this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.
I said it before on Reddit and I will say it again here—
If Reddit has asked me for a premium subscription to use my favourite third-party app, I would have fucking paid.
Just bad business all around
I don't know the right price point, but 1 dollar a month probably would have worked for most people. It just wasn't enough because they probably can make more than 1 by spoon feeding you ads now.
I'd go as far as 5 dollars a month, which is more than the buck thirty they make off users right now.
It just boggles the mind.
They had the userbase. They had the community moderation. They had the power-users basically doing their job for them. They could have had a bulletproof, tied-to-world-population-growth metric - not super fast, but basically monotonically increasing. They basically could have turned it into a sustainable money printer, while not crushing user enthusiasm. Hell, they could have even done an opt- in policy for ML training datasets, either offsetting or outright paying users a commission for content that’s used as part of a training set. There were so many possibilities that didn’t involve pointing the ship at an iceberg.
Spez threw it away because he wanted the quick payout from ad revenue.
Spez threw it away because he’s a libertarian tool. He doesn’t care how he gets the payout as long as it’s not ‘collectivist’. This commie shit your’e spouting in this post would not impress daddy Elon. GTFO.
The fuck are you on about with that last half?
Maybe I needed to add an /s?
Active users would, I probably would too. Problem is most apps would struggle to even get new users with that system.
100% I did pay for the premium version of Apollo and I absolutely would have paid about £20 a month for access.
It was the #1 most used app on all my devices.
20 a month?! No way in hell reddit app access is worth that.
Not now perhaps, but then it was. To me. I’d not pay them a farthing now.
Same here. I spend all my farthings at the taffee shoppe, or the cobblers.
I‘d say about £5 a month would be suitable for lurkers, with additional options for when your "contingent“ is used up
Didn't that become an option at some point? I'm sure I've read there are apps you can pay for to have access. Fuck that, though. Make it a reasonable price, too, and I'd listen. No way I'm paying a fiver a month for reddit. Maye 1 or 2.
Apps can pay in a ridiculous deal that no app would be able to support. So you either be a pay app that no one downloads, or a free app that gets killed the second it gets too big (And that number was low)
Recently I stumbled on Relay, still going strong with a subscription model (because API fees).
That said, I refuse to return to that platform.
You can patch old third-party apps with ReVanced. That being said, they are unmaintained and will still eventually break.
The funny ouroborous here is new reddit is shitty because no one at reddit team actually use it to know it.
Yeah, but the Apollo dev didn’t have the huge server costs that Reddit has. I’m not defending Reddit at all, but this is just comparing apples to oranges.
So the reason reddit struggled to develop a decent app is... because of server costs?
Seriously. They still don't have a way to increase the font size on the default app last I checked. How is such a basic feature STILL lacking?
Im a way, yeah. They clearly they made a shitty app to extract as much value from their users as possible. But my point was that Reddit has significantly higher costs than third party app developers (because they host the content), so the business model that works for third party app developers doesn’t work for them.
Looking at a third party app - made by someone who doesn’t have to bear the costs of running the site and can therefore make decent money on an ad-free experience - and a first party one which does have to recoup those expenses doesn’t really work. The financial models are just fundamentally different.
I don’t say that to defend Reddit. They’re clearly a shitty company headed by shitty people, and I’m sure they could’ve found different ways to make money. But yeah, their financial incentives for making an app are fundamentally different than those of other devs.
No one was saying reddit couldn't implement API costs. In fact, every major 3rd party app developer, including Apollo, supported Reddit charging for API access and made suggestions on how such an arrangement could be made that was fair and reasonable to all parties. Reddit even invited these developers to discussions on the topic. However, Reddit's CEO said fuck that and wanted to charge an insane amount of money for API usage that no 3rd party developers would be able to reasonably afford without asking for an exorbitant amount of money from their users.
Here: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/
That was post made by the Apollo dev after their meeting with the Reddit team. With more info here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about/
This link is really the one that discussed how willing 3rd party devs were to pay for API access if it was a fair cost. Reddit wasn't interested in being fair.
Server costs don't force you to make a bloated and shitty app experience. You might have an argument that 3rd party apps put strain on the servers, but that's just reddits fault for making an awful and borderline unusable UX.
I think he’s arguing that the organization, being several hundred times bigger, makes it a lot harder to focus on one thing, like making the app awesome.
As an example, in an hour long meeting you’d spend x% of the time on server costs, another y% on, i dunno, legal, another % on how to enshittify, and finally 5 minutes on the app.