I’ve been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn’t last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn’t
To me, Reddit’s sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I’ve never used.
If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I’ve only used Apollo so I can’t speak to the other apps.
I can’t blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn’t make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They’re going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO’s are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That’s how capitalism works.
In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can’t stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn’t have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn’t been such an uproar. So I’m glad it went the way it did.
Respectfully, I think you’re overreading the meaning of the Mavrix Photos case. That case involved the most popular LiveJournal community, moderated by a team led by a literal employee, where the mods reviewed the submissions by users before posting, and only posted about 1/3 of the submitted content. It was a human-required process for anything to be posted at all, and it went through the moderation team that was arguably controlled by LiveJournal. And even then, the appellate court sent it back down to the trial court to figure out whether a jury would determine whether that procedure counts as content being posted at the direction of a user, rather than at the direction of the company. It also made clear that some pre-posting review would still be OK even by the company’s agents/employees, such as when they manually review for pornography/spam/etc.
And after this year’s Supreme Court decision in Twitter v. Taamneh, which reversed the Ninth Circuit’s ruling that Twitter and similar companies could be liable for user activity on those services, it’s pretty clear that having paid/employed moderators doesn’t actually make services liable for what they fail to stop on their platforms. Liability will only happen when an employee actually does the thing that gives rise to liability (e.g., posting infringing material themselves).
So no, I disagree with your analysis that paying or compensating moderators gives rise to risk of liability. Especially after the most recent Supreme Court cases on Twitter and Google, which call the Mavrix reasoning into question.