this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Reddit Migration
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The fact that Relay can stay free of charge while "exploring subscription options" means Reddit modified their terms with some developers. The original deal announced at the end of May meant devs would incur charges starting July 1, although they wouldn't have to pay for those charges until August. That would mean racking up potentially millions in costs right away.
Reddit said they would work with developers who kept communication open, but then they wouldn't answer emails. If a deal was made with Relay it would have been very last minute and therefore rather unprofessional.
I used Relay but will not reinstall because it is temporarily free. I am done with Reddit. They don't respect their users or recognize where their value derives from.
I also suspect that there were inconsistencies between pricing based on the 3rd party app in question. I don't mean that Apollo was being charged more (in proportion) for having a larger userbase compared to apps like Relay or narwhal, but that Apollo was being charged almost double per unit to access API than Relay or narwhal. I am reading between the lines of articles published two *weeks ago about this because it didn't make sense to me why these smaller apps would be able to afford the business model if Apollo had a $20M bill to pay in August.
What gets my goat is why didn't reddit ever just headhunt Christian or other 3PA developers and bring them into reddit corporate to build out their native app? That's what Google or Microsoft would have done to quash competition. Or, to be truly evil, hired Christian and then never let him work on apps again with both an NDA and a non-compete in place.
Huffman regularly calls reddit unprofitable with a heavy dose of ire, but I think there could have been a way to bring a reputable 3PA dev into the fold to keep the reddit native app at least comparable in UX.
They DID do that, when they bought Alien Blue. Then they promptly destroyed it. Good UX != profits. So they butchered it into some sort of zombie app where everything was designed to make them money. And that's why they are pushing so hard to make EVERYONE use it.
If anything, they hate 3PA devs because they show users what the experience could be like - how good and clean it could be - if they didn't have a greedy corporation trying to sabotage everything.
They don't need to hire anyone to pacify them. Reddit doesn't gaf what happens to the devs, whether they are pacified or not. It's like a tiny baby fish cursing the ship that just harvested 120,000 fish in a net. The ship laughs, and sails away.
Hopefully things will be better once federation grows in popularity. I know I've been using it daily since this all started. But sadly I have to augment with reddit because there just aren't enough people here yet.
I had no idea that was the history involved. This makes more sense now why maybe reddit has a vendetta against quality developers. haha