Basically, title, here is a link to the Reddit thread for people curious: https://archive.ph/6mObB
I’m quite surprised with the neutral to positive reactions, which also show that some people will probably never leave Reddit.
It’s not about the money, though. If it was, they would have just said “third-party API access now requires Reddit Gold”, and a bunch of us would still have stayed there, giving them more money (and content) than they are making now.
Instead, it’s about fundamentally remaking the site to actively drive conversations toward things people pay to hype, and not have those conversations spring up organically. Steering traffic is much harder to do when it can be accessed through third parties.
They don’t want users creating content around what interests them. They want to charge users to interact with content that advertisers pay to host.
I was a very heavy Apollo user. I was ALREADY paying monthly for it and if Reddit would have released a reasonable API charge structure and worked with devs, I’d have been happy to pay more for it because I used it every day.
They shot themselves in the foot trying to create a walled garden, now it’s just bots complementing each other in weirdly verbose comments back and forth.
so if there was an oxygen tax, would you be happy to pay for that? i think this is the problem, the reason why those who can keep the system for the balls (Pay me ten cents for this comment).
This is an odd take.
I don’t mind paying for services that I use that give me information and fun, especially one that I used daily (I pay $10/mo for streaming services I use maybe once or twice weekly).
I DO mind when they decide to gouge and disrespect the user base. IMO, THAT’S the issue in today’s market - profits above all else, including your customers.
Services aren’t free. Servers cost money. I get it. If I am a heavy user, I don’t mind paying a reasonable price for it (that reasonable price being close to the 2-5 a month I was already giving to the developer at the time.)
I’ve paid for Relay Pro multiple times over the years, and was happy to do so. And if this subscription had been implemented as just a way to support Relay, I’d have subscribed in a heartbeat, because it’s a fantastic app and worth every penny.
But due to all the Reddit API (and other) bullshit behind it, I just can’t do it. After many, many years of happy usage, I uninstalled Relay Pro yesterday when I got the update.
As far as I’m concerned, Reddit is now only a “read-only” archive that I’ll read if a search returns old information I need, and I’ll read just the post/comment I need from an ad-blocking browser then move on elsewhere (ie. lemmy) when I want to participate in conversations.
I know it’s highly unlikely, but if dbrady ever releases a Relay for Lemmy app, I’ll pay for it.
I agree, and of course the complain is for the Reddit API, not for Relay, which is a great app, and I if they will provide a Lemmy version of Relay I may use it too. What is non-sense in the Reddit API, is that Reddit should value users comments, the platform has value because of users interactions, posts, etc. so it totally a non-sense that user, should pay to participate on Reddit. I may just understand a free donation model, or even the personalized ads based on your interests.
I’ve gone as far as to block Reddit on search nowadays. It may have been of help a few years ago, but even before the API stuff it was increasingly being unhelpful.
The only things I miss are the Eurovision community (which there’s a Discord for anyway, and has a Last.fm bot which makes things interesting) and Polandball (who apparently have an official YouTube channel now)
Same with Narwhal. They released some days ago their 2.0 App and already mentioned that in a couple of weeks the payment will start. The crazy part (besides the astronomical price) is that you pay for each API request. So every time you upvote, you make an API request and have to pay for it. YOU, the user, gonna pay for GIVING Reddit your engagement. That is crazy. Every Social Media plattform is trying too squeeze out as much engagement as possible from their userbase and now the user has to pay for it too. At this point, the best thing would be to deactive your your up/downvote buttons and comment buttons, to ease on the API requests. The the exact contrary of what the plattforms wants you for. I deleted the App after a decade of usage the same day. Reddit got everything from me. Engagement, Comments and my whole leaning on political and cultural topics based on my votes and comments to build a profile. Now they get nothing out of me. Fuck you Spez.
Multiple years of Relay Pro and last night was upted with the monthly paid option which I am strongly not into. Uninstalled as soon as it showed up and downloaded Boost for Lemmy, so far so good. Few issues here and there but nothing major
Yup same. Although I could do with the silver subscription at € 2,29 a month, I still skipped it and moved on to the one-time paid Boost for Lemmy. Feel sorry for dBrady though. He put a lot of effort into making the best Reddit app imo and now he’s forced to charge his users and hand over 90% to those greedy a-holes.
Check out lemmy sync as well! Excellent app. Also don’t tell anyone but if you use the “list” display mode (instead of cards as default) on the free version, it doesn’t show any ads.
Nearly the same story here. I saw the ads in boost and decided to switch to liftoff. Maybe the paid version of boost is better. There’s no way I’ll pay for a monthly subscription.
In a few years it will be 9.99$, then 19.99$, 32.99$ ect. Congratulations to those who power capitalism
As a conservative (by Danish standards, in the US I would probably be centrist and probably vote for the Democrats) I would say that capitalism doesn’t work well for every case in a society. In the olden days, people would meet in the town square and use the village posters.
Those local communities has largely been replaced by the internet today, and whereas the old communities was run by itself with its people taking ownership and responsibility for it with the incentive to make the community as good as possible, today the communities are largely owned by companies with a profit drive. In these new communities the incentive for the owner (the company) is not to create the best possible community, but to extract the most money from it.
I would say that pure capitalism would be to the detriment to a society. Capitalism is more a product of liberalism (where I am not using the definition of liberalism that most Americans would, but the “correct” definition) than it is a product of conservatism.
In the olden days, it would have been the church and the local nobles calling the shots on the local community forum, staging a witch-hunt or a public hanging event to keep the topics within desired boundaries and squeezing money, engagement and thus community power towards certain projects and not others.
I agree with the idea of your post commenting on today’s situation in capitalism, but disagree with the imo romanticised idea of how a community forum in the past would have functioned more independent and self-organising
I think there’s nothing liberal about this. I can decide not to attend a community anymore but the alternatives (as here) will always be shadowed by these capitals, advertising, bot factories, which make it difficult, if not impossible, to have a valid alternative, this is monopolization, that, forced by individuals, becomes fascism.
What I am arguing is that capitalism and (classic) liberalism goes more hand in hand than capitalism and classic conservatism. Also, liberalism does not guarantee nor guarantee the lack of monopolies. Monopolies are the result of economics and the industry’s fixed and variable costs.
That being said, I do agree that monopolism is generally bad for society, as it reduces economic welfare (look it up) by generally reducing consumer surplus while increasing monopolist profit by a lower amount, thus creating a dead weight gap.
As a last point, somewhat unrelated, I think that it is an insult to the victims of fascism to call anything you don’t like fascism. I know you are not alone with the comparison, but I wish people would stop sorting people as either people they like or fascists. I think that people sometimes forget that the world isn’t inhabited entirely by saints and fascists.
I hope you have a great Sunday evening though :)
