I’ve been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn’t last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn’t
To me, Reddit’s sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I’ve never used.
If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I’ve only used Apollo so I can’t speak to the other apps.
I can’t blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn’t make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They’re going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO’s are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That’s how capitalism works.
In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can’t stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn’t have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn’t been such an uproar. So I’m glad it went the way it did.
The problem is more about Reddit not giving a fuxk to the users who have made the platform. They obviously know in advance what 3rd party apps and tools people have been using. If they are really keen on keeping the matter civil, Reddit could have granted them free or reasonable access but it prefers not to. I think this is pretty telling.
Yah, no, a big part of this from the start was to force users on to their app. They want to go public and cash out but to do that they need to consolidate control of the platform. As it stands, users being able to customize their experience and choose how they interact with the sight through an open API undermines the companies ability to manipulate users experiences to suit the interests of investors and advertisers.
Getting rid of third party apps was always one of the central goals, not an accidental casualty, it was never going to be civil with that goal in mind.
I really don’t think that 3rd party apps were anything but collateral damage. I think his real goal is to try and capitalize off of AI training.
He clearly saw these companies using reddit data to train AI for like no money and got upset.
If their official app and “new” reddit layout ain’t shit there won’t be so many users using paid 3rd party apps to begin with. Fix your product instead of force killing competitors.
There would have been no outrage if Reddit valued its users. If they came out and said they were going to start charging (a reasonable amount) for API access but were giving developers until the end of the year to prepare no one would have batted an eye.
Most would probably migrate to the Reddit app for free. Some would just start paying to use the app of their choice and we’d have moved on.
Reddit showed their true colors which was a big f you to the free labor and free content producers of their platform.
I would’ve paid $5-$10 a month to Apollo had this all been handled professionally. Instead I’ve deleted Reddit , fired up an rss feed app and I’m also here now. There’s a handful of communities I haven’t found a suitable replacement for but I’ll live.
Check out Inoreader (plus Reeder (iOS) for an A+ phone/mac/iPad experience). I’ve found Inoreader to be by far the best RSS reader, and I’ve been using it for years now. It’s UI is very slick and unassuming, but has a ridiculous number of settings and preferences if you really want to dial in your experience
I would be happy to pay a fair price to remove ads and gain access to 3rd party apps. They should just bake that into the Reddit Gold perks.
