The vast majority of my Reddit use has been through a third-party app for a long time. When this API news originally broke, I did a test run of using the site exclusively on Firefox Android, and it was not a pleasant experience.
The recent AMA was pretty bad. I’m not sure why that was done at all.
The craziest part of that for me was this:
How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
They’re supposedly weeks away from a public offering (IPO), and the CEO is telling everyone that their business of 18 years isn’t profitable at all? Those that have been able to use the site to make it profitable, they’re getting rid of, completely alienating those customers who would pay, and are the most likely ones contributing and modding the site for free… so that Reddit can remain being unprofitable and cost even more to run?
I must’ve missed that lesson in business class.
And that’s all the lies, threats, and gaslighting aside.
There are so many far better solutions to their supposed problem. Since their whole claim is they’re not making money because of the lack of ads, and Reddit Premium doesn’t have ads, then if someone wants to use a third-party application, simply require the third-party app users to subscribe to Reddit Premium. Or, allow a certain amount of “free” API calls per user, and if they want more, then they need Reddit Premium. Possibly even do an affiliate program with the developers. There’s so many possibilities and examples of successful profitable businesses doing similar things.
Obviously we don’t fully know, but based on what’s been also reported, I think the more likely truth is that they want to fully monetize Reddit’s content for further AI training and they’re either unable, or unwilling to build the necessary infrastructure to handle both use cases.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it only Monday and Tuesday of next week? For most of them anyway.
I guess we’ll see what happens.