The way that Christian and other developers were treated by reddit, their administrative team, and their CEO, is just abhorrent. There's no justification to explain their behavior. It's just so cold. To attack someone from a position of power for simply defending themselves, after attacking them for a mutually beneficial compromise, is just morally bankrupt behavior.
I don't blame him (and others) for just wanting to stop the relationship with reddit. Even if they backpedaled, there would be no trust left.
Its honestly absolutely incredibly disgusting. Its pretty clear that reddit is getting sucked into the venture capital ratchet, and there's absolutely no way they're going to make profitability, so its just going to get worse and worse
Grim and grimmer. Kbin seems pretty ok so far though
Reddit relies almost exclusively on hobbyists and volunteers to both manage, moderate, and create content for the site. They've burned a lot of bridges with this stunt by blatantly giving the finger to a bunch of those hobbyists and volunteers.
I suspect reddit will survive as long as subreddits come back and won't go dark indefinitely. Karmafarmers, reposters, actual OC content creators and bots need to delete themselves from that platform as well. Are majority of people going to do that? I seriously doubt that. Considering that majority of subreddits that have gone dark have decided to only do it for a few days speaks volumes what will happen next.
The people who don't understand or care about whats going on will stay, and they will consume the influencer style content that is going to hang around and fill the void. Reddit wants profit, so its changing to a model where they have end to end control and stripping the 3rd party development and modification.
Hopefully the development community packs up and moves to the fediverse.
Absolutely, I agree. Whether or not it is good or successful, I reckon the owners will consider Reddit more marketable to advertisers in a couple of months. The 'milquetoasting' of Reddit has been going on for a long old time now but I think they're close to their endgame.
Its pretty wild though that he claimed that reddit isnt profitable right now if they are indeed planning on an IPO in the near future.
I know the world has a short memory, but its a pretty bad claim for a CEO to make who wants to sell off the platform
Especially as the platform is actively losing members. Even if you bank on maintaining a large enough number, you've admitted the company wasn't profitable even before it's challenges. What chance is there of profitability this late into the game, if that's the case!?
As a Sync user this absolutely sucks. One of the few apps with beautiful design, packed with features which reddit would never provide in their lifetime. Heck there were at least 7 better-than-reddit third party apps I can count over my head right now.
Relay was mine. it seems to be trying the subscription model to pay for the API but I'm not gonna be giving Reddit my money for this, so I'm still gone
I not only paid for it years ago, with the news of the API I went ahead and said thank you for a decade of Sync by buying the $30 ultra subscription. Felt really bittersweet. RIP.
Yeah, I have used sync since many years before reddit made their own client, I tried it, but it got deleted very fast before I went back to sync and have been ever since, it's just such a great application, it seems like LJDawson is contemplating refocusing his application to work on the fediverse stuff, but we'll see :)
As with many, I am also leaving reddit. I'm skeptical that the blackouts will make them change their ways and in some ways I hope they don't and it ends up tanking reddit. I was a part of reddit for 13 years and enjoyed it a lot but it was definitely much better back then. Spez needs to lose big with all his bullshit lies and greed. With all the other sites available for people to switch over to, I think we can create another great community without all the bots and hopefully build a better community for all. Fuck u/spez
Apollo is the only iOS app I have bought lifetime for and continued tipping every couple months. I’ve been on Reddit since 2010 and just deleted my account this morning and I will never be back on the platform. The way Reddit leadership has defamed Christian is absolutely unacceptable and I refuse to give them any more data.
I also bought lifetime for Apollo and did all my modding from that app. I literally can’t mod (I have been for 7 years) now, so what can I do? I’m not going to go out of my way to go on my laptop just to mod, I’m not getting paid. So today I set all the subreddits I mod to private indefinitely, deleted 8.5 years of comments and posts and logged out.
The way they treated Christian was the worst type of behavior I’ve ever seen a company (shit bag CEO) ever treat a developer that literally created an app to help serve the website better, like wtf.
As a long-time Apollo user, this whole thing really bums me out. I was only a casual user until I started using Apollo, and the way that Christian would listen to the community and implement features and ideas was so refreshing.
Apollo made browsing an information-rich site like Reddit so much easier on mobile than on a desktop machine, and that's no small feat! It - and the wealth of great 3P apps - will be missed.
Apollo was my most used app by far. The quality really put the official Reddit app to shame. I tipped every month just because of how much I used the app and enjoyed its features. Reddit is shooting themselves in the foot. Good fucking riddance
How can I follow Christian on this kbin platform? I've only just joined and don't know my way around but I feel confident that if he lands on a platform he likes I will like it too so I want to follow after tomorrow.
I wish Christian the best in his future projects. Apollo will always be Reddit to me and I cannot see myself using anything else especially the official Reddit app
It’s not the same thing as Apollo but if you have an iPhone with the Dynamic Island I think he has a pixel pal app using the concept that he had in Apollo as a feature.
He does have a pixel pals stand-alone app! It’s not just for iPhones with the dynamic island, there are lock screen and home screen widgets available too! App Store link here
Standup response, I hope Christian finds a promising career ahead of him.
If I'm being honest, I wouldn't be nearly so kind to Reddit following his ordeal. Even if Reddit renegs on the API pricing completely and go back to making it free, the trust has already been sufficiently broken that I wouldn't return. They won't stop monetizing the site just because they lost some users and pissed off their developer partners. They'll just be subtler, quieter the next time they try to screw you over.
Second chances are important, but there are limits to trust. Reddit slapped their users across the face today; despite any promise or apology they make in the meantime, there is no indication that they won't do it again tomorrow to get what they want.
I agree, I don't think they would just keep the API free forever, they've already said that Reddit is not profitable, and so they will continue to add more "features" to be more like tiktok.
Third party devs have said they don’t mind a reasonable API rate, but both the cost (~$20 million/year just for Apollo) and the timing (30 days to make the pricing changes, update the app, work out bugs, get Apple to approve it, etc) were just stupid.
It was done this way to kill the third party apps, period.
If Reddit didn’t insist on hosting all pics & videos themselves, they would probably already be profitable.
If the API pricing was reasonable, users & third party devs would happily pay it.
If Reddit had given more time (3-6 months) for third party devs to implement changes, then they could and would do so (assuming reasonable API price).
The timing is really what brings the enshittification home. THIRTY DAYS. That's laughable in terms of dev response to this. It's nothing else but a thinly veiled death knell to the entire ecosystem. They literally only care about cashing out the ipo while burning the entire thing down and retiring to their private mansions, fuck the site, fuck the users, fuck the communities.
A really good comparison to this was when Apple bought Dark Sky. From Christian's post:
As a comparison, when Apple bought Dark Sky and announced a shut down of their API, knowing that this API was at the core of many businesses, they provided 18 months before the API would be turned off. When the 18 months came, they ultimately extended it another 12 months, resulting in a total transition period of 30 months. While I'm not asking for that much, Reddit's in comparison is 30 days.
How ludicrous of reddit to give the entire community 30 days. I hope their ipo goes terribly and the site never recovers.
I don't understand why the pricing couldn't have been per-user (for people who don't want to use their shitty app). Make it part of Reddit Premium, or tiered based on usage thresholds - I would have paid for that instead of nuking my account.
Expose the user quota via the API so that Devs like Christian could show a usage threshold to warn users if they're approaching their monthly usage.
That way, all the people who are happy with the Reddit app can continue to bring in the ad revenue. The power users get to use their 3rd party apps (for a fee), and better still, the people who are doing more API calls (due to them actually using the site and not giving up after 5 minutes due to UX shittiness) will cover their costs.
Surely if this is about "unsustainable costs", that is the only solution that actually solves that problem. Isn't this how most other competently-run services handle it? How long is the company with that stupid "water multiplier" powder going to pay to run their ads for their quackery?
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