It makes so little sense to me. They could have charged a reasonable amount and made some money off of the apps, but instead, they chose to kill them and lose their users. Some might migrate to the official app, but this uproar may have caused even more to leave the platform entirely.

I'm honestly shocked the redditors are so blind to this. Do they actually think it'll just be plain sailing from here on out?

Maybe in just to old skool and remember a time when Reddit would have really stood up.

All capitalistic entities aim for a monopoly so they can fully dictate the terms to maximize their profit. I was actually only using the Reddit app and liked it, especially since the update. What I didn't like was banning anyhow good subs for thought crime and the forever lowering standard of content. Hell, I started getting soft porn in popular in spite of not opting into NSFW. The exodus to Lemmy gave me the perfect reason to fully commit to Lemmy. c:

Agree it's intentional. Normies don't care about any of this and will just follow the memes. Most of us here are the users that had ad blockers and probably didn't care about giving gold.

people just trying to one up each other on the comment threads for upvotes.

Here, have an upvote on me =D

Ramen, exactly 💯 this. Every time I wanted to see what commentary was on the post I would almost have to scroll to the bottom to get any talk about the actual post.

Reddit OTOH was a good place to discover other things organically (not the enshittification attempt "other people liked that sub" interjections). But the only thing I miss is a way to group my subscriptions.

Currently Lemmy is getting up to speed, and the discussion quality has already started to drop; we'll see whether communities can police themselves.

There's a lot of value in smaller scale too. Not everything needs to be mega-platform level for the mass market. We can have great communities in smaller spaces online too — sometimes even better as a result.

I liked it better when they had one kind of Reddit Gold and displayed a progress bar on the homepage showing what percentage of daily operating costs were covered.

Maximum cope

As CEO, I always like to go online and tell the whole world “we’re not profitable” right before my IPO. Big brain stuff, ya know.

I think this is exactly why. It’s to make sure that Reddit is “shored up” from any profits leaking out, and making sure that NSFW content is locked down so that investors actually invest.

It sucks because it’s our posts, our comments, our information that makes Reddit what it is. This is simply preparation for advertising and other for-profit opportunities. Greedy.

The fact that he was a mod on jailbait is kind of a distraction. It's funny in concept, but at the time, mods could just add anyone else as a mod instead of sending an invite to be a mod. So anyone could be assigned as a mod for an embarrassing subreddit.

There's some problematic power tripping mods and those incidents are the most visible, but probably >99% of mod actions are essentially unnoticed and just keeping subreddits relatively organized. And people were doing that for free. If reddit isn't profitable, then pissing off moderators that were doing work for free does not seem like a good approach.

I doubt he was targeting moderators directly, but that's what ended up happening in part.

Using the percentage of mods that use 3rd party apps is disingenuous (if that stat is even correct). There's probably tons of mods on low volume subreddits that don't need to do much and thus don't use the mod tools on 3rd party apps. But I bet the percent of mod actions that come through the API vs native is very different than counting it by mod that use the API vs native. As in, a small percentage of mods on big subreddits are probably doing a lot of moderation and they are probably using 3rd party apps at least part of the time.

What it is Spez? How can people who use third party apps simultaneously be only 3% of the user base (I realize you proved he's wrong) and significant enough to ruin Reddit's profitability? Cause if you're going public and only three percent of your users can ruin Reddit's profitability you're in for a rough ride. Investors don't like too much risk.

The irony is that at the fee they are charging, there is very little useful application for the API. So I doubt they will make much, if any, money from it. So they are just enraging and driving away their user base for a plan which won't work anyway. Unless the API was just costing them so much server time that they are getting massive cost reductions by closing it.

I know right? I have no problem with a fee existing. It's the ridiculously high fee, and the complete BS he tried to feed everyone that really drive me away. It's only going to get worse. I hope lemmy gets big enough