Apollo was already a nice app so why didn’t reddit just buy apollo and integrate ads into it and just keep the features that made everyone happy.
Apollo is an app that exists to give a great user experience for reddit.
The official app exists to ensure you get advertising and allow reddit to extract as much personal data from you as possible
because it’s not the user experience that matters to Spez.
Didn’t you hear? Christian is a lying, scheming, impossible to work with, dev who they just couldn’t possibly work out a deal with.
Reddit tried that before, they bought Alien Blue, and instead of improving it, they turned it into the monstrosity that we now know as the Official Reddit App.
Sometimes, when companies get too big, the C-level executives lose visibility about what the needs of the actual users are and instead, they focus their planning on increasing revenue, no matter what, Quarter after Quarter.
Buying another 3rd party app when they can keep using their shitty app to collect and sell user data to advertisers and marketers without spending more, makes sense to them in their twisted world, sadly.
when companies get too big, the C-level executives lose visibility about what the needs of the actual users are and instead
I think that cycle is universal. As any organization or group becomes increasingly stratified the decision makers at the top lose any connection to the foundations of prosperity that allowed to to grow and stratify in the first place.
I imagine it like a city on a mountain. As the city grows wealth and status concentrate at the top. That’s normal and beneficial at small scales. But at a certain point the top moves above the cloud layer and can no longer see the base of the mountain. After that point those at the top start to forget how the mountain works and believe the cloud layer is part of the structure and their decisions become increasingly disconnected from any reality below that cloud layer.
And our globally connected society keeps those above the cloud layer in closer contact to the tops of other mountains than to the base of their own.
I can’t speak for Apollo users, but as a user of Infinity and Slide, one of the best features was no ads
I bought Joey for Reddit and had no obvious ads. Lovely experience. I won’t be visiting reddit without the choice of removing the obvious ads.
I think it’s a move to monetize but without any mindful strategy whatever to utilize the strength of the platform or to maintain the integrity thereof. In other words “Elon did it so we do it too” .
Features that made everyone happy don’t make much money. Reddit’s ad-driven tracking hellscape is what makes them money.
Why spend the millions on an app that’s going to either disappear or start paying you anyway? Who cares about happy users when there’s money to be made?
They bought alien blue awhile ago and butchered it. New Reddit is horrible. Even on old reddit the sidebar is in the way (an extension can hide it). They’re just not good at this. (And maintaining two apps is more cost than one.)
Something that really blew me away is apparently Reddit has 2000 employees.
What the heck are they doing??
“Guiding the community” and eating fancy lunches
Maybe they first have to make it worthless before trying to buy it.
It would’ve made the users happy, but ultimately Apollo is not profitable for Reddit. It would need to be retooled and redesigned to extract data and push advertisers. as a free version…
Of course, Reddit could sell it as a “$2/mo Premium Reddit Experience” app that keeps what it is. And I’m sure there’s a ton of folks that’ll pay the benefit of that, particularly mods and power users.
Apollo’s paid subscriber base is 50K. Assuming they maintain that, it’s $1.2M/year revenue. The question is… is that worth it to a billion dollar company? To maintain and support all that?
My gut would say ‘yes’. Although goodwill is unquantifiable, keeping the community of volunteers placated is an investment in Reddit’s longterm health. Same reason the Mafia bought turkeys for uninvolved neighborhood families on Thanksgiving - so they’d look the other way when shady happenings go down.
But Reddit doesn’t want to spend money on turkeys. So we’ll see how well that works out for them. I’m not optimistic.
damn thats sad. I would be willing to pay 2 dollars a month.
At some point, the apps here will be as good or better than Apollo. Give it time.
Just a few things to keep an eye out for:
memmy is in very, very, very early Beta and incorporates Apollo’s gestures and scroll style. It’s missing pretty much every feature. However - scrolling, voting and commenting is a breeze and there’s a lot of potential.
mlem is also in very early beta and has several developers working on it. My understanding is there’s a goal for a 6/30 App Store release to coincide with the 3rd Party Kill date for Reddit.
The famed RIF Developer is working on a Tildes app that federates with Lemmy. It will be available on iOS and Android.
Spez is running a kingdom and sometimes the king goes mad and does dumb shit to establish authority. This episode felt like that, especially with how they talked down to the dev about it being unoptimised or some crap.
Where’s the ol’ Kingslayer (but a techie non-violent version) when you need him?
I think what we are doing right now is what‘s back then been called a “secessio plebis”. During the secessio plebis, the plebs would abandon the city en masse in a protest emigration and leave the patrician order to themselves. Though in our case more than enough stay back for spez to lord over them, but I‘m enjoying the vibe here a lot more.
They don’t want to maintain two apps, and the quality of the app isn’t a priority to them. They just want to remove competition so that they have full control.
they already bought alien blue and ruined it.
Cheaper to nuke them, I guess.
