zlacker

>>robbie+(OP)
Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase their revenue, they're doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened.

Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.

>>Lx1oG-+v6
> If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.

Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them.

If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features.

Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party clients, but to appease advertisers Reddit has to make guarantees around visibility. It's not enough to check if third parties are calling the correct API, they will actually need to regularly audit all third party clients.

It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.

>>raydev+Fc
There's an obvious solution here, which is to stop participating on platforms that are ad-funded. Charging user subscriptions and fees to businesses should be sufficient to cover costs. If it's not, maybe it shouldn't exist.

>>kodah+0l
People generally tend to use the platforms which other people are using and it's virtually impossible to build an audience unless you're "free".

>>qwytw+RD
An obvious way to fund ad-free platforms is as a public good / utility.

Nowadays with the brain damage that has been inflicted by adtech social media over decades it is hard to imaging mass adoption of such a publicly funded outlet. People have become literally social media junkies. Unless you do a tiktok like race to the bottom you can't disrupt the incumbents.

But establishing the principle is important even if its a small audience. 2% of billions is still a large population. Just like public TV being typically of higher quality (where it exists) such platforms could be really interesting, worthwhile places.

If the experiment succeeds one can start thinking of introducing user fees and other funding mechanisms and eventually maybe restoring sanity and delegating the targeted adtech industry in the darkest corner of hell where it belongs.