The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
I wish all articles covering the debacle but it at clearly as this.
And then there's one more thing in common: they get paid for bot activity just the same as organic activity so they're incentivized to under-report the problem.
Before the IPO happens, they have to rid themselves of third-party clients so that the app store numbers can't be extrapolated to verify site-wide user activity.
they have to rid themselves of third-party clients so that the app store numbers can't be extrapolated to verify site-wide user activity.
I must be having a pre-morning-coffee dumb, but how would this extrapolation realistically work, in your opinion? Those install numbers aren't exactly... exact, from what I understand.
Discord is a tough one, since those communities aren't open to search indexer and archiver crawls, losing that would extinguish a lot more of our collective knowledge.
Hopefully dedicated server teams branch to matrix or another more open platform.
Yeah, that is exactly the problem. When communities move to Discord, discussion between highly-involved individuals on a subject moves to a completely private place and can be purged at a moment's notice.
I've used it mostly to chat between friend groups so that makes sense to me, but I don't like having to join Discord communities because of this as well.
Discord is like the worst source for knowledge anyones has ever used as such.
I regularly find myself searching for stuff where there is only a small community and when they use discord and you want to look something up, you can straight up look into the sourcecode because it helps just as much. It is really devastating to be in this situation and I would really like for people to just get rid of discord and use a real wiki or forum for this kind of stuff.
lol dude this is flat out wrong. Being able to ask active communitites things is useful to a lot of people. Have you ever even heard of IRC?????
What do you think happened before google had everything indexed?
It's useful to chat it out with people sometimes especially when you are all collectively centered around a single topic.
I've learned mass amounts of things through IRC and often times they don't just give you the answer they give you clues to help you figure it out.
Discord will be similar for many people. It's not necessary to archive every last bit of information. It's OK to talk to real people who enjoy talking about said topic and letting them guide you real time.
Oh yeah, it's always cool to ask randos if a mod also runs on Linux only to be told by 3 people that they don't know and then to have someone change the topic.
Wouldn't want that in an indexable thread in some forum where you might find it by it's title and also see answers directly and not wade through 5 weeks of 17 topic only to find out that no one got it to work.
And yes, there was a time before search engines, but you cannot possibly suggest it was better than now. Now we have better tools and should use them.
The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
It's nice to see an article which finally states the obvious truth--that Reddit wants the third party apps to die so they can have a captive audience to advertise to.
It's not just that. If I'm accessing all of my reddit content through the app developers api pull requests they can't track what I'm doing except for when I comment/post/vote. They can't tell how long I spend on the site, where I'm scrolling, what I'm looking at, nothing. All of those API pulls are through the developers account, not mine.
So not only am I not looking at their ads, I'm also not giving them any information on what I'm doing at all, so they can't really give that information to their advertising partners.
Then of course they don't have the ability to send me random alerts on my phone to pull me back into their app.
Turns out, pretending the entire Internet is equal to 5 apps from mega corps (largely fueled by pretend money) wasn't the best long term play.
Who would have thought?
This has become the prevailing opinion for most of the tech-savvy folks that I know, but it's gaining traction with a wider audience.
Having steeped in corpo-climate for two decades, it's naïve to say that the C-Suite has ever maintained a realistic perspective on the business that they run; but it is baffling to me that corporations like Reddit have completely lost sight of their actual product - a clearinghouse of perpetually donated content - and seem to believe that their platform cannot be easily duplicated, or made obsolete nearly overnight.
It's exciting to be an insider as new paradigms like the fediverse become more widely known. If the last week is any indicator, there is a non-zero chance that ultra-capitalist hubris will be punished.
The fact of the matter is that I don't care if something is a monopoly as long as it's a monopoly for it's quality. Reddit used to be that, a hub for damn near all of my interests, and I used Boost to make the experience great.
But reddit is getting worse with this change, so I'm here now.
seem to believe that their platform cannot be easily duplicated, or made obsolete nearly overnight.
As much as it pains me to say it, I think they are right. The value in social media is in the size of their user base and I don't see a mass migration to another platform really happening unless reddit itself went completely offline for several weeks. People do not like change and Reddit will continue to be just "good enough" despite the API changes. If anything their decline will be extremely gradual since moderators will have lost most of their third party moderation tools. And niche communities can probably keep ticking along without them for the most part.
I don't mind if most of reddit users stay there, we just need to attract the valuable ones. Back on reddit I wouldn't have welcomed the entirety of Twitter for example, too many bad contributors.
Whether their hubris is punished or not is of no consequence to me. In some ways the ultimate karma is waking up every day to find out we are ourselves. I'm more concerned with building cool stuff for us to use than with anyone getting what I think is their comeuppance.
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