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I can’t wrap my head around this, it seems so bizarre. The only reason I’m here now is because I joined Apollo right after Reddit changed its app to remove the sort by rising feature. It completely changed my experience on the app for the worse and I sought out an alternative, and I know I’m not the only one that had this complaint. I was a faithful Reddit user/poster on the official app for 6 years until just a few months ago. Why would they make their app less user friendly a few months before announcing the crazy API changes. They drove me away from their app and then drove me away from the site altogether.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? It just makes no sense to me

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[-] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 13 points 1 year ago

Counter to what many will want you to believe, I think there may be a business case to what they’re doing… but how they’re doing it is completely dumb.

Imagine you run Reddit. You’ve got 15+ years of history and baggage (I.E. those of us who knew which sub /u/spez moderated). You’ve got handful of loyal users that have been very resistant to changes. They’ve been vocal about the new UI where you can spam ads. They’ve been vocal against chat in favor of legacy PM. But you’ve got no way to convert them to the new and shiny features which helps you monetize better that you’d want to focus more effort on.

So what do you do? You sunset older interfaces like the i.reddit.com / .mobile interface. You cripple old reddit. You don’t give new features to the API. You continue to build your new site and acquire new users who’s entire experience had been the new system with nothing to compare to. Old users resistant to change will either be forced to convert or leave… until eventually you get only users in the new system.

Killing the API and third party apps is just a very aggressive step. They’re pruning their old user base for the new.

Is it the best way? Heck no. The older users are active contributors. Their solution aren’t up to speed yet. And they’ve literally thrown decade+ of goodwill down the toilet. But, they have metrics, and I’m sure their bean counters have guaranteed their leadership that they will survive… and they almost certainly will. Just look at Twitter still limping along despite the mass exodus. Just like Digg before Reddit, Reddit will survive and continue to exist. It will be very different than what you and I are used to both in terms of look and feel, functionalities, and communities. But it will survive.

I don’t think I would’ve approached it the same way. But maybe that’s why I’m not rich and running big companies. 🤷‍♂️

[-] ErraticDragon@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

FWIW, Reddit had a revenue sharing deal with rif, at the very least. Apparently when spez returned as CEO he shut it down.

[-] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well aware; I'm sure it is almost certainly peanuts. Android users are well known in the industry as significantly less willing to pay than iOS users. Google also takes a significant cut of all transactions, as do third party payment processors. By the time everyone get their hands on it, there's not much left for the dev to share with Reddit. Why have a liability of a "paying customer" that barely generate anything when you can actively work your magic to that "paying customer"'s detriment and steal their user base to where you can monetize better yourself? You could say Spez had this in mind from the get-go.

It's cynical, but there's probably some truth to this.

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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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