The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
I wish all articles covering the debacle but it at clearly as this.
They have something else in common: Bots.
And then there’s one more thing in common: they get paid for bot activity just the same as organic activity so they’re incentivized to under-report the problem.
Before the IPO happens, they have to rid themselves of third-party clients so that the app store numbers can’t be extrapolated to verify site-wide user activity.
The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
It’s nice to see an article which finally states the obvious truth–that Reddit wants the third party apps to die so they can have a captive audience to advertise to.
It’s not just that. If I’m accessing all of my reddit content through the app developers api pull requests they can’t track what I’m doing except for when I comment/post/vote. They can’t tell how long I spend on the site, where I’m scrolling, what I’m looking at, nothing. All of those API pulls are through the developers account, not mine.
So not only am I not looking at their ads, I’m also not giving them any information on what I’m doing at all, so they can’t really give that information to their advertising partners.
Then of course they don’t have the ability to send me random alerts on my phone to pull me back into their app.
I’m wondering if a Co-op model would work for some of these alternatives. Then they would be less reliant on a single owner/developer system, there would be additional support for some of the businessy components, and there would be a built-in groups structure for resolution of issues.
I’ve been watching the formation of a co-op Etsy alternative, and I’m very interested to see how that goes. I think it’s fine to complain about corporatization, but I think it’s also crucial to build and support other models at the same time.
I am not a member of this Artisan’s Coop, but am considering it.
@mem_somerville_kbin @hedge My insurance company, Amica, is a mutual company; I get a substantial rebate every year.
Liberty Mutual is also a mutual company, but I hear they never issue any rebates, that management thinks it is more fun to spend any extra money on themselves.
Cooperates and mutuals are not a magic alternative to rapacious capitalism.
Discord is a tough one, since those communities aren’t open to search indexer and archiver crawls, losing that would extinguish a lot more of our collective knowledge.
Hopefully dedicated server teams branch to matrix or another more open platform.
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Yeah, that is exactly the problem. When communities move to Discord, discussion between highly-involved individuals on a subject moves to a completely private place and can be purged at a moment’s notice.
I’ve used it mostly to chat between friend groups so that makes sense to me, but I don’t like having to join Discord communities because of this as well.
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The amount of Discord communities that are really just a mishmash of stickies and google docs is absurd.
Discord is like the worst source for knowledge anyones has ever used as such.
I regularly find myself searching for stuff where there is only a small community and when they use discord and you want to look something up, you can straight up look into the sourcecode because it helps just as much. It is really devastating to be in this situation and I would really like for people to just get rid of discord and use a real wiki or forum for this kind of stuff.
lol dude this is flat out wrong. Being able to ask active communitites things is useful to a lot of people. Have you ever even heard of IRC???
What do you think happened before google had everything indexed?
It’s useful to chat it out with people sometimes especially when you are all collectively centered around a single topic.
I’ve learned mass amounts of things through IRC and often times they don’t just give you the answer they give you clues to help you figure it out.
Discord will be similar for many people. It’s not necessary to archive every last bit of information. It’s OK to talk to real people who enjoy talking about said topic and letting them guide you real time.
For me, the problem is not discords real time chat functionality (e.g. like IRC).It’s that communities are using it as their only source of information and getting rid of wiki pages and support forums.
There are many open source projects and communities whose documentation lives entirely in Discord. This makes finding information much harder as search engines don’t have the information indexed so you resort to asking on chat and hoping someone replies or using Discord’s horrible search functionality (it’s very basic and has a poor UI)
The thing with IRC is that noone ever used it as a reference. It’s the equivalent of a water cooler, no meeting minutes are made and people treat it as such.
Before google there was usenet and mailing lists and their archives and also forums. And web rings. There were index pages (how yahoo made its money) and, *shocker*, web search, in particular altavista. It might not have all been searchable but it was discoverable and you didn’t need an account much less an invitation to read a howto.
And frankly speaknig finding stuff on altavista back then was often easier than now on google, with all that SEO-infested garbage floating about and google ignoring advanced search syntax more often than it respects it.
Lol dude no. There was practically nothing online back then. I was around back then learning linux and programming. IRC was a great place to go otherwise you had to actually read books and RTFM. The wealth of information that we have today wasn’t even close back when alta vista was something you used. I had a job where I specifically had to search things and input data about it and there were like 5 different search engines offering all manner of different results. It was horrible.
IRC had massive amount of people and chatting with them was helpful. Discord offers that. Your beef is just that it’s not searchable and takes way more engagement for you to try and figure it out.
That’s just one place, but it’s very useful for a lot of people. IRC is still around and decent amounts still use it and have all along. Those communities that decide to be discord are probably so freakin niche that even if you just log in day 1 ask your question it probably gets answered in detail in 2 seconds.
Oh yeah, it’s always cool to ask randos if a mod also runs on Linux only to be told by 3 people that they don’t know and then to have someone change the topic.
Wouldn’t want that in an indexable thread in some forum where you might find it by it’s title and also see answers directly and not wade through 5 weeks of 17 topic only to find out that no one got it to work.
And yes, there was a time before search engines, but you cannot possibly suggest it was better than now. Now we have better tools and should use them.
I’m not saying it’s better my point is there is shit loads of that going on since forever. It’s not hurt anything and some people prefer to chat it out because searching can also get you a load of nonsense. Guarantee you got your answer. It’s mostly super niche communities. If properly run they have searchable forums of a FAQ.
This is what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”, and it’s part of the reason I’m on Mastodon and Lemmy now.
