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.
I think there’s a lot they could have done better. They could have injected ads into the API feeds directly so they could still get revenue and make it part of the terms that a client can’t remove them with a paid version that doesn’t have ads. That could work with the clients that could then continue to offer a free ad supported version or a subscription that removes them with Reddit getting a cut. I would have been totally understanding of that and reddit could have gotten a ton of subscription revenue by leveraging the existing distribution channels.
They’re a company, they have to pay the bills, I get that, but they went over the line with their deception, greed, and hunger for power. This wasn’t just about making money, it’s also about control. This was all just an underhanded move to kill 3rd party apps without outright banning them. They want total control so they can continue to make ui decisions that make then more money at the expense of the user experience with their users not having an alternative client to go to. They clearly don’t have any respect for their users so why would I use them?