I thought I would keep using old.reddit after they killed RiF but I’ve abandoned the platform all together. Finally got my lemmy account and I’m not going back. Google still shows me Reddit when I search for just about anything but I’m actively avoiding them.
For me, it wasn't so much the loss of third party apps as it was the way the admins handled it. I had never realized how little they actually valued their community. Instead, everything was about the money. Too bad they failed to see that users and the content they created was the reason Reddit was worth anything in the first place.
There were absolutely paths forward that would have worked to allow 3rd party apps without price gouging them. The whole thing was in bad faith and they never wanted to allow 3rd party apps at all, they just didn't want to announce they were kicking them off the platform. It wasn't just about the money, it was about control. Control over the users by forcing them to use their app where they could push unwanted content on you and degrade your experience to maximize profits. The 3rd party apps made money by providing a better user experience which was directly counter to their aims to maximize profits.
3rd party apps did not make a huge percentage of the user base, so why were they so afraid of them? I think the answer is that they are planning on making the user experience on the main app much worse and they know users would be looking for alternatives after, so they went out to kill the alternatives, or charge them an insane amount.
That was my line of thinking too, more or less. After RiF, I was like "I guess RedReader is still up, since they got an exemption! I'll just wait out till July 1 then switch to that.
But the day after the protest, I just decided to drop the platform altogether. It felt spineless calling out reddit on their bullshit, just to fall in line and still give traffic to their site.