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I watched his recent interview (only for 10mins) but he described Reddit quite accurately. Namely, reddit(or platforms like ours) is a city, a city is living only if people are living. Also, he knew that very minimal and subtle moderation is the right way.
It sounds like a CEO who knows its stuff, but facts have been shown his actions and attitudes are outrageous. The moderation was good enough to reach success for 18 years, only bc people do it for Reddit for free. He only took the free ride on it.
The biggest problem I have with this guy is that the API charges is really selling people knowledges and memories as a product. It is supposed to be free and open. He is taking all the profits as business with no promises or giving back to the community. This model simply doesn't work well with us, I would rather stick to decentralised model as long as it is reasonably efficient.
There is nothing inherently problematic about charging for API access, it's the fact that the price they've set is ludicrous, something like 25 cents per thousand calls when you'd expect it to be more along the lines of 4-5 dollars per million calls.
It's like someone buying a free parking garage, letting mopeds park for free, and charging cars five hundred dollars a day for parking, and then, instead of just being honest and saying "Fuck people with cars no cars allowed," saying that the car drivers are at fault for wanting to use a more full-featured vehicle that takes more space
Indeed, if the prices were reasonable this would not be a problem. I believe that the Apollo developer even said as much (or maybe it was rif's developer - or neither and I'm just imagining it) - and I have no objection to it either, the servers aren't free to run after all. But the rate the used? It's just absolutely fucking incomprehensible.
The shitty treatment of third party developers is just the unmentionable icing on this already disgusting cake.
Even more so, the Apollo developer said he could probably have figured out a way to make it work at that price if he was given more time.
The issue was that he already has a bunch of yearly subscriptions at a specific rate so he'd have to eat a loss of many millions of dollars until subscriptions at a new higher rate were a sufficient proportion of his user base.
They could have easily ran a profit selling the API as well tbh, but instead just inflated the price to blow the users off of the platform
Your parking analogy is on point 👍
That's my opinion. I know my use of reddit costs them money, and would happily paid a (sane) user fee to recoup this.
But their treatment of beloved apps is.... Insulting. And their treatment of mods is even worse