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
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.
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.
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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” .
Something that really blew me away is apparently Reddit has 2000 employees.
What the heck are they doing??
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 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.)
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.
Cheaper to nuke them, I guess.
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.
