What is Reddit doing
I don't use Reddit anymore, but I wanted to search something that I couldn't find anywhere. This is what I saw. After killing all the other apps, Reddit now is trying to force us to use their own spyware app.
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This is why they removed the apps. They want to be driving traffic through the app, and the 3rd party apps prevented that from happening.
They went from providing value to extracting it.
They made the service more shitty! We need a long word to describe that process.
Hmm... is impoopify taken?
enfecification?
Excrementize?
Long word? Pooooooooooopification
moreshittierization
I think the worst part is they entirely ignored the most painfully obvious solution of implementing a "reddit plus" or "reddit premium" or "reddit red" and just gated third party app access behind a $9.99/mo subscription. I have a hard time believing most reddit users' ad views are worth anywhere near that much per month. But instead they decided to burn a significant sum of goodwill on questionable premises and pissed off a significant number of power users.
The feeling I got from all of the communications was that /u/spez was jealous of Apollo and just wanted to kill off Apollo. Which would explain why they took such a scorched earth approach in trying to kill all third party apps
That is basically what they did. There are a decent amount of third party apps around that work. I personally use Narwhal.
The further we get from the whole third party app debacle, the more I think this was just a way to kill the most popular apps. The ones that people said made reddit worth using. The ones that got shouted out in Apple keynotes.