So, at some point, Reddit was going to have to be generating a return. Spez or no spez.
I don’t particularly like the route they took – killing the third-party clients was annoying and I think that there were ways to be a profitable super-forum site and still have third-party clients. But it was gonna be something, and whatever they did – more ads, selling data on users, only providing some functionality to paid users – was gonna be unpopular.
I would have been ok with reasonable prices for API calls. Bandwidth has a cost after all. But they so obviously set out to drive the third party apps out of business so they could sell ads in the official app/website it just disgusted me.
Also that new mobile site is so shitty, I refuse to believe it’s not on purpose.
What they didn’t see in doing so was that the core content of the site was curated mostly by people who used either old reddit or third party apps. Modding would be unnecessarily annoying without them. The content is, in fact, way worse than it used be, more importantly bots are in the open and with no counter. You can track the amount if reposts. As for mods they can be as toxic as ever, posting on reddit is hard unless you follow small subs or generic ones that let you post whatever. The site itself is the opposite of user friendly: they wanted to be an alternative to all other social media ever…but instagram, tiktok, youtube, even that deranged thing known as x, let you post peacefully amd without too many restrictions. Reddit…forget about it.
I don’t get why they had to drive out 3rd party apps for that? They try to make the ads look like user content so it seems like they could have fed it into the 3rd party apps. It must have something to do with the exact placement of the ads?
There were some internal docs leaked that made me think their real motivation was that they had signed some contracts for API access and pricing (probably a direct response to AI scraping), and that they were actually contractually obligated to close stuff down and/or set crazy prices. I think it may not have been about apps at all (or very little)
What do you think API access is? They have 100% control over how much they charge for access. There is no entity above them that they’re signing contracts with to decide pricing. There is no situation where what you just said makes any sense.
So, at some point, Reddit was going to have to be generating a return. Spez or no spez.
I don’t particularly like the route they took – killing the third-party clients was annoying and I think that there were ways to be a profitable super-forum site and still have third-party clients. But it was gonna be something, and whatever they did – more ads, selling data on users, only providing some functionality to paid users – was gonna be unpopular.
I would have been ok with reasonable prices for API calls. Bandwidth has a cost after all. But they so obviously set out to drive the third party apps out of business so they could sell ads in the official app/website it just disgusted me.
Also that new mobile site is so shitty, I refuse to believe it’s not on purpose.
What they didn’t see in doing so was that the core content of the site was curated mostly by people who used either old reddit or third party apps. Modding would be unnecessarily annoying without them. The content is, in fact, way worse than it used be, more importantly bots are in the open and with no counter. You can track the amount if reposts. As for mods they can be as toxic as ever, posting on reddit is hard unless you follow small subs or generic ones that let you post whatever. The site itself is the opposite of user friendly: they wanted to be an alternative to all other social media ever…but instagram, tiktok, youtube, even that deranged thing known as x, let you post peacefully amd without too many restrictions. Reddit…forget about it.
I don’t get why they had to drive out 3rd party apps for that? They try to make the ads look like user content so it seems like they could have fed it into the 3rd party apps. It must have something to do with the exact placement of the ads?
Idk maybe for performance tracking purposes the ads are marked as such and it’s accessible from the API
There were some internal docs leaked that made me think their real motivation was that they had signed some contracts for API access and pricing (probably a direct response to AI scraping), and that they were actually contractually obligated to close stuff down and/or set crazy prices. I think it may not have been about apps at all (or very little)
What do you think API access is? They have 100% control over how much they charge for access. There is no entity above them that they’re signing contracts with to decide pricing. There is no situation where what you just said makes any sense.
This is your brain on Capitalist Realism.
Honestly, the things that really pissed me off were
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