this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Technology
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What this is really about and people are just starting to realize is: the interests of the shareholders and CEO who want to get rich is not compatible with a volunteer created, volunteer run, and volunteer modded site. People aren't eager to do unpaid work just so the CEO can get rich. This API stuff is just exposing it.
The weird thing is that they ARE compatible. They could have charged slightly more per user than they make on the official app and everything would have been fine. This move reduced shareholder value and user value.
Why not slightly less? That would make more sense to me.
A user on a third party app isn't as valuable to the company. They miss out of all the valuable spying and tracking they can do by installing their own software on your phone. Plus just the presence of this party apps means you can't demands extra permissions on your own app and tell users to deal or suck it (in nice PR speak). So it makes sense to charge TP apps more for reducing the "value" of a given user.
Charging less is basically subsidizing third party apps out of your own pocket - which was exactly the complaint in the first place. Although it would've been better to gradually ramp up prices to less-subsidized and eventually to a profitable partnership.