It’s not out of solidarity, advertisers are worried they’ll turn into lightning rods: https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-reddit-as-advertisers-weather-moderators-strike/

Reddit is antsy to effectuate their exit strategy.

Or to put it more simply: everyone with a stake in Reddit, from pigboy Huffman, to institutional investors like Fidelity, to employees who earned equity is eager for Reddit to have their IPO so they can offload their shares on the public stock market.

Their valuation will be an important factor, if not the most important factor, that will determine for which price those stocks will initially be put on the market.

So while slashing the valuation in half will not directly lose them money, it could translate into the initial stock price being half of what they anticipated, causing them to get half of what they would’ve gotten had the valuation not be slashed in half.

There is no way in hell that people with equity in Reddit are not pissed about the slashing of the valuation, since they now anticipate getting a haircut as much as half of what they initially expected to get.

You can listen to the song on his YouTube channel as well: https://youtu.be/KOFChFxsJ3I

What most people missed, much less understood, from that interaction is that Reddit justified the API cost based on “opportunity cost”.

This means that Reddit was saying that they weren’t trying to kill off third party apps but that they simply were trying to charge $20MM/y to recoup the earnings they’re losing out on by virtue of people using Apollo instead of Reddit’s own offerings.

So yeah, like you said, he clearly tried to call BS on the price motivation by essentially saying “if my mere existence is causing you to lose out on $20MM/y of earnings, why don’t you cut a check for $10MM to buy Apollo”.

Because logically if it really was about opportunity cost and the pricing of $20MM/y would accurately reflect that, then a one time $10MM purchase would be such a steal compared to losing $20MM/y, it would have any CEO scrambling to sign a check the moment the option was even so much as whispered.

Instead the API pricing was simply a ploy to kill off third party apps and the “opportunity cost” nonsense was mere pretext to be able to maintain that it wasn’t about killing off third party apps.

Not to mention that outside of the vacuum of this specific matter, the whole ordeal was littered with duplicitous lies, like how it would be a fair and reasonable price when every other comparable API is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper, safe for Muskrat’s.

Imgur for example would charge $166/50 million request, compared to Reddit’s $12,000 for the same amount. Or put it differently, Imgur charges $276,666/y compared to Reddit’s $20MM/y.

Yeah, how dare he, after almost a decade of work, refuse to get back into the code mines at your whim and repurpose the app super easy in “a few hours”.

/s

Get a grip.

Not only would it take far more than “a few hours”, he owes you jack all.

Even if he would be interested in making a Lemmy app, he’d be well within his right to take a break from things.

That’s the neat part, there is no “official” on Lemmy.

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