I’ve been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn’t last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn’t
To me, Reddit’s sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I’ve never used.
If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I’ve only used Apollo so I can’t speak to the other apps.
I can’t blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn’t make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They’re going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO’s are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That’s how capitalism works.
In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can’t stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn’t have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn’t been such an uproar. So I’m glad it went the way it did.
At the current price he wants? Yes. Because it would still represent an attempt to kill off all third party apps. Reddit wants to look like the good guys in having a price structure, but it is a transparent bit of trickery. Because the whole thing isn’t about API costs to Reddit, but gathering all the data to sell about its users and to push ads. Reddit is attempting an IPO. And shareholders will demand a path to profitability, unlike Silicon Valley investors.
Would honesty and transparency made the protests smaller? On some fronts yes. But many Reddit users would have been pissed with the model they want to use (facebook). So maybe the protests still would have been as widespread. But we could have skipped the whole, “Reddit CEO disrespecting unpaid mods and Reddit users” phase.