EvilColeslaw

That being said, I really hope Steve Huffman doubles down on the API changes and kills Reddit as a platform. Nothing would make me happier.

I think this all depends on their reaction to the blackout planned for the 12th. If Reddit starts taking over the default/large subs that shut down it’s 100% going to crash and burn. Not backing down on their API changes I think is an optimistic 60/40 in favor of Reddit chugging along albeit just a bit crappier for it all. (The 40% being a Digg situation that hopefully blows up their IPO plans and VC funding.)

Interest rates stayed at or around 0% for a decade or so. VC money was flowing like beer at a frat party. COVID accelerated that trend and probably pushed sites that had somehow not taken a bunch of VC investors into doing it as everything went online. Now the interest rates have spiked and the VCs want a return on their money.

Someone pointed it out to me recently the discriminator probably isn’t the driver for the change. The real driver is they committed a very dumb mistake originally, with regards to capitalization in usernames.

For example, in Discord the user names Hyperz, HyperZ, hyperz, hyperZ, HYperz, etc… can all be distinct usernames.

Yeah, I understand Jerboa was inspired by Boost for example, but if I could use Boost itself on Lemmy that’s a no-brainer.

If there is an afterlife, I hope he gets the one he deserves.

From what I understand, even paid use of the API prohibits 3rd party ads under the new terms. So that $20M/year they wanted to charge Apollo? Yeah it also meant /u/iamthatis couldn’t serve ads on top of that.

I think this is the main reason for the insane prices, but it could have easily been avoided. They don’t need to have one price class for every type of use of their Data API. They could have easily had one rate for LLM and other AI training uses and another for third party client applications. I feel like at some point they realized they’d rather just kill the third parties while they’re at it and this seemed like the logical moment.

Also for any non-Americans I-95 is the major artery for traffic up and down the East coast. It runs from Miami, FL to the Canadian border in Maine.

It’s a dumb move but it’s in line with their goals. Giving third party Apps the “Fuck you quote.” price is also dumb when they could have offered a reasonable price and got some cash out of it.

Regardless, this interaction is from a month ago, so if anything it’s not reacting to the current situation but was a clue as to what they were and already are planning.

They usually let them go until something blew up on mainstream news. For jailbait, it got in national TV news. Then it came down. Before that? Not a peep.