zlacker

> every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue

That's maybe true as a first-order effect.

But, for the ads that everyone else sees to be worth anything, the site has to be worth visiting at all. If your most dedicated/prolific users mainly post/comment using third party apps, then making their experience worse will reduce the quality of the site overall (even if you start getting revenue on behalf of those dedicated users).

It strikes me as a very shortsighted move.

>>xavdid+(OP)
Short-sighted is presumably what they want: pump and dump onto the public market so early investors and founders get their payday and ride off into the sunset on bags of money while "the market" eats the losses and the slow (or maybe fast and painful) demise carries on for the next 3-10 years.

>>xavdid+(OP)
This is exactly what we've seen on Twitter. The already low bar for quality took a nosedive once they started ruining blue checkmarks and banning third party apps.

Twitter still maintains a critical mass of users and corporate accounts, but all the most talented creators (at least the ones I followed) have reduced their Twitter usage substantially or moved on completely.

Eventually new readers will stop showing up because there is no worthwhile content.

>>xavdid+(OP)
If your most dedicated/prolific users mainly post/comment using third party apps...

Thats really easy for Reddit to measure. Why are you assuming they haven't?

It strikes me as a very shortsighted move.

If you stop assuming that Reddit is run by idiots, and you consider the likely probability that they've modelled this stuff in some depth, it's easy to believe that your initial assumption is wrong, and that the users are on 1st party apps (or will be if others shut down), and that many will stay and continue to post rather than leave or stop posting.

Your premise is based wholly on the belief that you know more about Reddit users than Reddit does. That seems dubious to me.

>>onion2+b5
There's another possibility - they have measured it, and have assumed the draw to Reddit will be stronger than their ties to the third-party apps.

>>onion2+b5
Customers knowing more about the effects of decisions than the actual decision makers at a company is fairly normal. There is a reason they send out all those surveys. They're hoping you'll let them know about their mistakes.

>>onion2+b5
>Your premise is based wholly on the belief that you know more about Reddit users than Reddit does. That seems dubious to me.

I know that their UI and native application are absolutely bullshit.

>>babypu+u2
I haven’t used twitter since they blocked access to 3rd party apps. Twitter, Reddit and HN are sites I really only use on my mobile through 3rd party apps along with Omnivore to save interesting articles to read later.

For me, Reddit and Twitter are simply not worth visiting using mobile web or first party apps because the ratio of crap I don’t want to see (ads and promoted content) is too high vs the content I came to see.

YouTube is going the same way, I use multiple adblock rules to hide “shorts”, “people also searched for”, and “people also watched”. I pay for YouTube premium but feel like a mug for paying for a service which tries to force feed me content I don’t want. I’m on the brink of cancelling the subscription.

>>nitwit+K7
Some evidence to support your decision: The CEO of Reddit hasn't posted or commented on Reddit in almost a year. Same goes with most of the decision-makers. They're not users of their own product.

>>tornat+cg
he obviously has an alt, like cmon

>>onion2+b5
> Thats really easy for Reddit to measure. Why are you assuming they haven't?

It's a well know historical fact that companies always do the smart move only based on hard facts.

>>nitwit+K7
I’m not sure how anyone works in the tech industry for any amount of time and comes away with the impression that large company execs regularly make good product decisions. It’s especially funny to claim this for a company like Reddit that has a very public history of awful decisions.

>>Cheeze+Z9
Even if that is the case, it does not say much about their ability to evaluate what category of users (e.g., those coming from Apollo or their first-party clients) is generating more views/interactions and indirectly more "value" on their platform.

>>onion2+b5
Historically when a large organisation does something that looks really dumb, it's usually exactly as dumb as it looks. I'd expect most individuals to make better decisions about Reddit than Reddit does, because of the whole "the intelligence of a group is that of its dumbest member divided by the square root of the number of people in it" effect.

>>Cheeze+Z9
Sure, but something very important to remember in software is that users will put up with endless bullshit if the app is solving a problem for them. I could point out hundreds of apps that are absolute garbage that I've happily used because no matter how bad they are they're better than not using them. Reddit's apps don't need to be good if users derive enough value (fun, joy, karma, access to porn, whatever) from using Reddit despite the UI.

Something that so many founders get wrong is the belief that something needs to be good to be valuable. It doesn't. It just needs to be better than not having it. That is often a tremendously low bar.