I completely disagree. If anything, Google having difficulties with profitability is an opportunity for a competitor to beat them (although I don’t think youtube is unprofitable).

Can something like this under Twitter management (current or previous) succeed? Probably not. But could a team of smart people with access to 300 million users build a video streaming platform that’s profitable? Hell yes, and the only major concern would be anti-competitive bs from Google, but the FTC has been paying more attention to that kind of stuff recently.

That doesn’t really matter, unless you expect the video feature to be unprofitable. With ~300m or whatever active users, it would not be hard to raise money if they need it to launch a major product like that.

I don’t get why Twitter didn’t try to make a Youtube-like video platform before? I wonder if it’s because venture capital has caused brain rot in the executive teams at these tech companies? It seems obvious to launch something like that, and they 100% have (had) the talent and infrastructure to build and support it. Even if it isn’t massively successful on day one, it could be successful in the future with a strong marketing effort.

If I didn’t know that these companies were run by incompetent idiots, my first suspicion would be some kind of collusion. Trying to do it now that Twitter is a sinking ship is laughable.

And run by a guy notorious for not paying his bills

I recommended his app to people, I paid for the subscription, I left a positive review on the appstore. I was a loyal user for a long time.

In the end, he tried (and fortunately failed) to sell Apollo to reddit, then just killed the app when that didn’t work. If he did care about users (aka the people that made him a lot of money), he could’ve sold the app to someone willing to continue it, or at least released it as open source.

It’s not the end of the world, and he didn’t eat a newborn baby or anything like that, but I don’t think people should be patting this guy on the back for the way he handled this. He just took the money and ran, abandoning his customers in the process. That’s not the type of business I want to support.

How about instead of wasting time circle jerking in your 10 minutes of fame, you dedicate a few hours to add Lemmy/kbin/mastodon/whatever support to Apollo and actually support your users?

Although wefwef pretty much completely fills the gap left by Apollo, it still annoys me to see the way this guy is handling this situation. Not only is he doing jack shit to support his loyal longtime users, he went through the effort of updating the app to beg people not to refund the subscription.

/end rant

I know what you mean, it’s a huge problem for onboarding new people. Wefwef is the only one that’s actually accessible to regular users since it’s a web app, but I don’t think most people are familiar with how to “install” those.

I wonder how many redditors gave up on joining lemmy because they couldn’t find a single app?