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.
The way I see it is since I’m not a reddit customer, then I’m the product.
Except, if I’m the product, you’re probably not supposed to nickle and dime me.
It’s kinda like if McDonald’s was trying to charge cows for the privilege of being ground into patties, but relied on them to go through the process of their own free will.
Without user content, reddit is just an empty husk, a waste of data center resources, yet they behave like they’re somehow entitled to my engagement on the platform.
As for how they’ve handled things, it’s been a train wreck.
Just requiring reddit premium to have access to the API/3rd party apps would have made a few waves, but nothing like this. Keeping their mouth shut would have been more useful than almost everything they’ve done… whatever their strategy was…
Even without any of that though, they’ve been working hard at making the experience worse for a while. The redesign focuses on the user consuming ads instead of content, dooms scrolling instead of reading or commenting.
TL;DR: They were going to shit regardless, they just decided to use more fans.