this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Technology
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While essentially killing off 3rd party apps is disappointing, I could’ve understood and been willing to switch to the official app and maybe even pay monthly for no ads and more features.
What made me leave is how poorly Huffman and the company treated the developers, moderators, and users.
For developers:
For moderators:
For users:
Also, even besides Huffman showing his true colors as being a total asshole, it just makes Reddit’s poor leadership SO evident. How do you become such a popular site with free content and free moderators, and still can’t make money? How do you manage to turn a great Reddit third-party app into a buggy mess of an official app? Why are you constantly prioritizing what you think users want instead of just listening to them? And now you essentially just told all of us: “fuck you, I own you and your content, and I am entitled to to make money off of you.”
If I put on my tinfoil hat, I think Reddit might have a long-term plan here.
Hike up the API price to a point where 3P apps like Apollo will have to shut down, making them worthless, after so much was invested in them
Get users upset with the lack of features on the official app
Make the 3P app developers look like bad guys
Wait a month or so
Publicly offer to buy a popular, and now worthless, 3P app ^for way too little money^, in order to use the features for the official app
Point out that the 3P dev is a monster if they don't sell, since it would help users so much, and Reddit is a Community, after all
Large corporations regularly buy up small firms to get their product. You may be less tin foil hatty than you think on that one.
They couldnt do this because apollo dev already offered to sell apollo for 10m, half the cost it would have costed them for continued api usage.
The precedent is already there to buy one and reddit missed it.
Didn't they buy alien blue before that?
It was the most popular, before Apollo even existed I think.
They bought that, turned it to shit despite it starting from a beloved, yet now unrecognizable mess. Even if they bought Apollo, RIF, Relay, Sync and Baconreader tomorrow, their goal with the site conflicts with what people enjoy about using it and anything they do will be shittier and shittier.
People would always flock to another community focused app as long as that's a possibility, so they decided to nuke the whole concept.
If you are to believe that Reddit is setting the API pricing as high as proposed to eliminate 3rd party apps, rather than to recoup costs of allowing their existence (which I wouldn't put it past them to lie like that to make it sound more palletteable), then it's reasonable to believe Apollo's existence doesn't cost them 20M$. In fact I'd be surprised if it even costs them the 10M$ figure because Reddit's reaction implies a number that high must be extortion.
From a game theory of greedy agents point of view, what is the number value of a worthless app? As in, if Reddit offered to buy Apollo for $1 right now, what greedy reason would there be to refuse?
“How can I trust you to even give me the $1 if you resort to slandering my character?”
they hurt themselves here though because Apollo's dev gave them the buyout option and they said he was trying to extort them. I doubt any of the app developers would be too keen on this now without covering their ass to pretty extreme extents
And to pile on top, Reddit has been around since 2005. Why is there a SUDDEN and sloppy push towards profitability? It's like someone clued them in just recently that an IPO means you'll have to publicly show profit/loss. The way they've gone about it suddenly and sloppily doesn't scream long term plan, but instead a crash change.
Excellently said! Can I nominate you to represent me in the fediverse?