this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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!

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Third party app users generate content that make adds possible. Get out of here with this pitty reddit problems.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This.

Put more explicitly:

  • 3rd party apps bring more people to the site, or keep them there longer.

  • 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.

  • Better moderation tools help mods keep online communities healthy, and the kinds of places we are happy to spend unhealthy amounts of time on.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Once upon a time, Reddit didn't even have ads.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago

They've showed extremely bad faith. That's hard to recover from.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Three weeks ago, I totally would have… Apollo was life! Now, I don’t think anything could lure me back…

With Spez’s comments about how Reddit has all this data, and “we’re not going to just give that away for free”, I think anyone left on that platform is going to get sold so hard to anyone with two nickels to rub together, that they will effectively have zero privacy or anonymity… no thanks, Spez.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the problem rn is that Reddit is shitting on its users, sometime ago, I'd pay, but now I'm gone for good, even if they revert everything

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Had they come out and said "hey guys, we really need to actually be making money here. We know it's not ideal, but itll allow us to further invest in the site and its community", there really wouldn't have been a fuss. Sure people would have been upset, but most would've gotten it.

Instead they have to act like petulant children throwing a temper tantrum when they don't get exactly what they want exactly when they want it.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If Reddit want to settle this conflict peacefully. I want to do that. But, with recent news today I don't think so

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I wouldn't go back to reddit even if they paid me to do it.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think if they'd framed it properly, in that by using Apollo I'm bypassing their ad revenue and costing them money, I'd see it as a reasonable compromise that I pay for Premium to support the company and carry on using Reddit in the way I preferred.

Now? Fuck u/spez

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah. Like two or three weeks ago if they said third party apps need to create a couple dollar per month subscription, then I probably would have bit. Now, with the current leadership? Nope.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

No, bridge is already burnt.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No way. I've lost all faith in Reddit as a company.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

lmao fuck no. I was on reddit for 12 years until recently, but at this point, there's nothing they can do to win back my trust. Reddit is just another corporate giant these days, and has been for a long time. Huffman is the reason I no longer wish to support reddit in any form, and they can make promises all they want - I've happily jumped ship and will be staying here.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Lol, not anymore.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe before spez dug his heels in the ground. But now he's said too much. He admires Elon? Fuck off.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

With how spez is handling this? No.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Not anymore, they lost me with all these interviews, spez showed his true colors, he is a piece of shit and doesn't deserve my money. I rather support kbin or lemmy, I've always been a FOSS enthusiast.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That was my initial suggestion and IMO the change wouldn't be the PR nightmare that it currently is. It would have been a fair middle ground: you don't make it financially devastating for the 3PA devs, the Premium users don't get ads so that would be fair that 3PA don't get shown ads through the API and Reddit gets financially compensated for it.

At this point I kinda lost faith in Reddit. I don't expect them to honor whatever they say, so I won't be subscribing anymore.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If this was an option, Reddit would have done it.

But, their goal here is to completely deplatform 3rd party apps, and my assumption is that they are doing this so that their number of active users can't be verified and those numbers can be pumped up--by counting bots and all sorts of crap.

This is the same tactic Twitter used when they were negotiating with Elon. More "users" is more money.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think before (say) a week or two ago, before Huffman showed us all what he really thinks of the people using his platform, I would have said yes to paying for Premium in order to use 3rd party apps. But now I don’t want to give him a single dime.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, especially since he's not trying to stop AI-related scraping from using API calls, he's just trying to turn them into an additional revenue stream. That's my content he's selling...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

No. Even if they decided to do something to placate us today, they've shown their hand and demonstrated they don't give a shit about their userbase. I have no plans of going back. Period.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

If we never had all this drama where reddit showed its true colours, I think I probably would have (as an alternative to the API being paid). It is fine by me that reddit has to pay the bills in some way.

But lol, holy shit has reddit been awful in the past few weeks. The way they went about with their changes has been completely disrespectful towards reddit users, third party devs, etc. I don't want to give them any money now. It's almost comical how dumb their actions were in that regard. This isn't the first or only thing I've disliked about reddit, but wow did it blow the others out of the water.

By comparison, I've already donated $20 to kbin, the instance I use. If reddit had treated its users nice, they could have had that money. I have no qualms about paying for my usage. But instead reddit makes me almost want to pay money to see them fail.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe if the fediverse didn’t exist.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I might have a week ago, but after hearing Huffman say he hopes to run reddit like Elon Musk runs Twitter - no.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had reddit premium although I used a third party app. I wanted to support the platform. I spent so much time on it and really liked the way reddit worked.. being centered around communities and giving them the power to have their own rules.

I canceled my subscription a week ago and will not go back. Needless to say, this isn't a company I want to have any of my money.

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