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
you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views

Except that's not what Reddit is doing here. They're charging 3rd party clients ~21X what they lose in ad views, pricing them completely out of the market.

>>chongl+Tl
This is a story practically as old as the internet at this point. Grow with open API and third party client ecosystem, but ultimately shut the hatches and revert to single in-house client stacks to maximize control of the user experience and advertising opportunities. Mainly the 2nd part.

To look to the Twitter example, even when I used a third party Twitter client before Elon came onboard, old Twitter were regularly playing silly games with issuing auth tokens to third party clients, for all of the same reasons.

At this stage I view third party clients as nice to have for major free web service APIs, with the expectation one day it will probably stop working. Reddit doesn't owe anyone a public API, as much as I will miss third party clients (big Narwhal user here).

>>giobox+Ys
> Reddit doesn't owe anyone a public API.

And maybe they will soon learn that they are not owed an audience.

>>surgic+hx
Maybe, but I'd still take the other side of this bet sadly. Is there any data on usage rates for third party Reddit clients? Anecdotally, I don't know anyone outside of tech who would even notice this change, really.

>>giobox+LJ
Reddit was the only thing that resembles social media I ever used. Was a long time RiF user, as I absolutely hated the default interface. Even moderated a couple of subreddits back in the day (although I sort of dropped Reddit in the past couple of years, so I may be out of the loop).

My fellow mods and all prominent users I interacted with (the vast majority of them not from tech as it was not a tech focused community) were all well aware of 3rd party clients, and many used them.

This is very anecdotal, but amongst Reddit more "intense" user base, I would be surprised if 3rd party client usage was low.