Yep. The goal was to kill all the apps to normalize using their crap. Same thing Google is doing with youtube: make adblockers difficult so that paying for YT red is normalized.
Comment on Reddit moderator rebellion: AI moderation is part of the solution
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Huffman says that he stands by the company’s decision to charge for API access despite the fact that it was massively unpopular, and led to the demise of the leading Reddit app, Apollo …
Getting rid of 3rd party apps was obviously the goal…
Reddit wants people to use their own app, so they get the data
They could have done that by being better than 3rd party apps, but that’s hard.
So they charged them an insane amount of money, knowing it would shut them down and leave only the official app.
Neato@kbin.social 6 months ago
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I still wanna know why Narwhal made i work and Apollo couldn’t. Nobody has answered that satisfactorily besides Apollo was the first-born figuratively speaking and Narwhal might have been able to learn from Apollo’s missteps
admiralteal@kbin.social 6 months ago
Huh? The Apollo dev was very specific about why he couldn't make it work. The turnaround was too fast. He had users on multi-month and even annual subscriptions. Users who were effectively owed service by him. The new model would have caused all of those users into giant financial liabilities for him far beyond whatever revenue he earned from them.
If they'd give him 12 months notice about the changes instead of 30 days he would have been able to keep the app running. It would have cost quite a bit more as users would have had to pay for his costs plus the api costs. But with only 30 days the only financially sane thing he could do was refund everyone, rather than let them turn into liabilities he couldn't afford.
If you're wondering why he didn't refund all existing users and then roll out an update with the higher subscriptions... I mean, I'm sure he just didn't want to because he didn't feel like it after being forced to go through all that terribleness and repeatedly being defamed by the admins.
oDDmON@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Actually kinda glad Apollo did go down, because it forced me to reassess that pool of toxicity and GTFO there.
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Thats very understandable and I have modified my reply above. Hopefully that is more agreeable and respectful of all this :)
Aatube@kbin.social 6 months ago
Seems like Narwhal switched to subscriptions only
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 6 months ago
And Apollo/Christian could have swallowed that reality and altered the product so he didn’t have to shut it all down wholsesale, no?
hypnicjerk@lemmy.world 6 months ago
the short answer is that only a few apps were willing to play ball, and reddit corp was able to walk back their initial (untenable) terms to a point where they could keep those apps afloat.
the long answer is that during the course of these ‘negotiations’, huffman publicly libeled the shit out of christian which forced christian to defend himself against the accusations by releasing recordings, and none of this is conducive to a healthy working relationship. neither christian nor huffman have any desire to work with one another at this point, so they don’t.
DriftingDeep@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I imagine there were 2 primary reasons, one financial, one personal:
Number of heavy users (including a lot of mods) would’ve forced Christian to implement an open-ended cost model based on individual usage, or raise rates across the board to compensate, making it ultimately cost-prohibitive for the average user, and/or
Not wanting to communicate (by folding) such a change was okay. To move to a blanket cost model is to basically admit that you’re okay with and accept the changes.
Some might say it was pure stubbornness and greed, or conclude his decision was a bad one. That’s its own topic for debate I guess.
Aatube@kbin.social 6 months ago
It was doable, but a bit hard and Christian didn’t want to answer to the whims of Reddit anymore apparently
Uglyhead@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Right after that he said some other bullshit about Reddit being ‘open’. Just complete BS from this guy non-stop.