Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I'll just lock it for now.
It's not that you're charging for API access; it's that you're charging US pharmaceutical industry pricing levels ($12,000 for something that should realistically be $200) and then only giving devs such a short time to implement changes. This was designed to kill 3PApps outright and everyone can see it. What an ass.
That part. No one is saying don’t charge but literally no one can afford to fork over that kind of money. Christian crunched the number to run Apollo for a year and it came out to approximately $20M. Twenty million freaking dollars. How is this reasonable?
Of course they aren't going back. We saw how arrogant spez was. There was no doubt in my mind he is just going to rely on the fact that most people are rarely committed enough to do anything.
My expectation... Some will stay with the fediverse. Others will see the blackout as a "we did everything we could" and then go back, business as usual.
I for sure will not be back. I like RIF and it is the only way I browse. With RIF gone so too am I.
I’m team Apollo. When Apollo goes I’ll go.
It’s Lemmy for me from now on!
It’s been a good 10 years with Reddit but it’s time to be the bigger person and step away from toxicity.
I feel so bad for Christian. He's been an absolute role model in handling this—calm demeanor, transparent communication and willingness to compromise (which Reddit obviously doesn't have).
He's put so much work into Apollo and stayed composed so far during the shutdown process. What scares me for him is the risk of refunds now: whoever subscribed to a premium tier can have the purchase refunded since he won't be able to provide the service. I hope not too many will go the refund route.
I think you're probably right. I might even go back because /r/stopdrinking is sort of a lifeline for me, and I just don't see another viable alternative.
But I'm hoping to replace the majority of my reddit use with the fediverse.
Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable
It's their own fault. They didn't have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn't have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.
They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.
I'm really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants
There's this toxic idea in the business world, that in order to be successful you can't just make money and be profitable, but your profits have to keep increasing year after year. This kind of runaway, cancerous growth is poison to the country and the world.
This is like if a Grocery chain said that they need to stop selling Lemons to little girls because the lemonade stands were profitable and they aren't. The scale of the two businesses is not the same... none of these apps have millions of dollars in VC funds or thousands of employees.
It blows my mind that Reddit can look at 90% of its communities going dark in some way and think, "yeah, this is fine."
EDIT (AGAIN): Thank you all for the comments on total subs. It's still clearly not 90%, but it still appears to be a significant portion of the active Reddit community. For the interested, check out the comments below for stats. :)
It might be as Louis Rossmann said, it was a mistake to say "we're going black for two days. They should've just says "were going black until you cange the rules again".
That's what Huffman was saying BEFORE the blackout. Now that 8476/8838 subreddits are currently dark, I wonder what he would say now? I don't really see how Reddit recovers from this. It's sad because I loved it and there's nothing else like it (yet), but there would need to be some major changes taking place before a lot of people consider venturing back.
There are 3.1 million subreddits.
That 8838 is the number of subs who pledged to protest in some capacity. A lot of them are big subreddits, but still. It's not like they've cut off access to 90% of the site like some people think.
Yeah but how many of those millions are ghost towns?, since a lot of the biggest subs are participating I'm more curious about how reddit will handle it, replacing the mods in every one of them? That's a lot of man power, I hope whoever they put in charge isn't an idiot that does it for free, and what's more funny is that the best mod tools rely on the API and 3rd party access.
At the very least I expect a decline in quality content and spam, trolls, bots etc.
Over half my feed went dark. I was only getting posts from 4-5 subreddits, mostly news. That's a big impact on a user.
Unfortunately in a few hours most of those subreddits will open back up and it'll be business as normal. The ones that don't open will be transferred over to new moderators and they'll resume normal operation too.
Realistically, for the most part, not much will change for Reddit. A lot has changed for me and you, though. I've diversified my entertainment and don't intend to lurk the same website for hours a day. I like Lemmy, and I like the people here but Reddit is too old and too encompassing to never visit it again.
The problem is that there is a lot of great crowd-sourced knowledge on Reddit on everything from programming to which microwave oven I should buy. It's going to take time to replace that, if it can be done.
somebody else pointed this out, but it's honestly bizarre he's going in on the "we aren't making any money" ploy in preparation for the ipo
what's the pitch to the investors? "please by shares in this unprofitable company, in the hope that we can become profitable by pissing off our userbase"?
"We're not afraid to make the tough decisions and purposefully alienate our longest-standing users, the ones who know about things like adblock and try to hold us accountable to things we said a decade ago. Please give us money for this new sleeker userbase without any of those pesky olds."
Completely agree. They want a tiktok or Instagram clone except for link aggregation. Happy people mindlessly scrolling and eliciting predictable reactions and emotions.
Cats -> 🥰 News -> 🤔 Injustice -> 😡 Helping others -> 🤗 Cool gadgets -> 🤯
No thinking just liking
Honestly fuck that guy. I'm glad that I don't need to continue supporting this person.
Tbh, I'm really enjoying this small feel of Lemmy. I'm not even mad I left.
Well Steve, it's not profitable for me to be a moderator for free either. Feel free to let me know how profitable you think you'll be after hiring enough staff to replace all the mods that'll be leaving.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
There is literally no new information in this article and the title implies that it is in response to the acutal blackout, and not the threat of one. Bad article.
RIP Reddit! This was all I needed to see to delete my reddit shortcuts from my phone and computer. let's gooooo lemmy!
I won't argue against the need for reddit to be profitable, they're a business after all, BUT, all respectable software that is paid has different tiers of pricing, usually ranging from single-user to corporate-deployment.
spez is complaining everywhere that they can't allow corporate-level scraping of data to train AI for free, and that's fair, but why don't they differentiate "small" devs developing apps for users from "corporations" training AI?
I find it really hard to believe it's too difficult for them, other paid software/platforms do it all the time.
The only logical explanation to me is they don't want to, they just want to kill apps no matter what, that's why the unreasonable prices for everyone, they're just using the "no profitable" excuse to do that without a worse backslash than they're getting already, tho they're being quite stupid about it.
Since I don't see a link to it in the discussion, here's an internal email from yesterday that has made its way to the Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman
I never expected them to change their mind, they know what they want and they know what sort of people they want on their platform and frankly it is not us.
Plenty of people including me are very glad about being pushed in a more fedi direction, and genuinely enjoy it here. Probably most of those people are older like me and feel very much at home with a bit of jank, with Mastodon's topic-based following system, etc etc. Because that's what the internet was like when we were first exploring it. We will 100% stick around.
For younger or less techy people though, the only thing that really gets them to use services is how easy it is. And that's fine too. We can have our own corner of the internet here to be dorks in, and they can have their own corner over there, and we can all still be friends just...you know...from a distance.
They really should have just found out what the 3rd party apps -COULD PAY-. If it covered the cost of their usage and there was some profit on the top, it would at least bring in some money. Based on what I read by the Apollo dev, there was back and forth communication about pricing for a while until he broke the news.
It astounds me that they chose to cut them off entirely by offering impossible pricing. Isn't some money better than no money?
Digg used to be king. People abandoned it in droves when they went a step too far and there was an alternative. Reddit is not immune to the same thing happening to them.
The irony is reddit was that alternative to Digg.
You'd think Huffman would have the wherewithal to realize that no king rules forever.
"We are not profitable"
Says the one who wants the money of 3rd party developers.
The alt-right is having a great time right now on Reddit. Tons of their posts from r/conservative on the front page.
I just want to point out that the article is dated 9 June, so before the actual blackout. Maybe they have changed their mind seeing the actual data
I don't need reddit. Reddit doesn't generate content, nor does it prevent contributors from sharing the same content on other platforms.
What is reddit doing to win me back?
The world is ready to fully transition away from that cancerous company.
First comment here. Sad to Reddit go but also it's their own fault for pushing me away
I really can't wait to see what's the fallout of Reddit going dark. Does the community really wield the power? Or does Reddit have another ace up its sleeve?
Just shows how much reddit cares about it's users.
WE should blackout for longer, i own a very small subreddit, but 2 days is not enough!! im not backing down tomorrow, i ask over subs do the same. lets stick it to reddit
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