It's ironic, too, because their entire refrain is "we're broke". Well then. Now you lost most of your big subs and a ton of users AND you're broke. Guess at least we fixed the bandwidth problem.

Meanwhile it was all over ChatGPT training on their API. You'd think that woulda been step 1 to fix.

[–] Ralphensnitch@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Maybe I'm missing something but is there a reason they couldn't have started addressing all of this with a terms of service agreement for the API? They demonstrated they can make exceptions for some accessibility apps, so if AI is the issue, then why not focus on that? If they wanted to force ads on apps, they can make that happen as part of the agreement too. As much as people wouldn't like it, this would still be a better posture than now.

The current situation appears so poorly though out to me, but I'm just a guy.

[–] EsotericEmbryo@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I agree requring third party apps to contain their ads would have been a WAY better move. It's funny to me though that Reddit claims to be unprofitable but pulls in $456 million and some change per year. Greedy fuckers

[–] AU8830@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How fucking stupid do they have to be to complain about 3PA not paying their way (BS anyway - the net gain of users using Apollo etc is a win for Reddit) when REDDIT are the ones not serving them up? Then they frame it in a way that sounds like Apollo are taking advantage of them.

Why not include ads in the API responses, tagged as ads, and let the app developers implement a way of showing them. If an individual User pays for Reddit Premium - ads aren’t sent in the API responses.

My leading statement wasn’t a question. Reddit and spez aren’t stupid - they think we are. Fuck them.

[–] Cube6392@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

Reddit even already treats ads as a post type (hence the karma and comments on ads). All they had to do was say "you must show our ads" and if they caught a major app filtering out ads, block their API keys.

I don't even think paying an API licensing key is that unreasonable. In fact it's quite common. But the price they're asking is completely absurd and doesn't scale appropriately. They also didn't give app developers time to assess and discuss the pricing before implementation started.

There were SO MANY ways to handle this better, that would have been more profitable for them, and would have left people feeling more good about that things were being handled in a reasonable way. This decision making process screams of hubris. I've said it a couple of places, but it gives the impression that Reddit fundamentally doesn't understand reddit. Reddit's greatest value is ease of community creation and curation. Many of the decisions they've made since rolling out New Reddit have stood to restrict and inhibit this core interaction.

I genuinely wonder how Spez et al view reddit. What do they think the point is? What do they think people are there for?

[–] s_s@lemmy.one 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I was the ultimate freeloader/user. I used reddit nearly everyday for 13 years, never once bought premium or any reddit gold or any sort of rewards and blocked every ad.

They definately could have forced me to pay a subscription or something somehow without just completely shuting down how I browse the site.

It's so utterly bizarre and stupid.

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