Perfectly reasonable IMO. That said I’m still not going to use reddit again
Just sad that’s what the Internet has come to, microtransactions for using an app for a website that just aggregates links. Not to mention reddit has already gimped your third party access with the NSFW stuff and I’m sure more is on its way. Fuuuuuck off reddit
I guess the era of getting everything for free wasn’t entirely sustainable after all. Who would have thought.
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We never got anything for free. That’s not how capitalism works my dude. We paid, and are still paying, with our data. Only now they want more
Many startup companies run mostly on VC money instead of actually making enough revenue.
Due to the way investor money works, you can keep your company running on VC money for many years. Making the company profitable in the early stages isn’t entirely necessary as long as the investors get their money back within a reasonable time period.
The idea is, that if you’re able to make your shiny new service very popular, that will be the valuable product you can eventually sell in a merger, IPO or whatever. In some cases like Skype, the intellectual property was also an important part of the deal; not just the userbase. After that, the new owners are free to enshitify the service as much as they like. It’s their problem to make the service actually profitable in the long run while the founders get to drive their Lamorghinis in Dubai.
That’s when the new owners really have to crank up the data leeching and ads, which will kick out a decent percentage of the previous users, but that’s ok as long as enough of them remain.
It’s absolutely sustainable- but once you aren’t satisfied with sustainability and want it to produce an ever growing profit, that’s when things start going sideways and eventually downhill.
Late stage capitalism in action
Interesting side effect is Reddit is basically penalizing voting, since if you vote on most comments you end up doubling or tripling your API usage. The best way to pay less for this app is to stop voting altogether.
Reddit’s advertising is based on user engagement, so they’re shooting themselves in the foot for a few pennies in comparison.
Its just end-to-end-retardation. All the rage lately
I have to warn that is is going to be harsh. Relay was my favorite app and I used it everyday for years. DBrady has sold out here in my mind by sucking up to Reddit - The authors of the other apps deliberately chose not to charge users a subscription and it has put us on a better path long term by taking influence away from Reddit and centralized social media. If Relay won’t flip to Lemmy or decentralized alternatives then I hope it fails.
Redreader still works for some reason.
Joey also still works. You have to use a older version and block the versions check though. Also you have to be a moderator on a subreddit. It’s stupid to pay a subscription to Relay if you can just use older third-party clients and block their versionscheck (otherwise they force you to update)
Why is Infinity for Reddit still working fine? The Verge hasn’t reported anything about it.
So is Comet and Narwhal. Something weird went on with this whole thing. It seems like reddit wanted to kill the popular apps that were actually being used by people, but the smaller ones are fine.
you can still use most third-party apps. All you have to do is be a moderator in a subreddit. for some stupid reason reddit then allows you to still use them because they probably need all help they can get from mods.
Joey as an example still works fine, you nust have to use a older version and block their versions check.
Infinity is working on charging people, and the dev has been fronting the bill to keep their userbase before they roll out a billing system. Obviously, they didn’t have time to rollout a new version before the changes went into effect because Reddit gave them a month.
