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
I feel like this is Conway's Law at play. People would create high quality paid apps if the users that want to pay for them could find them, but if somebody makes something that's perfect for you, how do you discover that it even exists? The organizational structure of the web is the problem.

Google and social media platforms have shaped the web to be entirely advertisement driven. If they were capable of showing you things you wanted to buy, without the creators paying to be seen, they'd never make any money.

Almost anything you ever want to do, someone else has already done well, but despite that, it's hard to find snippets of code you can include in your projects. It's easier to just write it all yourself. If the usefulness of ChatGPT is an indicator of anything, it should be an indicator of how much is out there that you never get to see. The sad part is realizing that that's intentional.