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.
I’m strongly of the opinion that instead of killing Apollo, Selig should featureflag most of the features, scale it back, implement ActivityPub quickly and a guided process to get started. Just killing Apollo gives Spez exactly what he wants, especially with the amount of algorithm rigging they are doing to block ActivityPub/Lemmy/Kbin info from making it into Top and Popular.
Spez is going to get what he wants either way, really. He just wants third-party app activity gone from Reddit, and Apollo moving over to ActivtyPub is just more of the same, even if the app itself is around.
Personally, I think that dropping Apollo might make more sense. It was designed as a Reddit Reader, so instead of cramming new app functionality into it, it would make sense to just split it off into its own app.
A lot of ActivityPub/Lemmy/Kbin features are natively supported, so he wouldn’t need to keep paying for things like Imgur API access, unlike with Reddit where third-party image hosting is the only way to do image hosting, without using the official app.
Plus, after the recent shenanigans from everything, he probably deserves a break, for a while, at least.
FWIW, I don’t think it’s spez who’s asking for that; he’s simply the conveyor of the message.
I’m pretty sure this is a finance constraint imposed by underwriters/financers of the IPO, who want to see all the revenue with reddit and not with third parties. (I also think Twitter’s similar move was at the behest of $ people since Elon borrowed money to buy the company.)