Reddit’s unpopular decision to revise its API pricing in a move that’s forcing third-party apps out of business has taken a weird turn. In an AMA hosted today by Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, aka u/spez on the internet forum site, the exec doubled down on accusations against the developer behind the well-liked third-party […]
  • gotofritz@beehaw.orgEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Am I the only one who doesn’t get all the outrage? They are a private company with a CEO and investors and that’s their data. There was never any promise to be a community effort. Why should they let Apollo etc make money out of their data.

    And before people say “it’s NOT their data! Users cre it” - yeah it’s user generated data, which users then donate to Reddit in exchange for reach and publishing tools.

    It would be different if it was on the fediverse, which has totally different premises. But Reddit is a private company and eventually they would have to turn a profit. That was always on the cards.

    • CheshireSnake@lemmy.oneEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think anyone who understands the issue is complaining about them monetising. People know it costs a ton to maintain the infrastructure. That’s not the point.

      • people don’t mind TPAs are billed, but the pricing is a thinly veiled attempt at pretending that they don’t want to completely eliminate TPAs. People would have been fine if the pricing is reasonable. They don’t like it when you try to pull a fast one over them.
      • their own application is bad. There’s no way around it. From accessibility to mod tools.
      • they have promised to focus on the above points for years now, and there’s still almost no improvement. People don’t trust them anymore.
      • spez’s recent comments against the Apollo dev are blatant lies and it only fuelled the outrage. Unfortunately for him, the Apollo dev legally recorded the conversation.
      • they do own the data, but it’s still the users who create them. If you treat the people who create content for you like trash, expect backlash. This happens on many private companies, not only reddit.

      There’s more, but I’m out right now so I can’t focus much. Basically, if your content is from the users, you should take care of the users and people running your site.

      • gotofritz@beehaw.orgEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        I agree that them pushing out third party apps when their own is rubbish is an idiotic move - and it will hurt them badly. They rely on people being too addicted to leave (it kind of worked when Musk did it with Twitter) but if the app is unusable it’s simply not going to happen. As someone who uses as few apps as possible (why do people trust the Apollo dev to be any better at privacy than spez? anyhow…) I didn’t quite grasp that for many people Reddit is an app first and foremost. No viable app = no reddit

    • Clbull@beehaw.orgEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Maybe I can elaborate.

      As somebody who uses the official Reddit app (Android), it’s complete dog shit and ridden with bugs. Tapping links will often direct you to a completely different thread, videos often don’t play or if they do, audio is disabled, sometimes comment threads don’t load at all, etc. I would 100% recommend using a third-party app for browsing Reddit and the only reason I ditched BaconReader was because I had some compatibility issues a few years ago.

      If the official app wasn’t a vastly inferior alternative to browsing the site and like a worse version of New Reddit, a lot of people would be less pissed off at Spez over this.

      • gotofritz@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Oh don’t take me wrong, I am not saying they are handling this well. Specifically on the app, it’s idiotic to force people off unofficial apps without the official app being if not better at least comparable in quality. That’s why I use the web version - that and the fact I don’t want apps collecting location and sensor data as I go about my day. I am not sure why people assume the Apollo devs are trustworthy and are not selling your data like everyone else does.