“It’s not a principle if it doesn’t cost you anything”
Also just curious about your deeply held principles in general.
No political grandstanding please.
“It’s not a principle if it doesn’t cost you anything”
Also just curious about your deeply held principles in general.
No political grandstanding please.
The Reddit API changes around third party apps like a lot of other people here. It was so clear they were being disingenuous about the changes and that it was a de facto ban. Pretending it wasn’t a ban and that they “support third party developers” really pissed me off.
It’s one thing to charge for API access (which is not unreasonable, per se, since API calls cost Reddit money), but Reddit decided to charge an extremely unreasonable and unjustifiable rate to third party app developers. On top of that, they decided NSFW labeled content could only be seen in their official app and could never show up in any third party apps that decided to pay for API access. They claimed it was about “making sure children don’t see adult content,” but that was clearly BS since they could just not serve that content in the API for non-18+ accounts and require third party developers to agree to certain terms of use or have their app cut off.
So Reddit forced third party apps to have to charge a subscription fee to their users and those users would not get full access to Reddit content anyway. Gee, I wonder what users will do if they have to choose between paying a subscription for less content or using the crappy official app with worse and fewer features to get all content for free…
The disingenuousness of the justification for the changes and pretending there was no ulterior motive was worse to me than the changes themselves. I missed Reddit a lot at first, and occasionally I still do, but I haven’t been back since.
I have not been back since as well. I was so optimistic at the time that the community would force reddit to back down with the whole black out. Was so sad to see many people just went back to business as usual.
I had similar feelings. I knew I would miss my better, ad-free apps, but I could recognize it would be unreasonable to expect Reddit to pay for competitor access when it uses ads to support itself. I wouldn’t even hold it against them if they removed third party access entirely. But the way they did it was just so slimy.
Lying to developers, then lying to users about their discussions. Then insisting their unviable price was reasonable just so they could claim to not actually be killing them. And during the protests, threatening and replacing mods of subs for literally implementing the rules their communities voted for simply because it hurt their bottom line. They were volunteer workers maintaining the platform for years because they love their communities; until they do something the company doesn’t like, then suddenly they were employees to be fired and replaced. It really was the principle of the thing that disgusted me.