this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
130 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37805 readers
280 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] dudewitbow@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

They couldnt do this because apollo dev already offered to sell apollo for 10m, half the cost it would have costed them for continued api usage.

The precedent is already there to buy one and reddit missed it.

[–] kartoffelsaft@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

If you are to believe that Reddit is setting the API pricing as high as proposed to eliminate 3rd party apps, rather than to recoup costs of allowing their existence (which I wouldn't put it past them to lie like that to make it sound more palletteable), then it's reasonable to believe Apollo's existence doesn't cost them 20M$. In fact I'd be surprised if it even costs them the 10M$ figure because Reddit's reaction implies a number that high must be extortion.

[–] InEnduringGrowStrong@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

Didn't they buy alien blue before that?
It was the most popular, before Apollo even existed I think.
They bought that, turned it to shit despite it starting from a beloved, yet now unrecognizable mess. Even if they bought Apollo, RIF, Relay, Sync and Baconreader tomorrow, their goal with the site conflicts with what people enjoy about using it and anything they do will be shittier and shittier.
People would always flock to another community focused app as long as that's a possibility, so they decided to nuke the whole concept.