I’ve been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn’t last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn’t
To me, Reddit’s sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I’ve never used.
If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I’ve only used Apollo so I can’t speak to the other apps.
I can’t blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn’t make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They’re going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO’s are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That’s how capitalism works.
In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can’t stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn’t have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn’t been such an uproar. So I’m glad it went the way it did.
In a nutshell:
Imagine if you own a nice Jaguar - keep it in your garage and let the neighbours borrow it to go to the shops. Now you need to do some maintenance, and make up for losses in your taxi service (which might cost $2 per km) so you wanna price this as a premium service. … so you could charge them $5 takeout fee plus $1 per km, or (if you’re greedy) just go for $5 per km.
What Reddit did is say ‘Fuck you, you want to use it, you pay $100 per km or fuck off - we don’t care’.
The amount of money Reddit makes for you getting advertisements is actually less than $1 per km… The same occurs with YouTube. If you actually click to donate, then you can pay enough to cover thousands of hours of advertisements in one small swipe.
What we need is MICROpayments spread across a wider user-base to balance the ad-supported platform, and then people will accept that small payments are better.