somebody else pointed this out, but it’s honestly bizarre he’s going in on the “we aren’t making any money” ploy in preparation for the ipo
what’s the pitch to the investors? “please by shares in this unprofitable company, in the hope that we can become profitable by pissing off our userbase”?
“We’re not afraid to make the tough decisions and purposefully alienate our longest-standing users, the ones who know about things like adblock and try to hold us accountable to things we said a decade ago. Please give us money for this new sleeker userbase without any of those pesky olds.”
It’s not actually about the money in that sense. Don’t be fooled.
No, they want to kick out third party apps because that cuts costs and the first party app is way better for pushing ads onto users. That’s the real investor pitch, they just aren’t saying it out loud.
If it was about being profitable, why charge such outrageous prices?
If it’s about covering costs created by these apps, why suddenly drop such a huge change on them with an timeframe that can’t possibly be met? Why don’t they work together with app developers, communicate things well ahead of time and give them some leeway when necessary?
They just want to kill third party apps without outright saying it and the easiest way to do that is to charge costs they can’t pay.
Really curious to see how long the more popular subreddits will remain private. Surely the admin won’t just turn them public again without having any mods, right? I kinda would love to see that dumpster fire.
Spez personally banned me for harasent because I reported a child porn seller
Well, Spez was a mod of /r/jailbait before advertisers made them take it down…
Wait, really? Not that I’m actually surprised but it’s almost to perfect…
Captain of the Titanic: “we’re sticking to our course, despite the iceberg being dead ahead”
They really should have just found out what the 3rd party apps -COULD PAY-. If it covered the cost of their usage and there was some profit on the top, it would at least bring in some money. Based on what I read by the Apollo dev, there was back and forth communication about pricing for a while until he broke the news.
It astounds me that they chose to cut them off entirely by offering impossible pricing. Isn’t some money better than no money?
Others have speculated that the API pricing model is built around customers who want to use the data for AI training, not customers who want to build apps for public use. The $20M price tag is what they’re hoping a mega corp will pay for data access and don’t care about anyone who can’t afford that much. Some money is better than no money, but for a lot of people the “chance” at BIG money is better than some money lol
If this is the case, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just separate into tiers, where mass data usage to feed into a language model is priced differently than people legitimately using and contributing content to the site.