They don’t even want you to use the website I don’t think. They’ve even done experiments where they blocked people from using the mobile website. The more they want me to use their app, the more I want to avoid Reddit all together.
They don’t even want you to use the website I don’t think. They’ve even done experiments where they blocked people from using the mobile website. The more they want me to use their app, the more I want to avoid Reddit all together.
Control and money. They can serve more ads and harvest your data more easily if they control the platform
To them, loss of 3rd party users is insignificant because they’re users they weren’t able to monetize to begin with
If that insignificant number is disproportionately active users and moderators, then they will significantly feel it.
At least until they just have bots commenting, posting, and moderating.
Everyone says that the loss of these 3rd party app users will destroy them, but I disagree. I don’t think that the quality of experience is as closely linked to profitability as most people think. Ad-Clicking viewers of cat gifs are blissfully unaware of the current fiasco.
Yes they can get most of their content from tiktok and instagram. They’re likely not going to be a discussion heavy site anymore.
Bang on. Can’t serve you ads if they can’t control what’s on your screen.
I’m pretty sure they could serve ads from the API if they wanted. However, telemetry data would be incomplete at best. Given that they’ve outright stated that they want to create “actionable conversations” out of people talking about products they like on Reddit that data could be incredibly valuable to marketing companies and astroturfers.
Them serving you ads could’ve been solved by adding that in the TOS for using the API as a third party client. They can still track you by the API calls your account makes.
That’s what makes this stupid in my opinion. They could’ve easily monitized the API in several ways, while still having control. One reason I can think of they’d do this is to harvest non-reddit data from you using the app, which is shitty as hell, but not too far fetched.