After a month of outrage, protests, and unrest from the community, Reddit has finally flipped the switch to shut down some third-party apps, including Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader.
After a month of outrage, protests, and unrest from the community, Reddit has finally flipped the switch to shut down some third-party apps, including Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader.
you’d think it’d be a fucking advantage for a site to have robust 3rd party apps to serve the needs of more users
furthermore in fact, you’d think the primary goal of a discussion site would be to better the experience for the user, not the advertiser. the site exists to facilitate a user’s posts, not an advertiser’s schemes and whims
They could have had third party apps and kept the advertisers happy. All they had to do was put ads into the API and kill access for any app that didn’t show those ads.
This was about user data, I suspect. Way too many apps request and acquire more permissions and data than is remotely acceptable, but people put up with it for lack of alternatives. Reddit’s leadership wanted not just the users’ data from using reddit, but all the data they could siphon off from direct access to users’ phones.