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.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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Once upon a time, Reddit didn't even have ads.
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They've showed extremely bad faith. That's hard to recover from.
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.
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).
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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.
No
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
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.
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.
I was thinking more like ...3rd party apps only function when users have an account with premium. Skip the API pricing all together but reddit still makes money since 3PAs dont show reddits ads EDIT:typo
If Reddit want to settle this conflict peacefully. I want to do that. But, with recent news today I don't think so
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?
No reddit is dead to me. Anything that is used by ceos to fuck over the people. Let it burn for all I care.
Actually scratch that. Let it pump to obscene levels and after all those rich riches have bought in. Dump that thing into the Earth's core.
Far too much money and corruption in this world.
Lol, not anymore.
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 absolutely would have if things were handled differently, but at this point my only goal is to see spez get his ass fired.
I never paid for it before and I wouldn't start now. Especially not after how they've been handling the whole situation.
I do agree with what you're saying, though. Many people would have been fine with paying to keep their favourite apps.
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
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.
At this point, no. I took June as a Lemmy test drive, and turns out I like it better. The API change doesn't affect me too much, as I primarily interacted with Reddit through a web browser, but generally things have been going downhill for Reddit. I found a viable alternative, I'm sticking with it.
No.
Maybe before spez dug his heels in the ground. But now he's said too much. He admires Elon? Fuck off.
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.
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 would depend on the price, and also we would need to live in a hypothetical world where Reddit hasn't done any of the stupid shit they've done in the past month. As of right now, I can't imagine giving Reddit my money knowing what a PoS spez is
Maybe if the fediverse didn’t exist.
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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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.
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