Relay was (yup) one of the third party apps that survived the API-calypse. But this sort of model is unsustainable in the long run, given that the competitor (the broken native app) is free and unlimited.
The obvious future monopoly of the broken native app is bad for the platform in the long run, given that Reddit always sucked off ideas from third party apps; and now there’s no incentive whatsoever to make it better, after Reddit Inc. killed the better competitors.
I checked out the relay subreddit and there was a thread of people trying to see what plan they would need to pay for. Was insane seeing smartphone type plans when it came to social media usage like it’s some monthly utility they need.
I only login to Reddit now to see what’s going on with Relay, it was a great app which I used for 10 years or so.
The relay subreddit became very strange. People happy to pay for using the app, some due to loyalty to the Dev. I don’t understand how people would be happy to pay. I’m wondering how many of these people actually do pay when they switch the feature on.
I just launched Relay and it gave me a notice that it will switch to subscription in the next few weeks. That will be the complete end of me using Reddit.
Reddit is still cool for having their rss, and I hope that doesn’t change. So I set up a RSS feed for gamedeals and buildapcsales. Those were the most useful and frequently used subs for me. It was interesting to find that I didn’t really miss the other subs that much even though they haven’t sprung up here, since they didn’t have the same level of utility.