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A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 31 May 2023
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How is it no sustainable? From my understanding, Reddit doesn't make a buck out of the third-party-apps. Let's take Infinity as an example, because I use that app. I don't have an account on Reddit, so I scroll it with an anonymous account on Infinity, so they can't even collect some nice personal data to sell it on the market for money. Now, If Reddit is shutting down these apps with the API-costs, people have two choices, use Reddit frontend, which is hardly usable without an account, or flee to alternatives. I obviously choose to flee, but I believe there are many people to which lemmy isn't yet an alternative. So they would be forced to start using Reddits frontend, for which you basically need an account, personal data will be collected and sold, targeted advertising etc.
To your second point, I read in the post from the apollo dev, that Reddit literally makes enough money already. I think this whole progress to charge for API-access is just a next step, to make even more money, which is a logical step, given that Reddit announced to go public this year.
So as I see it, it's probably sustainable for them to do this, but please tell me If I am mistaken somehow.
They could have, by making third-party apps access available through Reddit Premium as a monetization path without destroying the developers, but they decided to Digg their own grave instead.
The problem is that Lemmy isn't as well-established as Reddit was when Digg died. There's as much of a risk that reddit will just leave a vacuum and it'll get filled... by people doing whatever Reddit demands of them. And Reddit is doing less-horrific stuff than Digg did, if only slightly.
This is sorta how it went with Facebook. I would love to see lemmy or another alternative win, but it might be difficult to dethrone reddit.
I'm in a panic because I hate reddit official and I use RiF exclusively. But I might not have any option but to learn to suffer through reddit offiical.
Ultimately, it comes down to what communities you can either stand to live without and or actively work to build an alternative here. If you're happy here, it doesn't really matter what's going on over there.
That would also have been a good solution.
I'm a pretty active user on the site and I almost exclusively use 3rd party apps because their official apps suck ass.
I'm talking about active in the sense of at least 30 comments a day and 15 posts since the beginning of this year.
I would guess that most power users and mods are using a 3rd party client. So they would lose a lot of users who create content and many communities will die.
Not to mention that they basically want to kill all of NSFW reddit so these communities will die too.
Thanks for pointing that out, I haven't had this view angle because I just lurk and don't post.