, communicate things well ahead of time and give them some leeway when necessary?
They just want to kill third party apps without outright saying it and the easiest way to do that is to charge costs they can’t pay.
