Just a thought that’s gonna disappear into the aether…

The amount Huff-spez was going to charge Apollo was the opportunity cost, not the real cost. That is, they figured that each Reddit users was worth X amount each month, give or take, in revenue that could be generated from tracking and advertisement. That actual cost per user was more like 5% of X. If Huffspez was being honest and transparent about this, he could say to users, hey, if you pay X per month, we’ll turn off all advertisements, not sell any of the data associated with your usage, and stop tracking you as much as possible and still have our site work. (I know tracking can’t stop completely, but it can be reduced.) But that’s not what is being presented to end users; they’re only being given the ability to use the official reddit app.

Then again, the promise of cable television and streaming services was that we would pay for the service, and not be force to watch ads. And then companies figured out that they could be more profitable by also selling ads, and then requiring subscribers to pay even more to reduce the number of ads. So any claims from Huffspez that you could subscribe and not be tracked etc. would have been, rightly, viewed with derision.