Why would anyone use Reddit?
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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If the paid API wasn't rolled out as a complete trainwreck I'd probably be paying. And probably wouldn't be here, too.
Relay was my app for 12 years so I wish him well with this but I'm not planning on going back to using it or reddit.
Sorry that was a rhetorical question.
Momentum/inertia
If the changes don't directly affect people most of them won't change their ways. That's just how it is.
To get answers to specific questions, written by a actual human. That's the only thing I still use it for. Why deal with pages upon pages blogspam written by bots, when you can simply add site:reddit.com to your searches and get an answer immediately? I can't wait for the day when Lemmy grows enough that I no longer have to do that.
Or a version of Gigabrain that works with Lemmy. Otherwise too many domains
A lot of people are "stuck" because of the content still there, like Psythik said; you either look for info in Reddit or you get to navigate through blogspam. (I do the later because I'd rather not give Reddit more traffic. Screw it. Complex websearching techniques alleviate the issue.)
Others are like this:
I use it because of specific support communities where there isn’t a good alternative or where I’ve built connections.
Yeah, Lemmy is very small compared to Reddit.
Yeah, that was going to be the outcome of all the third party apps. I get the feeling a lot of people didnt understand that.
And theres nothing wrong with that. I mean, it sucks, but reddit wanting to make money from giving access to its APIs to third parties is fine. What wasnt fine was the ridiculous price they pulled out of their ass, and the lack of any real time for app developers to prepare for it (this was Apollo's issue with the situation).
But had the API pricing been reasonable and a fair timeframe for app developers to implement it, this is what we would have seen, all the third party apps charging a subscription to access reddit. The other option would have been a higher initial cost for the app, to cover costs for the estimated average liftime of the app.
Yeah, that was going to be the outcome of all the third party apps.
Yup, it's no surprise for me either. Still something to document about it.
And theres nothing wrong with that.
Besides being done in a scummy way (that you already addressed), it's overall bad for the platform in the long term. Those third party apps didn't generate direct profit, but they generated value - it was yet another "chain" keeping users in Reddit, as the official app is trash. And Reddit consistently picked features from those apps to actually improve theirs, now this is gone.
I never understood why reddit didn't go to asking for a cut of the third party sales for a revenue sharing model over this api usage tier.
But then a look at the permissions asked of the official reddit app made me understand.
But then a look at the permissions asked of the official reddit app made me understand.
Data-mining, right? It's that sort of shady as fuck activity that every business and their subsidiary dog is doing nowadays. If not for that, theoretically they could feed the advertisement directly into the third party apps, or demand them to show ads from Reddit in order to operate. (They'd probably do it - their devs were eager to dialogue, before the recent events.)
It's one of the reasons I've moved over to lot of Foss apps over the years, and opting for using lite apps through the browser over downloading official apps.
Reddit Is Fun actually had a revenue sharing agreement with reddit.
Spez ripped it up when he came back as CEO
This is a great model!
It means I don't have to pay anything, which I appreciate.
This also means more lemmings
Paying an app to use Reddit the way you would a cell phone provider sounds absolutely terrible.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The costs of a subscription will go up based on a user’s daily average number of API calls, essentially meaning that the more things a person does in the app, the more they might have to pay.
Here is the full list, from developer DBrady’s post, which appears to include Google’s take of the subscription and Relay’s expected revenues:
In the newest release of Relay, DBrady says they also added the ability for users to see their average daily API calls.
The plan is for a subscription to roll out in two or three weeks from the time of their post and they expect to charge a monthly cost of $3 or $4.
“This won’t cover the cost of ‘super users’ who use the app all day, but, on average, it should allow me to pay the Reddit API bill,” the developer said.
Many subreddits and users protested against the switch to the paid API in-party because of its effect on the third-party app ecosystem.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Wow, they’ve really accelerated the enshitification, haven’t they?
How addicted does someone have to be to pay to use reddit. Average reddit users is probably fine fine with the official app or moved to browser so would also see this type of reddit user as bizzare. Would like to know how much they rack up in fees using reddit.
Yeah it's just crazy because if you're into reddit enough to pay for it you're probably producing value for them in the form of quality posts.
I checked out the relay subreddit and there was a thread of people trying to see what plan they would need to pay for. Was insane seeing smartphone type plans when it came to social media usage like it's some monthly utility they need.
I only login to Reddit now to see what's going on with Relay, it was a great app which I used for 10 years or so.
The relay subreddit became very strange. People happy to pay for using the app, some due to loyalty to the Dev. I don't understand how people would be happy to pay. I'm wondering how many of these people actually do pay when they switch the feature on.
I just launched Relay and it gave me a notice that it will switch to subscription in the next few weeks. That will be the complete end of me using Reddit.
Reddit is still cool for having their rss, and I hope that doesn't change. So I set up a RSS feed for gamedeals and buildapcsales. Those were the most useful and frequently used subs for me. It was interesting to find that I didn't really miss the other subs that much even though they haven't sprung up here, since they didn't have the same level of utility.
I mostly lurk but according to the relay app 35%+ of my API calls were voting. So reddit is basically charging people to vote.
At this point, fine. Whatever. A fool and his money are soon parted.
I use Reddit quite frequently. Spez (the Co-owner) ist just trying to be like Mark Zuckerberg. He thinks he can do whatever he thinks is necessary for profit. He could really care less about his fan base, or users on the site.
Whynim seeing this on Memmy ?
Gotta love it
Whynim seeing this on Memmy ?
If you meant "why I'm seeing this on Lemmy?": because this is a community about Reddit going downhill. That's it.
Gotta love it
Ditto - I want to see Reddit gone. I wish that it happened earlier, but beggars can't be choosers.