In Reddit's defense (I'm team Apollo, for the record), it is a legitimate concern to become profitable. But drastic changes that infuriate the community with little time to adapt is very questionable.
It's weird to me that Reddit just blindsided Christian like that after he's had many years of good collaboration with them and always showed good faith. I feel like there would have been a lot of more beneficial alternatives. From how they responded to the community outcry it's clear that they want to ban third-party apps without downright saying it.
Reddit could have charged the actual lost revenue plus a reasonable mark up. Then the 3rd party apps could have survived on a paid subscription basis, and Reddit would've made more off those users than if they'd moved to the official app.
Now a bunch of them, like us, are jumping ship instead. It was a dumb business decision. And this kind of stubborn disregard for their users is the kind of thing that destroys companies.
The reason Reddit doesn't want to do that is they can harvest and sell so much more user profile data if they funnel everything through themselves. That is what they are selling to investors.
Yup. I get it too. 'We'll lock down and get rid of the 3rd party apps, just give us a couple of months.'
I'm also thinking about what is the proper way to handle this LLM situation and how should the maybe grown threadiverse react to it. Mastodon actively resisted the attempt of building a central search service but a dataset builder can go stealth.
In Reddit's defense (I'm team Apollo, for the record), it is a legitimate concern to become profitable. But drastic changes that infuriate the community with little time to adapt is very questionable. It's weird to me that Reddit just blindsided Christian like that after he's had many years of good collaboration with them and always showed good faith. I feel like there would have been a lot of more beneficial alternatives. From how they responded to the community outcry it's clear that they want to ban third-party apps without downright saying it.
Reddit could have charged the actual lost revenue plus a reasonable mark up. Then the 3rd party apps could have survived on a paid subscription basis, and Reddit would've made more off those users than if they'd moved to the official app.
Now a bunch of them, like us, are jumping ship instead. It was a dumb business decision. And this kind of stubborn disregard for their users is the kind of thing that destroys companies.
The reason Reddit doesn't want to do that is they can harvest and sell so much more user profile data if they funnel everything through themselves. That is what they are selling to investors.
Yup. I get it too. 'We'll lock down and get rid of the 3rd party apps, just give us a couple of months.'
I'm also thinking about what is the proper way to handle this LLM situation and how should the maybe grown threadiverse react to it. Mastodon actively resisted the attempt of building a central search service but a dataset builder can go stealth.