161–170 of 1001 posts
I'm more surprised that reddit has maintained features like old.reddit.com and their API for this long. To me, this is textbook enshittification. Either die unprofitable or live long enough to see yourself rip features from TikTok.
That's no longer the case. Google's "For You" gets me my niche subject-specific content, Google News/Memeorandum (and its sibling sites)/Apple News gives me the mainstream media perspectives, HN (and maybe Bluesky occasionally) my urge to discuss and engage with others, and YouTube Shorts (I refuse to install TikTok) helps me understand Internet culture.
I don't think any one company came for Reddit on their own, but what they've left Reddit with as a differentiator are the communities. Unfortunately, those end up existing as little fiefdoms for the moderators who run them, and if that's all you're going to offer, you're not going to be able to justify that $10-$15bn (probably lower now) valuation to investors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them. Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them. If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features. Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party c…
you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views Except that's not what Reddit is doing here. They're charging 3rd party clients ~21X what they lose in ad views, pricing them completely out of the market.
To look to the Twitter example, even when I used a third party Twitter client before Elon came onboard, old Twitter were regularly playing silly games with issuing auth tokens to third party clients, for all of the same reasons.
At this stage I view third party clients as nice to have for major free web service APIs, with the expectation one day it will probably stop working. Reddit doesn't owe anyone a public API, as much as I will miss third party clients (big Narwhal user here).
Not to go all “I told you so” but I do recall Christian talking about how Reddit would never do anything like this and how much trust he had in their developer relations team now, oh, sometime earlier this year. Hope he took the suggestion to have a backup plan seriously…relying on the whims of a single company is a hard way to make your income. Doesn’t mean you can’t try it but it is fundamentally pretty risky.
Nobody mention that their RSS feeds still work...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them. Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them. If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features. Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party c…
> It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views. I really want to be the fly in the room looking at their grafana for monthly active users and see what happens to it in the coming months. I’m someone with ADHD and obsessive behavior is kinda one of the main symptoms of it. I think with this change, it’s not going to be hard for someone like me to drop…
What evidence do you have that a majority of these users are not already using the first party app?
It's business. While I do hate reddit with the passion of a thousand burning suns I acknowledge their right to set their API prices however they wish. They are not a monopolist by any stretch of the word.
Reddit is getting destroyed by tiktok for casual news/random videos etc. I was a huge reddit user over the years, but now I only go there for a handful of very specific subreddits. That's really it's only use anymore. It's great for that, but they are probably seeing massive decline in usage. And the moment they basically kill 3rd party reddit apps is the day I barely touch it again.
I love reddit but recently they are starting to make it harder to use their services. Eventually its going to turn in to a cesspool just like facebook. Something new is gonna come open to all we promise its always free and then repeat.