• bus_factor@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Different goals. The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.

    I guarantee you a good chunk of that R&D money is for making ads more profitable and other monetization.

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.

      • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I said it before on Reddit and I will say it again here—

        If Reddit has asked me for a premium subscription to use my favourite third-party app, I would have fucking paid.

        Just bad business all around

        • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I don’t know the right price point, but 1 dollar a month probably would have worked for most people. It just wasn’t enough because they probably can make more than 1 by spoon feeding you ads now.

          • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlOP
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            8 months ago

            I’d go as far as 5 dollars a month, which is more than the buck thirty they make off users right now.

            • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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              8 months ago

              It just boggles the mind.

              They had the userbase. They had the community moderation. They had the power-users basically doing their job for them. They could have had a bulletproof, tied-to-world-population-growth metric - not super fast, but basically monotonically increasing. They basically could have turned it into a sustainable money printer, while not crushing user enthusiasm. Hell, they could have even done an opt- in policy for ML training datasets, either offsetting or outright paying users a commission for content that’s used as part of a training set. There were so many possibilities that didn’t involve pointing the ship at an iceberg.

              Spez threw it away because he wanted the quick payout from ad revenue.

            • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Active users would, I probably would too. Problem is most apps would struggle to even get new users with that system.

        • Rumbelows@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          100% I did pay for the premium version of Apollo and I absolutely would have paid about £20 a month for access.

          It was the #1 most used app on all my devices.

        • qdJzXuisAndVQb2@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          Didn’t that become an option at some point? I’m sure I’ve read there are apps you can pay for to have access. Fuck that, though. Make it a reasonable price, too, and I’d listen. No way I’m paying a fiver a month for reddit. Maye 1 or 2.

          • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Apps can pay in a ridiculous deal that no app would be able to support. So you either be a pay app that no one downloads, or a free app that gets killed the second it gets too big (And that number was low)

        • tb_@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Recently I stumbled on Relay, still going strong with a subscription model (because API fees).

          That said, I refuse to return to that platform.

          • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            You can patch old third-party apps with ReVanced. That being said, they are unmaintained and will still eventually break.

      • randomname01@feddit.nl
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        8 months ago

        Yeah, but the Apollo dev didn’t have the huge server costs that Reddit has. I’m not defending Reddit at all, but this is just comparing apples to oranges.

        • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Server costs don’t force you to make a bloated and shitty app experience. You might have an argument that 3rd party apps put strain on the servers, but that’s just reddits fault for making an awful and borderline unusable UX.

          • Optional@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            I think he’s arguing that the organization, being several hundred times bigger, makes it a lot harder to focus on one thing, like making the app awesome.

            As an example, in an hour long meeting you’d spend x% of the time on server costs, another y% on, i dunno, legal, another % on how to enshittify, and finally 5 minutes on the app.

    • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.

      Spot fucking on.

      Ever have a good app? Something you like using but it’s by a corporation but that’s ok, because it’s a good app and does what you want? And then they start adding more features to it, and it slows down, and it’s more annoying and it keeps offering services you don’t want, and it changes and it morphs and it becomes a shit app.

      Hell I’ve watched Whisk become something I liked using to something worthless now it’s Samsung food… Switched to using CopyMeThat which actually also gets me recipes from sites that you can’t just read the recipes from, and that’s ALL it does (well recipe book/shopping cart/meal planning, which is what it’s designed for.)

      I’m just sick of “How do we make more money” instead of just being an app that does what it says. Gaming is going down the same hole, sadly.

        • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          This is the result of shareholders. Capitalism doesn’t have to turn into this and people can have small businesses that are comfortable and don’t grow. But when you get investment involve the question is always “how do you ‘grow this business’ so I can get a ROI”.

          There’s a few cases where that’s not the case, but the majority of the mindset of the modern business world is fast returns, rather than sustainable growth.

        • Morefan@retrolemmy.com
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          8 months ago

          This is the inevitable long term goal and result of CORRUPTION.

          I’m not advocating for capitalism.

          Corruption exists in both capitalistic and socialist systems.

      • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Always going to upvote someone talking about CopyMeThat. Been a premium member for over a decade, it was a game changer for us.

      • reflectedodds@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I also quit whisk when it became samsung food. Does CopyMeThat let you have shared lists with other people?

        • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          It does have a “Community” aspect, but honestly I think it’s quite weak on that. however if you have someone you know and their recipes are public you can see them, but not in any organized sense.

    • Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I get your point and you’re not wrong, technically . Technically that is what Reddit is trying to do but you need to remember that this is Reddit. They fucking suuuuuck at everything.

      I remember years ago a disaffected ex employee wrote something about what it’s like to work the and in just remember thinking to myself: “Imagine going in to work and they call an important meeting, all hands, to discuss “brigading” and then, without an ounce of irony they proceed to sternly discuss this important topic.”

      Just imagine those little snot nosed shots puffed up with so much self importance discussing how these “brigades” are destroying their “bastion of free speech”.

      I thought I was going to pule in my own mouth again just typing this.