‘Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,’ Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.
‘Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,’ Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.
Of course they are. They had already done their projections and accounted for whatever melt they would incur over all this. The ad/whatever else revenue they expect to generate by forcing users to the official app outweighs the loss in users and collateral damage to subreddit moderation.
Reddit gradually became one of the single most important websites on the internet over the course of 17 years. Like Facebook, Reddit is functionally the ONLY website on the internet for a massive number of people. The IPO was always going to result in decisions that would tarnish Reddit in the eyes of the type of people who’d even consider migrating to a place like Lemmy. But that kind of user doesn’t matter when we’re talking about things like vaLuATioN.
I mentioned in another community yesterday that my most realistic hope is this whole ordeal fractures the power user base into various diasporas. I hope that people migrate to a bunch of different alternatives, and then they apply the community building energy there that they used to apply exclusively to Reddit. Maybe we’ll be lucky and enough people get excited about enough other places that we’ll have a [viable] diversity of choice online again.
I think the point we need to get from this is: they get to keep their ad machine and pretty numbers, but we get an influx of like-minded people to the alternative social media. To me that’s a win win situation.
Next time the wave will be bigger, and so on.
Maybe I’ve been around too long but it seems like a decade or more ago the average Reddit user would be exactly the type of person who would migrate to Lemmy in the face of something like this.
I know Reddit has gotten much larger and it seems like it’s got a lot more generic over time but do you really feel like the user base as a whole has changed enough that This move won’t impact the feel of the site as a whole, as well as their bottom line?