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Elon Musk's Twitter moves were 'reaffirming' says Reddit boss amid API changes (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 year ago by lunacybooth@readit.buzz to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[-] CoffeeBot@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 year ago

I feel like we’re seeing a lot of money leave tech. These companies are no longer getting cash injections and running into the red. The number one game for them now is revenue generation and that is through user fees and advertising. That’s why we’re seeing this shit now.

A lot of these platforms (Twitter/Reddit) started off simple and never took into account advertising. That means third party apps never got the ad feed in the general timeline.

Seeing their infinite funds dry up, these companies are now looking for where they can generate extra revenue, or where they are not generating revenue and making cuts.

These APIs cost them money. So now they’re making the gamble. Will their users tolerate losing their favourite apps to a privacy invading and ad serving machine just to access their feeds?

[-] curiosityLynx@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Did you not hear that Steve Huffman let slip during an interview that the API cost them about 10 million? And that he demanded 20million from the Apollo app alone? He wanted 3rd party apps gone.

[-] ClammyMantis488@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I didn't hear that. I knew it was bad but seeing the numbers are even worse. He's such an idiot.

[-] CoffeeBot@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I didn’t hear that, but I’m not surprised it’s also about control. When you offer a paid API you’re capping potential revenues for those users at essentially a flat rate.

I suspect that their revenue generation plans likely would see more than 10M/yr return so they threw out some big number to kill everything, force a portion of those users to their own services where they’re planning on ramping up monetization