The essential part at the end:
“ When reached for comment, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt directed me to Reddit’s API FAQ page and said the company couldn’t comment further because it’s in a quiet period and doesn’t “comment on confidential business conversations and/or agreements.” ”
We can infer that it was not the fountain of money they thought it would become.
More telling is their silence. Who doesn’t want to promote and advertise how profitable they are to potential shareholders just before an IPO.
Who doesn’t want to promote and advertise how profitable they are to potential shareholders just before an IPO.
They might want to, but it’s illegal.
The “quiet period” is a reference to an SEC law that forces any company to be radio silent for a strict 40 day period during the IPO process. Reddit is in that period now and therefore they cannot say a word.
JPMorgan was fined almost a billion dollars for answering questions on a phone call during their quiet period.
I love this personally. The admins had a vision for the future that was not based in any form of reality, but rather the same wealth extraction tactics that have collapsed so many other services.
Anyone who remembers the Digg exodus, there are reflections of that in reddit’s stittastic new policies.
Just more proof that enshittification isn’t a slow erosion of quality over time but rather direct actions taken by a profit-seeking leadership.
If you go back now and look in older technically complex threads it is a wasteland of [Deleted] and various account scrubber script Lorem Ipsum as a good chunk of decent contributors have left and burned their accounts.
Good.
Looking forward to the day that they don’t prop up google anymore.
Narwhal made a small amount of profit before, thanks to a small ad at the bottom of the app. Narwhal 2 “barely” makes a small profit, too. However, most of the money from Narwhal 2’s subscription fees goes to either Apple or Reddit.
This makes me irrationally angry. The dude was making something people wanted to use, without getting much of anything from it, and now the men upstairs have decided they’re not happy with that situation unless they can force him to squeeze his users for a little bit, so that they can keep it, and leave him still with pretty much nothing.
*rationally angry
TLDR: not worth reading the article, it’s just a long list of third party apps that are no longer free anymore, totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats and more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you’ll see the “this content has been removed by” (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.
Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in “hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now”. It got fairly obvious even at the start when it said that the protests
lasts(edit: lasted) for “weeks” - not the more truthful “months”, not “permanent changes”, but the minimum amount they could halfway reasonably get away with stating.I am biased, and this article is far more so, and less forgivably so bc mine is a personal opinion while this is touted as “news”.
totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats
The author asked multiple devs about these things - they all had the same reply: Can’t talk about it because NDA.
more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you’ll see the “this content has been removed by” (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.
That’s not the stated objective of the article, which was “Exploring Reddit’s third-party app environment.”
Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in “hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now”.
No, it doesn’t. You don’t call it an “APIcalypse” if you’re shilling for Reddit. You don’t pull out the most critical quote right at the top if you want to shill for Reddit. (“I don’t believe Reddit’s leadership… cares about developers anymore.”) You don’t mention Lemmy, or Threads, or Tildes if you’re shilling for Reddit.
You admit that you’re biased; good, thank you. This article isn’t.
Meh. I mean it’s not surprising. A lot of people including open source enthusiasts stuck with reddit despite everything.
I no longer have a reddit account I’m often I search and a reddit thread comes as a result but I can’t read it because you have to sign in to view “18+” content. So annoying.
I’m pretty sure old.reddit.com lets you bypass this.
I still use Boost for Reddit. It’s never stopped working.
Some folks have api leniency periods. It will eventually stop working
I have an old iPad on my nightstand and I paid for Narwhal. I have no idea why I can still use it like the ‘old times’ but I’m grateful that I can still browse Reddit.
It’s a husk of the former site I loved but the niche communities I care are still there. I wish for and 2nd and 3rd, 4th etc dramas on Reddit to get people here but sadly it’s a numbers matter game.
Once we reach critical mass it’s all over for reddit. Federation is so much better at a fundamental level
Community isolation is still a big problem. Federated services like lemmy will never reach critical mass until owners start limited communities to force more user interaction, and cross posting becomes more streamlined. My favorite proposal as a solution is to allow mods of a community to subscribe to another community, and allows it to synchronize posts and comments.
