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Do You Think There Would Have Been a Large Protest if Steve Huffman Just Said We're Charging to Use the API to Increase Revenue? (self.technology)

submitted 1 year ago by curt to c/technology

347 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The app devs, including Selig, often, said they were perfectly fine and found it quite reasonable that Reddit wanted to charge for API access-- they even looked forward to it because the y believed it would. open up access to previously walled-off parts of the API such as chat, polls, and other features only available in the native app and the website. This was public info, and users also looked forward to this.

The problem came with both he outrageous pricing and the absurd 30-day timeframe. Then, further with spez's refusal to be flexible by listening to the reasonable complaints of the devs, slanderous accusations against Selig, profound and entitled disrespect towards the mods, and shitshow parade which started with his mind-boggling AMA and then continuing by taking interviews with any news agency that would talk to him, further spreading the lies, slander, disrespect, and disinformation-- ending by praising the king turd of tech: Elon Musk.

THAT is what provoked the outrage, protests, and overall "uprising". THAT is what is killing Reddit.

[–] arquebus_x@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Once Selig announced that he could not keep Apollo going after June 30, I was done with Reddit. That was days before Huffman said anything publicly - even before the AMA in which he pasted prefab answers to 14 questions.

[–] themadcodger@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Same. Different app, but it was the same day. Once I realized my app would die, reddit was dead to me. I came to kbin a bit earlier than others but it was super dead in the beginning.

[–] therealpygon@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm strongly of the opinion that instead of killing Apollo, Selig should featureflag most of the features, scale it back, implement ActivityPub quickly and a guided process to get started. Just killing Apollo gives Spez exactly what he wants, especially with the amount of algorithm rigging they are doing to block ActivityPub/Lemmy/Kbin info from making it into Top and Popular.

[–] techno156@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Spez is going to get what he wants either way, really. He just wants third-party app activity gone from Reddit, and Apollo moving over to ActivtyPub is just more of the same, even if the app itself is around.

Personally, I think that dropping Apollo might make more sense. It was designed as a Reddit Reader, so instead of cramming new app functionality into it, it would make sense to just split it off into its own app.

A lot of ActivityPub/Lemmy/Kbin features are natively supported, so he wouldn't need to keep paying for things like Imgur API access, unlike with Reddit where third-party image hosting is the only way to do image hosting, without using the official app.

Plus, after the recent shenanigans from everything, he probably deserves a break, for a while, at least.

[–] deirdresm@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

FWIW, I don't think it's spez who's asking for that; he's simply the conveyor of the message.

I'm pretty sure this is a finance constraint imposed by underwriters/financers of the IPO, who want to see all the revenue with reddit and not with third parties. (I also think Twitter's similar move was at the behest of $ people since Elon borrowed money to buy the company.)

[–] keeb420@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

yeah. the protest was small but reddits response has been great and has lead to where we are at today. like you said it wasnt really the pricing but how reddit went about it and afterwards. hell if he had announced that their intention was to kill off third party apps but was more transparent about it and wasnt acting like an elon musk there might not have been any protest at all.