I would have considered that at the start, but at this point they've damaged their ecosystem so much, and correspondingly Lemmy has grown a lot, so I don't see why I would go back either way.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Yeah, the fact that he seems devoted to following musk's business practices leaves litte faith for Reddit to ever get back on the right track again. Besides, I'm loving my time here at the fediverse and will probably start selfhosting my own private Lemmy server soon!
Hah, no. Are you asking if I want to pay for access to a platform that is already dependant on its users to create or aggregate content, while they are already making ad money off my eyeballs? Heck, no, never. If that site cannot make enough money on ads alone, while being one /were of the most visited non-porn sites on the internet, then maybe they should reconsider their other expenses. E.x. Is it really necessary to have a downtown office in an expensive us city, or pay out high CEO wages. I can only really conclude that they are being stupid about this. If they want me back, they are going to have to beg.
But that is exactly the problem with third party apps ..they don't show ads so they make no add revenue on people using apps like Sync and Apollo or RIF.. The official app does. I understand why they are trying to push people to their app, but the route they took was worst case scenario.
Third party app users generate content that make adds possible. Get out of here with this pitty reddit problems.
That's not a problem with third party apps, that's a problem with Reddit's API that doesn't send ads to third party apps. It's entirely a problem of their own making, which they could have fixed years ago, but chose not to, and are now using as a fallacious excuse to shut off access.
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Once upon a time, Reddit didn't even have ads.
You're ignoring the other effects of third party apps - which is to have significantly added to the number of users they have to show ads to in the first place.
Making their API free encouraged active development which increased user engagement. So it absolutely did increase their revenue because it helped to increase the popularity of their site in the first place.
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They took a 250m funding round and used it to build an nft site. reddit's problems are 100% self created. Think about how ama's used to be and how they managed to kill that. They could have had several revenue streams just based on ama's.
We are literally the product that Reddit offers. It’s not like they produce content like Netflix etc.
They’re literally trying to sell the product to the product.
They've showed extremely bad faith. That's hard to recover from.
Three weeks ago, I totally would have… Apollo was life! Now, I don’t think anything could lure me back…
With Spez’s comments about how Reddit has all this data, and “we’re not going to just give that away for free”, I think anyone left on that platform is going to get sold so hard to anyone with two nickels to rub together, that they will effectively have zero privacy or anonymity… no thanks, Spez.
Had they come out and said "hey guys, we really need to actually be making money here. We know it's not ideal, but itll allow us to further invest in the site and its community", there really wouldn't have been a fuss. Sure people would have been upset, but most would've gotten it.
Instead they have to act like petulant children throwing a temper tantrum when they don't get exactly what they want exactly when they want it.
Yeah, the problem rn is that Reddit is shitting on its users, sometime ago, I'd pay, but now I'm gone for good, even if they revert everything
If that had been the compromise, that users of this party apps needed to be premium, I'd have grumbled, but thought 50 a year is worth it to subsidize the costs of running the site without ads using the api.
Now, hell no. I'm transitioning the community I ran to lemmy, and trying to start communities here. Between lemmy, tildes, and royal road, I have everything I had on reddit.
I wouldn't go back to reddit even if they paid me to do it.
Ok so, if they paid me, I might consider it.
If Reddit want to settle this conflict peacefully. I want to do that. But, with recent news today I don't think so
Those are big ifs, but: if the API prices would have been reasonable and if the Reddit leadership hadn’t acted as they have, I think I might have been willing to pay for Premium. As it stands, Reddit leadership has destroyed a lot of trust, so for me that ship has sailed.
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lmao fuck no. I was on reddit for 12 years until recently, but at this point, there's nothing they can do to win back my trust. Reddit is just another corporate giant these days, and has been for a long time. Huffman is the reason I no longer wish to support reddit in any form, and they can make promises all they want - I've happily jumped ship and will be staying here.
No, bridge is already burnt.
No, the reason I left Reddit last week has little to do with with third party app issue. I left because the CEO has shown he isn't interested in listening or addressing community concerns.
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If you had asked me a month ago, I’d have said absolutely, as long as it keep Reddit alive.
Now? Absofuckinglutely not. I’m a firm believer in putting my money where my mouth is. I haven’t accessed Reddit (intentionally) since the 11th. And my original plan was to see how it all played out, and still probably browse only when I’m at my desk, on my laptop. Watching it all unfold, I’m absolutely disgusted with the choices they are making, and more so with how they are treating everyone, privately, and publicly.
I won’t be going back to Reddit. And I’m ok with that. It was honestly already a bit too……money-grubbing anyhow, and all this last week just solidified that for me.
The intentionally part is my only difficulty. I’d not realized until last week just how many search results were Reddit threads. I need to start excluding Reddit from my search results.
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Not anymore, they lost me with all these interviews, spez showed his true colors, he is a piece of shit and doesn't deserve my money. I rather support kbin or lemmy, I've always been a FOSS enthusiast.
Hell no.
No
If they had given us a heads up that we would need a subscription, early enough in advance.
If they didnt limit the content we could access.
If the price wasnt ridiculous - Im not paying Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Game Pass money to access a web forum.
Then sure.
But Spez fucked it up. Hes shown that he really doesnt care about the communities, the people that make it up, or even reddit itself. Hes too bent on making that IPO and bailing out as soon as he can.
I had reddit premium although I used a third party app. I wanted to support the platform. I spent so much time on it and really liked the way reddit worked.. being centered around communities and giving them the power to have their own rules.
I canceled my subscription a week ago and will not go back. Needless to say, this isn't a company I want to have any of my money.
I felt the same, cancelling my subscription after 10 years on a 16 years account.
It's funny, because that was the obvious solution from the start.
"Third-party apps don't sell our Awards or include any of the NFT/Vault stuff^1^, and we're not making money. So from June 30th we'll only be allowing Reddit Premium subscribers to use third-party apps. The official Reddit app will continue to be free for everyone."
I honestly think people would've understood.
But if they announced it now, it'd just make people even angrier. 🙃
--
^1^ As far as I know
You're right, it would be too late...
But it would have allowed users access to awards and coins and chat features without stepping on the toes of Reddit. It's crazy that they didn't come up with that rather than this.
That was my initial suggestion and IMO the change wouldn't be the PR nightmare that it currently is. It would have been a fair middle ground: you don't make it financially devastating for the 3PA devs, the Premium users don't get ads so that would be fair that 3PA don't get shown ads through the API and Reddit gets financially compensated for it.
At this point I kinda lost faith in Reddit. I don't expect them to honor whatever they say, so I won't be subscribing anymore.
Well said
If we never had all this drama where reddit showed its true colours, I think I probably would have (as an alternative to the API being paid). It is fine by me that reddit has to pay the bills in some way.
But lol, holy shit has reddit been awful in the past few weeks. The way they went about with their changes has been completely disrespectful towards reddit users, third party devs, etc. I don't want to give them any money now. It's almost comical how dumb their actions were in that regard. This isn't the first or only thing I've disliked about reddit, but wow did it blow the others out of the water.
By comparison, I've already donated $20 to kbin, the instance I use. If reddit had treated its users nice, they could have had that money. I have no qualms about paying for my usage. But instead reddit makes me almost want to pay money to see them fail.
With how spez is handling this? No.
No
Absolutely not. If I learned something from Twitter and Facebook and Reddit fiascos then it is to never ever let youself be trapped into a closed-source, centralized for-profit platform. So NO, unless they make it completely open source and decentralised so anyone can setup their own instance. But then again we already have Fediverse and Mastodon and Lemmy... so why bother with that, let's improve what treasure we already have.
I might have a week ago, but after hearing Huffman say he hopes to run reddit like Elon Musk runs Twitter - no.
No.
Back at the beginning of all this I would have been willing to spend $1-2 a month or so. But at this point it's become clear that Reddit is completely untrustworthy, I wouldn't give them a dime.
Maybe before spez dug his heels in the ground. But now he's said too much. He admires Elon? Fuck off.
Exactly...I think from the start it would have been an understandable approach. They want to make money but understand people like their apps l.
No. Even if they decided to do something to placate us today, they've shown their hand and demonstrated they don't give a shit about their userbase. I have no plans of going back. Period.
I created an account just to emphatically say NO.
I personally don't think the API pricing was ever meant to be reasonable or cover their true costs. Between the absurd pricing, the short timing, their test that blocked mobile web browsers, and refusal to even negotiate, it's clear to me that they just want to kill 3rd party apps and force everyone on mobile into the official mobile app where they can enforce their monetization schemes.
I think before (say) a week or two ago, before Huffman showed us all what he really thinks of the people using his platform, I would have said yes to paying for Premium in order to use 3rd party apps. But now I don’t want to give him a single dime.
Yeah, especially since he's not trying to stop AI-related scraping from using API calls, he's just trying to turn them into an additional revenue stream. That's my content he's selling...
I'm not sure I would accept Reddit paying me to go back, let alone me paying to use Reddit. The API debacle has laid bare the problem with centralised, proprietary social media - the users who create the value of the platform ultimately have no control over the platform. If it wasn't APIs and third party apps it could by anything else.
Why invest time (and money) contributing to something that could be pulled out from our feet at any point, with no recourse?
No, once they showed what they're up to, this could happen again in some new kind of paywall. Really hope Lemmy continue it's ascension
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