Reddit isn’t profitable, despite having more than 50 million daily active users. In preparation for an IPO, CEO Steve Huffman put the platform’s API
The funny thing is… for me it wasn’t even the API changes, it was how Steve reacted to the community feedback. If you need to make your app profitable that’s fine by me, but don’t ignore your customers so bluntly. They could’ve easily worked politely with devs to find an agreeable API price, find alternative funding streams for those devs, etc. They did none of that, instead Steve acted like a jerk.
This is the business world in general. Consumers need to say to businesses in no uncertain terms that they cannot just do whatever they want and still remain profitable. Without users, there is no profit. Charging for the API would be completely acceptable and expected, but they decided to go the most cartoonishly villainous route possible. This is what a lot of companies are doing now. They have gotten far too used to the profits being free. We should teach them a lesson, collectively.
I’m 43. I lived a good amount of my life without the Internet and even more of my life without smart phones. Even after gaining reliable Internet access, I remember the times when the Internet was not just a few big companies. I just rediscovered one of the old forums I used to hang out on is still operating. They have an active IRC channel as well. Don’t think we can’t go back, big tech. It would be so easy to go back. Don’t tempt me with a good time.
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Fund it with donations, open source all the technical components
reddit did both of those originally
but when they started taking private VC money they had to start making returns on that investment which spiraled into the current situation
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Honestly if they’d worked with the Apollo dev and he’d turned around and proposed something reasonable like $2 a month to continue using it I’d still be on Reddit.
Treating Reddit users like shit, treating devs who have made their whole business about making Reddit better like shit, fucking with unpaid mods, and finally, this weird manifest destiny attitude that Reddit will succeed despite all of the above turned me to the Fediverse.
Just make it part of reddit premium! Ugh, why wasn’t that the solution.
Stil frustrates me. Being fair about why the business side needs it and then giving a time frame to devs to integrate with premium calls would have been the best option.
There would have been some revolts because of it, but nothing like the last few weeks imo
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Good point! It was not a given, but right now it seems like Reddit’s choices (and related events at Twitter/Meta) have been driving new platforms to emerge. I’m still incredibly suprised by the adoption of Lemmy and Kbin and especially the quaility and diversity of available apps for the platforms. It’s just really cool to see what people can do when they care about communitites of people coming together.
Yeah, we all see his extremely punchable face. Simultaneously blond and ginger and rat-like. It’s a big reason I’m off reddit.
