They could have just straight up said, “hey, we are getting rid of third party apps because we need to consolidate where our users browse reddit for our IPO”. I would have been annoyed, but the way they pretended that all that TPA devs were too unreasonable to work with their outrageous terms genuinely pissed me the fuck off.
Making a website to host AMAs would be an enormous amount of work. Even if they retained their userbase, the costs of hosting a site that wouldn’t crash would be significant. If they don’t retain their userbase, it ruins the entire reason who many notable people do AMAs which is to advertise whatever they’re doing. To make a profit, they would need to monetize it too somehow.
The issue with Yang is that he’s proposing cutting other social safety nets and replacing them with UBI which would put a lot of people in worse situations. UBI would be great but we also need robust social programs.
I’m honestly just over reddit. Even if all the apps came back for free I’d probably try sticking with lemmy. Not a fan of a company that clearly doesn’t give a shit about their userbase. Good for the third party devs who are making it work with subscriptions but I’m not willing to pay a subscription to go straight into reddit’s pocket.
I don’t think Lemmy is big enough for more high profile people to come here. The main reason celebrities do AMAs are for publicity for whatever they’re promoting. Lemmy has way less total users than /r/iama has.