I’ve been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn’t last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn’t
To me, Reddit’s sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I’ve never used.
If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I’ve only used Apollo so I can’t speak to the other apps.
I can’t blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn’t make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They’re going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO’s are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That’s how capitalism works.
In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can’t stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn’t have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn’t been such an uproar. So I’m glad it went the way it did.
The other thing is that they’ve just handled things so incredibly badly. Limited communication largely directed at third-party media sites, erratic rules changes and enforcement, doubling down with heavy-handed admin actions.
I think that even beyond a need for profit they lost sight of why they have substantial value in the first place. The majority of their value came from their community which made “the front page of the internet” a pretty honest claim. Their software isn’t worth billions, but the front page of the internet sure is. They should have had a substantial community engagement department specifically to kiss ass and build relationships with mods (and users via AMAs) so that open lines of communication existed - and they probably should have taken control over key things like inserting an employee as top mod of the top 50 subs (make it standard practice for hitting top 50, offer cool extra services like a visit to HQ and such for the mods so its like they “win” rather than “reddit seizes control” even if that’s what it is).
Instead they stayed way too hands-off and basically treated their community as an afterthought. The poor communication made me feel disrespected as a user, so I can only imagine what its like for the mods who put far more time and effort in and are in the direct line of fire of erratic admin actions. I mean, this isn’t even hard. Just make a vague corporate statement that you’re “very sorry” about all the “confusion” and you’ll be “putting changes on hold an re-evaluating while you work with various parties to come up with solutions”. You make some token concessions and then do 80% of what you were gonna do anyway, 1-2 months later. Its dishonest and shitty but it’s not rocket science to take some of the fuel away from the fire. Like, do they even have a PR department or… did they completely forget that the community even mattered?
If Reddit has an employee on staff as a mod that can approve posts, then they lose safe harbor protections. Anything that mod approves is considered representative of Reddit, giving them editorial control and causing them to be handled more strictly. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/1856011.html
Further, if Reddit gave bonuses to mods, then mods would be considered unpaid employees. Any kind of “swag” or quid pro quo for being a mod of a big subreddit increases the chances that those moderators will be considered unpaid employees by the Department of Labor. AOL famously got in big trouble for giving free/discounted internet access to their volunteer moderators. https://casetext.com/case/hallissey-v-america-online-inc-sdny-2002 (Settled in 2009 for $15 million in back pay.)
Combining the two is terrible news for Reddit and would make their business model absolutely unsustainable. Every mod would be an employee and every post would be representative of Reddit as a company. If a mod approves a link to copyrighted material, then Reddit could be sued.