I keep thinking this would have been a much better sell to devs and to users. I have always used Sync, and Boost. I tried the official app a few times, but really only used it for the chat feature. I didn’t want to pay for it, but (I am embarrassed to admit it) I would pay premium to keep my app. I think this would have worked out better for Reddit than the garbage they are pulling right now.
Would that have been a more reasonable solution in your opinion as well?
I would have considered that at the start, but at this point they’ve damaged their ecosystem so much, and correspondingly Lemmy has grown a lot, so I don’t see why I would go back either way.
Yeah, the fact that he seems devoted to following musk’s business practices leaves litte faith for Reddit to ever get back on the right track again. Besides, I’m loving my time here at the fediverse and will probably start selfhosting my own private Lemmy server soon!
Yeah exactly. My trust and relationship with reddit has been damaged. Even if they roll back all the API pricing changes the damage is already done.
At the very least they would need to fire spez for me to think anything has changed or is going to get better.
They’ve showed extremely bad faith. That’s hard to recover from.
Hah, no. Are you asking if I want to pay for access to a platform that is already dependant on its users to create or aggregate content, while they are already making ad money off my eyeballs? Heck, no, never. If that site cannot make enough money on ads alone, while being one /were of the most visited non-porn sites on the internet, then maybe they should reconsider their other expenses. E.x. Is it really necessary to have a downtown office in an expensive us city, or pay out high CEO wages. I can only really conclude that they are being stupid about this. If they want me back, they are going to have to beg.
But that is exactly the problem with third party apps …they don’t show ads so they make no add revenue on people using apps like Sync and Apollo or RIF… The official app does. I understand why they are trying to push people to their app, but the route they took was worst case scenario.
Third party app users generate content that make adds possible. Get out of here with this pitty reddit problems.
You’re ignoring the other effects of third party apps - which is to have significantly added to the number of users they have to show ads to in the first place.
Making their API free encouraged active development which increased user engagement. So it absolutely did increase their revenue because it helped to increase the popularity of their site in the first place.
This.
Put more explicitly:
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3rd party apps bring more people to the site, or keep them there longer.
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Those people create content in the forms of posts proper and comments— hell, even down to just voting— that feeds the site engagement for users through 1st party interfaces(the ones getting ads), keeping them there longer, and seeing more ads.
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Better moderation tools help mods keep online communities healthy, and the kinds of places we are happy to spend unhealthy amounts of time on.
Lest we forget how dumb reddit is, they didn’t have a mobile strategy in 2014, which necessitated buying Alien Blue.
If you look at the history of reddit, it has succeeded entirely in spite of management decision. Gotta say, even being on the site since 07-08, even I got this wrong. I expected reddit to do something dumb, I just didn’t expect them to do the most dumb thing.
They took the best Reddit client and turned it into the current abomination.
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That’s not a problem with third party apps, that’s a problem with Reddit’s API that doesn’t send ads to third party apps. It’s entirely a problem of their own making, which they could have fixed years ago, but chose not to, and are now using as a fallacious excuse to shut off access.
Once upon a time, Reddit didn’t even have ads.
Why didn’t Reddit try to buy out these third party apps, then? They’d have had the superior functionality AND they could have added ads.
They could have added ads at any time, by feeding them into their API, which they could have done at any time, but didn’t.
They did years ago. AlienBlue was the unofficial “official” app. It was the most popular Reddit app on the App Store. Reddit bought it and at first it was fine, but then Reddit decided it didn’t like supporting AB and its official app, so they shut AB down and forced everyone to their official app.
They took a 250m funding round and used it to build an nft site. reddit’s problems are 100% self created. Think about how ama’s used to be and how they managed to kill that. They could have had several revenue streams just based on ama’s.
We are literally the product that Reddit offers. It’s not like they produce content like Netflix etc.
They’re literally trying to sell the product to the product.
I wouldn’t go back to reddit even if they paid me to do it.
Ok so, if they paid me, I might consider it.
If Reddit want to settle this conflict peacefully. I want to do that. But, with recent news today I don’t think so
Those are big ifs, but: if the API prices would have been reasonable and if the Reddit leadership hadn’t acted as they have, I think I might have been willing to pay for Premium. As it stands, Reddit leadership has destroyed a lot of trust, so for me that ship has sailed.
I was thinking more like …3rd party apps only function when users have an account with premium. Skip the API pricing all together but reddit still makes mo ey since 3PAs dont show reddits ads
Absolutely not. If I learned something from Twitter and Facebook and Reddit fiascos then it is to never ever let youself be trapped into a closed-source, centralized for-profit platform. So NO, unless they make it completely open source and decentralised so anyone can setup their own instance. But then again we already have Fediverse and Mastodon and Lemmy… so why bother with that, let’s improve what treasure we already have.
If you had asked me a month ago, I’d have said absolutely, as long as it keep Reddit alive.
Now? Absofuckinglutely not. I’m a firm believer in putting my money where my mouth is. I haven’t accessed Reddit (intentionally) since the 11th. And my original plan was to see how it all played out, and still probably browse only when I’m at my desk, on my laptop. Watching it all unfold, I’m absolutely disgusted with the choices they are making, and more so with how they are treating everyone, privately, and publicly.
I won’t be going back to Reddit. And I’m ok with that. It was honestly already a bit too……money-grubbing anyhow, and all this last week just solidified that for me.
The intentionally part is my only difficulty. I’d not realized until last week just how many search results were Reddit threads. I need to start excluding Reddit from my search results.
Yeah, google search is a pain without reddit, I setup a WIndows VM to try Bing Chat, I’ll see how it goes.
I don’t use ChatGPT because I don’t want to give them my phone number, Bing Chat only requires an email and that’s fine for me (got a throwaway one just for that).
Same, Google searching for anything has been a massive pain in the ass ever since the 11th. I should find a plugin to auto redirect from Reddit to the latest wayback machine snapshot of that post.
No, the reason I left Reddit last week has little to do with with third party app issue. I left because the CEO has shown he isn’t interested in listening or addressing community concerns.
This. He’s just another arrogant authoritarian who doesn’t understand where Reddit’s value comes from. It’s the users who will decide if Reddit survives or not, NOT the CEO’s. We’ve seen this attitude before. Hollywood has been destroying franchises for years because they think they know better than the fans.
No. They’re allowing more and more spam outside of their ad platform. They’re actively user-hostile. I already don’t like it for free, why the hell would I want to pay for it?
Maybe before spez dug his heels in the ground. But now he’s said too much. He admires Elon? Fuck off.
Exactly…I think from the start it would have been an understandable approach. They want to make money but understand people like their apps l.
Maybe if the fediverse didn’t exist.
I am really working on making Lemmy work. It’s slowly getting there for me…learning curves. I just miss the subreddits I had for my niche hobbies. It really bums me out.
yeah, it’s a bummer. on the other hand, it’s a nice reminder not to put all one’s eggs in one, corporate-owned basket. what happened to Reddit can happen to Discord, too. or you can get your Google account banned without an option to appeal.
No.
Lol, not anymore.
If they had given us a heads up that we would need a subscription, early enough in advance.
If they didnt limit the content we could access.
If the price wasnt ridiculous - Im not paying Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Game Pass money to access a web forum.
Then sure.
But Spez fucked it up. Hes shown that he really doesnt care about the communities, the people that make it up, or even reddit itself. Hes too bent on making that IPO and bailing out as soon as he can.
