Why would Reddit push users away from their app shortly before announcing API changes?
I can’t wrap my head around this, it seems so bizarre. The only reason I’m here now is because I joined Apollo right after Reddit changed its app to remove the sort by rising feature. It completely changed my experience on the app for the worse and I sought out an alternative, and I know I’m not the only one that had this complaint. I was a faithful Reddit user/poster on the official app for 6 years until just a few months ago. Why would they make their app less user friendly a few months before announcing the crazy API changes. They drove me away from their app and then drove me away from the site altogether.
Anyone have any thoughts on this? It just makes no sense to me
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To start, I don't agree with what Reddit are doing. However, to play devil's advocate, the company is losing money. They're not profitable. What if Reddit had to declare bankruptcy due to it? How do you propose they make money? Asking for donations? Even with offering Reddit Gold, or whatever pay-for entitlements, they aren't profitable.
ChatGPT is seemingly making a lot of money off of comments on Reddit, and Reddit are giving them that data for free. It makes sense, to me anyway, to charge OpenAI, Microsoft, et al., for access to that data. It seems third party app users were caught in the crossfire. Perhaps that was a lack of foresight, but perhaps it was a calculated (albeit incorrect) risk.
I know literally nothing but what the everlovingfuck are their costs? Most content (all until their shitting hosting site) is just aggregated to the site. All this content is free, moderation is free and theyre making ad money. Sure ads for reddit are probably super shit but its something. My best guess is its going to greedy little pig boy?
They increased their staff from around 700 to over 2000 in the last year or so, and their constant drive to turn from a link aggregate to a social media & hosting platform for every reposted image and video imaginable really hasn't helped either. Both of which probably have been done exactly to not be profitable, because then they have to pay taxes, instead the idea is to grow your value as far as it can go while bleeding investor money - last year Reddit was "valued" at 10 fucking billion - and then you sell it to some idiot and cash out. This whole API thing was also part of that plan, to gather everyone to their official site and apps to show advertisers how massive their reach is.
But because Spez is an idiot, he fucked it up.
3rd party apps did not get caught in the crossfire... reddit very specifically targeted them and has crafted the chatgpt narrative as a scapegoat. Chatgpt got the info they needed already reddit won't see a dime and knows this. What reddit wants is everyone on their app and thats their prerogative... I doubt they expected the backlash from longtime and even newer user, they probably anticipated some pushback from devs and maybe mods but this blew up in their face and rightly so... ugh I'm a bit sensitive over this sorry reddit was a home for me through 3rd party apps for a looooong time and I'm a tad upset over it.