Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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How would making it open source help anything? It's not like they would accept contributions from the community to remove all of the nonsense they've put in, and the API is essentially off limits with how much they charge.
What they need is to unshackle the API so third party apps can blossom again. Charge them something to fund their bottom line, but not so much that it makes building those apps infeasible.
because open source will help them have a better experience, also there are still third party apps!! For example you can use apps that use the RSS feeds instead of the API!! And that's nice.
I guess, but that's true for a number of news websites, so it's a pretty low bar. One of the things that made Reddit unique was the selection of mobile apps. I even paid to remove ads on one of them. If they offered an API token at something like 5x what they'd make off me from ads (so I'd pay something like $5-10/year), I'd gladly pay it.
But no, they jacked up prices so much that the apps I used had to shut down. And the mobile web experience sucks, so I just bailed.
If they want me back, I need a decent mobile app and an affordable way to eliminate ads at a minimum. They don't provide that, so I stay here.