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.
Same reason why Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. don't have alternative clients.
Nothing unusual.
Reddit is proceeding along the well-trodden path to monetization optimization.
Then the third party app can choose between adding their own ads, or charging a subscription.
Realistically, it was only a matter of time. Also predicted here: [0]
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.
And they do. Over time they have become less and less distinguishable from post of humans.
I wonder what's going to happen with Apollo.
And what about my script to randomize my posts after a while? Yea, it doesn't do a lot, but still...
I really want to be the fly in the room looking at their grafana for monthly active users and see what happens to it in the coming months.
I’m someone with ADHD and obsessive behavior is kinda one of the main symptoms of it. I think with this change, it’s not going to be hard for someone like me to drop it.
I suspect that because of these changes, Reddit is also going to make it harder for search engines to index them - which is going to further reduce how useful Reddit is for information discovery.
This is going to hurt reddit, and I personally don’t think the growth is going to be as strong as it has been once they take these actions. Social media sites depend on their users, and arguably only a small portion of their users create content. And a smaller portion that than create useful content. Once you’ve pissed off and pushed away that small %, you’re not recovering.
I’m guessing this is some decisions made by MBAs who have learned some theoretical stuff, but don’t realize their courses haven’t really covered businesses like Reddit, Twitter, StackOverflow etc. They’re in for a rude awakening.
Remember that Tumblr effectively died once they made some decisions.
Otherwise I will ignore this claim because we simply don't know what ad revenue per user is, and we don't know what Reddit's projected future revenue per user is, which I would also expect to be covered by this pricing.
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).
What evidence do you have that a majority of these users are not already using the first party app?
But having worked on platforms like this, this solution opens up yet another support vector. A cost that works for the most potential buyers may not be high enough to actually pay for support requests.
I guess if they go through with it we’ll see what impact it has.
And maybe they will soon learn that they are not owed an audience.
Credible citation needed
EDIT: Okay I see the 20x figure in the article
If the API is solely for your own consumption, this can be simpler, and of course third party clients are harder to monetize as the kinds of ads you can serve are going to be restricted to what you can force a third party client to receive and render.
If the number of users on third party clients is really low, all of the above can carry more weight in internal business case style discussions too.
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.
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.
I agree. And I think people should also keep in mind that OSes also have APIs as well, and should be wary of systems that try to prevent user freedom.
Then again, I've been running Linux for ages now. And I don't have to worry about anti-user garbageware on a forced update coming my way, or updates that de-feature my system.
I wonder how many power users, heavy users, or content generating users use unofficial apps. The passive lurkers are great for ad revenue, but the people who comment make the site worth browsing.
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.
2. It's the OP's assertions and estimations as an outsider, it's not based on any insights.
They would instead rather charge far more money for data access for things like AI training etc, Twitter have also made similar changes to their own API to prioritize high bills for AI training use cases, not third party clients. That's at least how I see this change. The high pricing for these customers also removes the need to worry about the ad tech situation as is the case in the third party clients - you can just offer them an ad free feed at these prices for the training requirements.
I suspect the internal at Reddit desire to have less third party clients may well predate the AI discussion too, given almost all companies in this position eventually want to wind down those clients as history has shown again and again, for all of the reasons discussed in this thread.
The difference is really that Reddit was relatively late in a concerted effort to monetize.
But it winds up at the same place regardless.