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?
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.
Once upon a time, Reddit didn’t even have ads.
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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Users that likely will never see an ad of they only use the 3rd party app
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
No, bridge is already burnt.
They’ve showed extremely bad faith. That’s hard to recover from.
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.
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
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.
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.
I felt the same, cancelling my subscription after 10 years on a 16 years account.
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).
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.
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.
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…
It’s funny, because that was the obvious solution from the start.
“Third-party apps don’t sell our Awards or include any of the NFT/Vault stuff1, and we’re not making money. So from June 30th we’ll only be allowing Reddit Premium subscribers to use third-party apps. The official Reddit app will continue to be free for everyone.”
I honestly think people would’ve understood.
But if they announced it now, it’d just make people even angrier. 🙃
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1 As far as I knowYou’re right, it would be too late…
But it would have allowed users access to awards and coins and chat features without stepping on the toes of Reddit. It’s crazy that they didn’t come up with that rather than this.
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.
