If losing third party apps ruins your reddit experience (oh no) just find another app or website.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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To me the main reason for the protest is not 3rd party apps themselves, but the fact that when these are gone, they will have full control on user data (both personal and posts) and how its presented. Even if you just look at cat pictures, they can then potentially do stuff like feeding you with whatever post or idea they want/ get paid to promote. E.g. Youtube now sorts comments in the most convenient way to make you feel good and watch more videos when you scroll down, stuff like this it's scary to me...
A lot of it is due to some lack of information, and a lot of news outlets only telling part of the story.
I was seeing stuff on CNBC, Reuters, and Louis Rossman and stuff on youtube talking about the protests, and everyone one of them leaves out critical information. Some people see it as moderators being upset about losing tools, others see it as third party app developers being upset about having to pay a fee to reddit. But they leave out that moderators are volunteers and arent paid to moderate, and would have to pay to be able to do so from a third party app. Or that reddit is asking for a ridiculous amount of money in less than a month for app developers to access their APIs. Overall theyll talk about a few points but miss on others.
It creates a lack of a sense of urgency or meaning to all this. "Regular people" think no one wants to pay reddit and get stuff for free, or that mods are power tripping.
But theres still 15 days before apps shut down and then people may change their tune once they cant access reddit using their favorite app of choice.
They seem to forget that the 1% are the ones actually providing the content. Reddit itself doesn't make the content, they just host it. Unless you're going to step up and become the 1%, your site is still going to be shit.
When inevitably the next fuck up afflicts reddit, and it will, those of use who already converted to lemmy or whatever will have made and even better home. Each time it happens, the alternatives will be made stronger, and reddit will come back weaker.