this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Today I Learned (TIL)

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[–] tobybencollaghduff 85 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I just don’t understand the thought process. They could’ve just shelled out $10M for Apollo and made that the official Reddit app. Then give users the choice of ads or pay for ad free experience.

so basically they’re making a massive gamble that most people will just switch over to their garbage app. Maybe they will, but for sure the power users, big sub moderators & regular posters are all coming to Lemmy. You know, all the people that made Reddit worth visiting.

Personally I think this will be the end of Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Well, Reddit did shell out money for a third party client. They bought the iOS app Alien Blue in 2014 and turned that into an official app before quickly abandoning it for their client in 2016.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (2 children)

They bought the app , and then destroyed it.

They should have learned for their second try, and just bought the app, then not destroyed it.

[–] whereisk 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

If your core offering can be recreated by a bunch of hobbyists in the their spare time, and your value is 100% the content your users create and moderate then perhaps you're not the great product company you thought you were and you should leave product creation to others.

But hey, perhaps it's a good idea to take the reasons for using your site away and see what happens.

After all, your friends take their private planes everywhere while you're forced to fly first class occasionally - and you want that money.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That would never happen though. The icentives of Christian Selig and the incentives of Reddit are very different. People like it because it's not made by Reddit

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

That is the crux of the issue, yeah. Reddit needs to make money, which requires enshittifying their app to serve more ads...which drives people away from using their app.

Lemmy's lack of profit motive is probably the best thing going for it. The decentralization is good too, but I still think it's secondary to the fact that it doesn't need to try to make a profit

[–] tobybencollaghduff 8 points 2 years ago

Yeah I used that before Apollo :)

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Realistically Reddit will survive, but it will be a zombie of its former self, kind of similar to how Digg is these days. Let's just hope it kills their valuation and /u/spez has to answer for it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I really hope it survives, only because I want to preserve and archive all of it's content. Sure, there's a lot of duplicate data and links to other places, but there's also a lot of unique things there. If it dies before it can be properly archived we would lose most of it, with only internet archive keeping some. That would be sad.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago

I think that it's been fairly well archived prior to July 1st. Now that API access is blocked, further backing up becomes harder.

[–] orientalsniper 8 points 2 years ago

There are some off sites reddit archives, given enough time, there will be a way to find data without visiting reddit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

So you read reddit specifically through the way back at all times, so it'll archive as you go?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

MySpace does too!

[–] psud 1 points 1 year ago

Some of the communities I was in on Reddit don't seem to want to move. They're ones where users don't go to Reddit, they go to r/whatever, and have usernames matched to the sub.

I doubt Reddit can survive on those sort of users, in those sort of subs, but many of them will stay on Reddit as long as it keeps working

I now only use Reddit for those subs, but rarely since I now only use Reddit thorough it's old web interface with Reddit Enhancement Suite