You like it? This is the effect Reddit was trying to create - destroying third party apps which they are finding difficult to monetize. They're betting that these users will start using the website and the official Reddit app. How is this a good thing?
I am unable to understand this bruhaha about reddit as I am an occasional user of this website and mostly in lurking mode.
Was there a promise made to those 3rd party app authors and users that their access would be perpetual, not to be taken away from them, no matter what ? I don't think any for-profit company makes such promises.
If you play in someone's walled garden, you should be ready to see them change the rules as they see fit. I am not sure why reddit decided to nix the 3rd party apps but my gut feeling is, this is a financially motivated move. And if it is so, can you blame them?
I wish someone could explain me why everyone is in an huge uproar today.
Reddit pushes its own app so hard--so obnoxiously hard--that I can't imagine they are terribly concerned about any of this. And, come on. They can charge what they want for their dogs-squeezed-into-guitar-cases library of content. We all can.
This actually pushed me to use a third party Reddit app that includes no ads, not even Reddit's ads. All they needed to get revenue from me was just display the damn page.
It's not what they're doing, for the most part, but the way they're doing it.
I don't think many people begrudge them to implementing a paid API to recoup the costs of third-party clients.
But they've set the price way too high, with practically no warning, defamed an app developer and then went "lalalala we can't hear you" when people, rightly, pushed back.
All while using dark patterns to push users to their (objectively awful) official web and mobile apps. Power users (especially mods) just can't use these to do what they need to do, Reddit doesn't care and now Reddit is - effectively - killing off 3rd party apps.
Killing 3rd party apps lets them funnel traffic to the official app instead, or the official website. Not sure if you've compared 'old' reddit to new (on desktop), or the app to 3rd party ones, but there's a lot of gamification, ads, bad patterns they're pushing with what they have. I suspect it's largely to monetize on the user more significantly via tracking data and such.
I assume they'll kill off old reddit shortly here, once they implement the API changes.
It's interesting to watch Reddit lose control of the narrative on this. If you read the relevant threads Reddit admins swear up and down that the new API pricing is reasonable and not intended to kill third party apps.
Whatever their intent, it's definitely a failure on the PR front.
The third parties are incentivized to deliver a good user experience. Reddit has incentives that inevitably lead to the opposite. Any good app under Reddit's control would cease to be a good app.
It's not an accident that Twitter just went through this too. We're in a new era of too-big-to-be-disrupted enshittening.
This is the end of Reddit. They can’t monetize the web version of their site because their users are sophisticated enough to use ad blockers. If they load up their mobile app with ads, people will just use a 3rd party Reddit app. So they’ll have to ban 3rd party apps which will betray all the users who got into Reddit because it was an open platform.
Reddit doesn't make money directly from providing a good clean user experience, they make money by putting ads in front of retinas, and they can drive up the value of said ads by mining user data (which can also be sold).
People gravitate towards third party apps because they have less ads, and because since they don't mine for data as much as the official app the user experience is more like "classic" Reddit and less like an algorithmic content pipe alla TikTok.
Most of the things that make the official app shit are the things that make it profitable - it just needs to avoid being so shitty as to alienate too many users.
Reddit is doing this on a per-app basis rather than a per-user basis. That would be a great idea, but sadly reddit it against it (likely because the goal is to kill third party apps).
It looks like they'll be no more free access so every third party app will have to charge a subscription that goes to Reddit (monthly and with no costing provided yet)
The official app collects far more data points to identify users for ad targeting than the third party clients do (check the permissions asked). They may have decided there's no way to effectively monetize third-party app users to the levelling of targeting that their ad platform requires, so these users will always be a cost center instead of a profit center.
Then again these users are likely to disproportionately be posters and commenters, the people who create free content that keeps the broader userbase engaged, or are moderators keeping the site running for zero compensation, so pissing them off seems ill advised.
Based on this thread [1], where an admin accuses 3rd party apps of being inefficient API consumers but refuses to explain why, it's clear Reddit just wants these apps gone and isn't interested in whether anyone is alienated or upset by it.
The looming IPO and showing as positive user monetization numbers as possible is undoubtedly the motivation for this, unfortunately goodwill with the userbase that has taken years to build is getting trashed in the process.
hm yeah that seems like an obvious possible win for reddit, they would convert all the 3rd party app users into paid users. Maybe they simply didn't have that idea
reddit wants to kill the third party apps, straight up. Third party apps hurt reddit's ad revenue. The mobile website hurts reddit's ad revenue.
Given that listing, I expect he talks about how they resolved all the other issues that were brought up with their API changes -- accessibility, mod tools, etc. They're going to work to not cause problems for those use cases. But they want to kill the third party apps, and it doesn't sound like they're budging on it.
Cutting off 3rd party apps isn't a cost cutting move. It has two clear benefits - firstly they can push users into the officially supported apps where ads can be shown in a more controlled fashion and metrics on those ads can be gathered. Second, it removes the ability for other companies to programmatically gather Reddit's data - this is important in the context of large language models where investors are convinced that the data sets to train the models will be valuable.
The reason reddit is hard to monetize is actually quite simple, they don't know much about their users so they can't do the high value targeting other companies do, and they have a site where it's very difficult to insert adverts in what looks like an organic way. It's easy to scroll past an advert on instagram and not realise it's an advert, it's visually consistent, on reddit it sticks out like a sore thumb so they get CPS rates of a 90s banner ad - because that's what they're selling.
sounds like reddit want to kill all third party apps which is a bit unfortunate but this business practice is not very uncommon (Apple/Google with their 30% fees).
Why would you hope this kills reddit? Wtf is wrong with you to think that a company charging for access to their resources warrants it being destroyed?
They seem to be acting in good faith and giving people plenty of heads up. If the pricing is reasonable, it’s more than fair to have third parties pay for access. Apps running on reddit itself will not have to pay.
The more I think about this the funnier it is. A third party app built by two guys is so much better than the official Reddit app that people are willing to pay actual money for it... and his response is to throw shade at the developrs?
Do you guys really expect a for profit company to offer free API access to 3rd parties, that offer a better experience with no ads, bypassing their revenue stream, and making their own site and apps look terrible in comparison?
I've always been shocked Reddit allowed this at all. No other major player that owns a platform- FB, instagram, Google, etc. offers this either.
I don't like it either but it makes perfect sense. You could even make the argument that not doing this would mean Reddit employees aren't doing their jobs, and aren't looking out for the company.
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