Look at it from another perspective: Reddit was always free, their app is not the best but you don’t go to reddit for the interface. For me the ‘00’s forums vibe is part of the charm. Now the Apollo app is 4.99 one time and 12 a year for the ultra plan as “developer support”.
His work definitely deserves to be paid and at the number of requests mentioned in the article, I” m pretty sure he makes some decent money out of it.
It’s always bad if your business depends on an external api/services. Basically it last while it last and I m sure he knew that. Now the users who pay for the app are upset as they should be but Reddit has a point, those billion requests are not cheap and the 3rd party devs are making money out of their platform.
reddit is going down the drain for long time now, actually I think it began even before they banned porn from r/all, the r/popular r/all are useless for long time now as they all rinse and repeat of content, same pattern every day. ~10 years ago r/all was the best place to find new communities, now it’s just tailor made front page for social media junkies, sometimes I wonder if they constantly boost posts from r/aww or other “here’s a cute puppy to distract you from the violence posts” just to create “a balanced home page” to keep people engaged.
with ads, but you always could buy premium and still use apollo, many apollo users were actually like that. I had reddit premium for long time but stopped it last year, I don’t have any mobile clients anymore because I’m only interested in handful of small communities and have zero interest for their new “polished for all” experience they create by manipulating posts ratings/awards, so I only check on my subscribed communities on the desktop where I have ublock origin.
the fact that reddit tells they will replace mods on communities that were created by the users, not by reddit is ultimate dick move. greedy, selfish, and shows exactly where this platform is going to.
all in all, I love the small communities but I wish they’d move to a new platform, less greedy and less corporate compliant, and I truly hope that the users won’t let spez get away with it, I hope they spam the major communities into oblivion and the site will either die or go back to be community, not corporate driven eventually, as it was intended to be.
btw if someone wants proof that they manipulate votes, just check the disgrace of the AMA spez did:
Wouldn’t be reddit if its userbase weren’t whinging about something. So the bosses are just giving the people what they want i.e. something to whinge about.
Yeah, same for me and also some Facebook groups with an fb account without friends.
I think that’s the future of social media and web in general(unfortunately?) since the AI madness. Multi billion AI bots trained on public data and communities knowledge comes after multi billions crypto scams promoted through behavioural data powered ads on social media platforms that made billions from selling the user data for years.
25 posts in and I guess I’m pleasantly surprised that this hasn’t descended into a Kotaku like keyboard warrior circle jerk! I don’t know why I bother with that place sometimes…
I’d love to see the numbers here as I still suspect I vast majority of Reddit users won’t be impacted by the charges at all. Well, other than by the temp user blackouts of the moment that is. I’d never even heard of Apollo until now
The issue the 3rd party developers and users are having is not whether to pay or not for the API, it’s the heavy-handed approach of giving developers 30 days notice where after that some of them will be on the hook for US$ 20 million/year.
As a software engineer with almost 20 years of career (and currently working at Spotify’s Web API): this is fucking absurd, if you are engaging in good faith with your 3rd party developer community to figure out pricing you’d try to give them some leeway to figure out how to monetise because you don’t want to lose them, they provide value to your platform.
What reddit did is bonkers, those apps attract their power posters/power users, these users provide a lot more value to reddit than the lurker going to /r/pics and looking at memes… This wasn’t done in good faith, it was done to shutdown 3rd party apps because reddit wants to monetise everyone they can through their own app as fast as possible to increase their metrics/KPIs for a quarter or two before the IPO.
You don’t give 30 days notice to a major API change if you are acting in good faith, that’s it.
Personally, I moved over from Reddit back to various internet forums (such as Elektronauts here, hellohello) and have been having a better time. It is honestly a shame what Reddit has become over the years, but it is what you get when your userbase grows enough that management starts seeing money more than anything else.
The CEO in his hail mary attempt of PR also did not answer any actual questions in the mentioned “Ask Me Anything” thread (of course he didn’t), but had questions planted that he would answer instead of actual genuine ones. This was also painfully obvious to most people. The man has also lied about the interaction between Reddit and the developer of a well-liked 3rd party app, Apollo, and doubled down on that in the thread as well. Just simply slimy behaviour.
Plenty of people have as a result left the platform completely and wiped their comments and posts from there before deleting their account, to try and combat the situation. This of course means that finding information on some subjects becomes harder on Reddit as the information simply isn’t there anymore and the people providing it have left. On my part this was mostly answers regarding functionality in various keyboard instruments as well as other assorted topics, so nothing majorly important.
Also, the official app still sucks major butt compared to 3rd party solutions. Useful moderation tools still aren’t on the platform (promised several years back, apparently just now being developed if they actually are at all) and the website can no longer be efficiently used on mobile (i.reddit.com used to be a thing).
Honestly wondering what their gameplan here is, if they have one.
Do be mindful that 3rd party solutions are not just limited to alternative mobile clients. It also encompasses moderation tools that Reddit itself does not provide, without which any larger subreddit becomes impossible to manage due to the official tools being poor. This includes automoderator. Prepare for a lot more low-quality posts, karma-farming and bot spam on the larger subreddits.
and he got caught copy pasting answers, which was hilarious
obviously it’s about numbers, so social media junkies > real communities, hence the “polished for all” experience and obviously they try to manage everything by having the users on their app instead of third party where users can build their own experience
what is karma farming for? to me, reddit always seemed yet another playground for psychpaths and trolls. somehow people fight for and against free stuff and try to get or compete for points that have no actual value. it is most bizarre.
People like numbers going up, is the simple explanation. Maybe they get some sort of fulfillment from it? Same reason why people fish for likes and retweets and all that jazz, I would guess.
Higher karma also means that an ad-campaign ran through said account looks more natural, which is increasingly common on the platform.
High-karma accounts are desirable for a wide range of corporate and government groups who use them to influence public opinion. There’s a lot of astroturfing on reddit.
The rise of reddit seemed to somewhat correlate to the demise of a lot of interesting websites and fora. While I too have ended up using the site via google searches in the last few years but it’s feels like begrudgingly driving to a Home Depot while I rather of went to a couple small stores in walking distance that no longer exist.
