What a wild end for Apollo. The era of client APIs for ad-supported platforms is over. Developers should invest their time in open platforms where the business model is aligned with users' and developers' interests: Micro.blog (paid blog hosting) or the fediverse (often donation-supported).
@manton They got ultimate exposure, via an Apple event, and it did nothing. The lie of "exposure" laid bare.
@manton it’s sad and frustrating to see Apollo shelved due to such poor business practices by Reddit.
@myrmidon Donations have their own problems, for sure, but the user is paying directly, so the platform can support third-party apps in a way that ad-based social networks aren't set up for.
@manton It's satisfying to be able to blog about this issue on my own, paid micro.blog site. In your face, Reddit!
@manton The sad thing is that Reddit is actually an excellent (my experience) community-driven forum website. The volunteers will be saddened (emboldened, enraged?) by this duck-move by the Reddit staff.
@manton Ads: If this was the only reason, unlazy platforms could certify apps relaying the ads. Easy.
I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure if it's accurate?
Ad-supported networks have to do incredibly shady possibly illegal things in order to have viable business models.
Grassroots networks run by volunteers and supported by donations simply don't need to do this.
Commercial networks also have extremely low staff-to-user ratios compared to donation-supported, which is why they use moderation algorithms a lot more. Commercial networks cannot afford enough moderators.
Sure, I'm just saying there are far more people moderating on a volunteer system.
On centralised networks there may be one human moderator for 100,000 people, on decentralised ones it's more like 1 for 1000.
By spreading out the ownership, it attracts more people to moderate because they are more motivated to look after their own server.
@feditips @manton First, nobody knows. You’d need access to moderation metrics.
Second, a Facebook has one of the best ML team, money to power the needed servers. (networks owned by crazies will vanish.)
Thinking that ML doesn’t outpace humans here is like betting on a human driver or a human go player.
But if we go full federation, moderation might be less of an issue? (it will be easy to moderate your family, your co-workers or members of your association).
We know how many Fediverse servers there are and how many users, it averages out at about 1 server per 1000 users. That's an average of at least 1 moderator per 1000 Fedi users.
To match this ratio. Facebook would need 3 million moderators. I doubt they have the capacity to pay that many people, their entire staff is about 80,000. FB may run moderation sweatshops, but I doubt they have 3 million people in them, and if they do then the working conditions/pay must be immoral.
Playing a game of Go is nothing like moderation.
Go has clear winning conditions, moderation is a complex cultural phenomenon.
Replacing people with machines is just going to reflect the priorities of the makers of those machines. You might think that's okay, I think it's the opposite of what decentralisation and the Fediverse is supposed to do.
@myrmidon Definitely. I'm not sure whether it's laziness (it might be!) or that platforms inherently don't trust third-party devs. Again, because it doesn't align with their business.
@richardmoy Maybe, but more likely I think the trend is just closing off API access. Facebook has been heading that way for a decade. Twitter was indecisive about making the change until Elon.
@manton or create a new revenue model since the existing advertisement revenue is tapped out. Of course this could result is less usage of their product.
@richardmoy Yep. Despite all the chaos at Twitter, they did attempt to balance ad revenue with Twitter Blue subscriptions. They just totally botched the features and rollout.
@manton Apollo needs to strike while the iron is hot. He should get his app working with a Reddit clone. And then bring the people.