zakarhino
Contributor
Yeah, better at tracking you. Hope you don't have a problem with Facebook or Google's invasive ad tracking because Reddit have caught up with them.
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Apple Subreddit Goes Dark in Protest of Reddit's API Pricing Changes
- Thread starter MacRumors
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Yeah, better at tracking you. Hope you don't have a problem with Facebook or Google's invasive ad tracking because Reddit have caught up with them.
zakarhino
Contributor
Most reasonable people understand that a free API is unsustainable. Have you bothered to read Christian Selig's (Apollo dev) comments on the whole situation? The point is that there was zero communication and a 30 day deadline before everyone gets billed, plus some people believe the price of the API is way too high. The final straw for people was when Reddit's CEO flat out lied to his employees and said Apollo's dev tried to blackmail the company.
There's a difference between a company transitioning to a reasonably priced paid API vs. whatever hatchet job Reddit decided to pull here.
zakarhino
Contributor
right but who are you to decide if 10k for a hamburger is reasonable!?!?!?
Again, people should read Christian's back of the napkin calculation on Reddit's API price. Even if people agreed with the API pricing, there was zero rollout and therefore no time for apps to adapt and offer a new pricing strategy.
hoodafoo
macrumors 6502a
macsplusmacs
macrumors 68030
90% of the forums are dark?
This CEO really needs to pull his head out of his Musk.
This CEO really needs to pull his head out of his Musk.
laptech
Suspended
MR owner must be crapping himself over the lost ad revenue MR is going to lose by not having people post stuff in Apple reddits linking to MR. The site is going to lose a huge amount of traffic which means ad revenue is going to drop vastly.
The same would go for other site owners who will lose traffic from not having their website linked to or referenced to in sub reddits.
The same would go for other site owners who will lose traffic from not having their website linked to or referenced to in sub reddits.
I have only been on reddit about 2 years, honestly never even thought about the 3rd party apps. I just used the normal reddit app but even thought it seemed clunky. I completely support the app developers on this case, what Reddit is doing is wrong. I will check out the 3rd party apps if they are still a thing after this is all said and done.
boss.king
Suspended
It’s waaay less than 90%, but a significant number of very active ones are private now.
CarlJ
Contributor
Not even that - Reddit regularly closes/bans subreddits for being unmoderated - they can't really reopen them without either a willing unpaid moderator (who will be under strong pressure from the existing/previous mods and other subreddit members to not "cross the picket lines") or some paid Reddit employee doing the moderating.
CarlJ
Contributor
If Reddit maintains the current course, the 3rd party apps will all be gone at the end of the month. I've used Apollo for five and a half years, and it's orders of magnitude better than the "official" Reddit app (which was originally a 3rd party app named Alien Blue, that Reddit bought, and then broke in various ways).
If Reddit perceives the negative publicity to be a big enough problem for their upcoming IPO's pricing, and they relent, and charge reasonable prices for API access, thus allowing the 3rd party clients to live on, then, by all means, check out Apollo - it's great because it was designed and built by someone who wanted a great Reddit client, rather than by a company looking for "maximum user engagement and ad revenue", who considers users an unfortunate necessity.
Time to coordinate a groups of users to volunteer as scabs and botch the reopening of whatever subs get forced open. Sabotage
CarlJ
Contributor
If Reddit wants to charge me a reasonable monthly fee for API access for whatever client I choose to run (I'd use Apollo), I'd happily pay them a couple dollars. They want the developer of Apollo to pay them roughly 20 times what Reddit is currently making from users each month via ads and Reddit Premium. Twenty times is nothing even remotely resembling reasonable.
CarlJ
Contributor
You could do worse than to look at Apollo's website - there's a video there that hits a lot of the highlights. But, in general, think in terms of an app that's built by one guy who's obsessed with making one perfect app, rather than something dispassionately provided by corporate because it's necessary for them to have an app (and corporate wants to make sure they maximize user engagement and ad revenue). Apollo has ben the most used app on my iPad many times.
CarlJ
Contributor
It would seem that impressions of Reddit's level of conversation are highly dependent on what subreddits one frequents. I usually found a fairly high level of discussion, and lots of interesting insights. And vanishingly little aggression. You and I must hang out in very different subreddits.
CarlJ
Contributor
Hard disagree. Discord is a great way to have a conversation in the moment, but is absolutely dreadful for looking up information from a month ago, or a year ago, or five years ago. Both because it isn't all exposed on the web, and because it tends to all flow together - at best you have one conversation after another mixed into the same channel.
Reddit is something like what Usenet used to be. Discord is more like what IRC used to be.
jlc1978
macrumors 604
It would be nice to see USENET return to the pre-Eternal September USENET, but I won’t hold my breath.
Even the kooks added to the enjoyment - Ludwig Plutonium, Serdar Argic et. al, the Green Card Lawyers; and of course, the all immortal James “Kibo” Parry, AFU and some of Ted Frank’s epic trolls.
Solomani
macrumors 601
Who knows. Maybe private BBS (bulletin boards) apps have a reason to come back. I remember back in the Jurassic Era, circa late 1990s, that the First Class software was really popular on Macs and Windows. The Mac client was really nice and slick.
If people want to go private.... then that's what people want. It just means every community of "shared interest" has their own little private forums, without having to be exposed or even be forced to look at other topics. You'll have gated online neighborhoods. But if that's what people want....
Then again, corporate advertisers would hate this concept 😇.... because advertisers cannot thrive and cannot profit from the niche-interest groups. They can only profit from the REALLY large and active forums.... like zealous Apple/Mac forums, or cult-like TESLA forums, or cult-like Chipotle forums, etc.
Abazigal
Contributor
Speaking as someone who joined Reddit primarily for Apple-related news, and who is now happily using Mastodon via the Ivory app, I find that enough tech-related people / organisations have joined Mastodon to replicate roughly 80% of the content for me, without any of the Twitter drama. Sadly, I have not been able to court AboveAvalon, but that's pretty much the only holdout left that I am interested in. The rest (Macrumours, Ars, Macstories crew, Christopher Lawley, Marco, creators of Tweetbot and Twitterific, just to name a few) are active on Mastodon, and that's really all the community I need.
The acid test was during WWDC, where engagement from the people I followed on Mastodon closely mirroring my previous experience at Twitter, to the point where the two were virtually indistinguishable. The tone at Mastodon also feels more civil and relaxed overall; previously on Twitter, everyone felt like they were constantly shouting.
I don't need Twitter or Reddit to fail, though I feel there needs to be alternatives, because it does appear that as the era of cheap investor financing starts to dry up, these platforms will start to be come more user-hostile as they seek to increasingly monetise their use base, often at the expense of the user experience.
Every so often I poke my head onto /. and see the dwindling comment numbers, it’s depressing :/
They have no right to withhold their freely given labor that Reddit profits from from being fully monetized? Lolwut?
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Ok, I want you to repeat these phrase slowly:
“Reddit’s content is user generated”
“Reddit’s content creators are the ones using the third party tools”
“No one is saying API access should be free, just affordable”
That should answer all of your weirdly misplaced outrage
Abazigal
Contributor
Please do so by all means. It's not like the volunteer mods have anything to lose. They are not being paid, nor do they receive any perks (to my knowledge), so Reddit actually needs them more than they need Reddit.