• Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.

    • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I said it before on Reddit and I will say it again here—

      If Reddit has asked me for a premium subscription to use my favourite third-party app, I would have fucking paid.

      Just bad business all around

      • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I don’t know the right price point, but 1 dollar a month probably would have worked for most people. It just wasn’t enough because they probably can make more than 1 by spoon feeding you ads now.

        • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlOP
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          8 months ago

          I’d go as far as 5 dollars a month, which is more than the buck thirty they make off users right now.

          • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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            8 months ago

            It just boggles the mind.

            They had the userbase. They had the community moderation. They had the power-users basically doing their job for them. They could have had a bulletproof, tied-to-world-population-growth metric - not super fast, but basically monotonically increasing. They basically could have turned it into a sustainable money printer, while not crushing user enthusiasm. Hell, they could have even done an opt- in policy for ML training datasets, either offsetting or outright paying users a commission for content that’s used as part of a training set. There were so many possibilities that didn’t involve pointing the ship at an iceberg.

            Spez threw it away because he wanted the quick payout from ad revenue.

          • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Active users would, I probably would too. Problem is most apps would struggle to even get new users with that system.

      • Rumbelows@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        100% I did pay for the premium version of Apollo and I absolutely would have paid about £20 a month for access.

        It was the #1 most used app on all my devices.

      • qdJzXuisAndVQb2@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        Didn’t that become an option at some point? I’m sure I’ve read there are apps you can pay for to have access. Fuck that, though. Make it a reasonable price, too, and I’d listen. No way I’m paying a fiver a month for reddit. Maye 1 or 2.

        • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Apps can pay in a ridiculous deal that no app would be able to support. So you either be a pay app that no one downloads, or a free app that gets killed the second it gets too big (And that number was low)

      • tb_@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Recently I stumbled on Relay, still going strong with a subscription model (because API fees).

        That said, I refuse to return to that platform.

        • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          You can patch old third-party apps with ReVanced. That being said, they are unmaintained and will still eventually break.