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Comment by acwan93 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Reddit is hitting the same issue as Twitter did with regards to third-party apps. Like Twitter, Reddit has a robust API that allows for really full-featured apps to fetch/post content, which is great as a user, but horrible for monetization.

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point third party Reddit clients end up getting neutered much like Twitter apps have become. Given that the mobile site is turning more inaccessible without registering for an account, it certainly seems that way.

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Reddit is also reliant on third party apps to get content and interaction since their own frontend and backend are terrible for everything but link and comment aggregation.

Holy fuck the new reddit is shitty.... If i just want to see the link, I click the link. If i scroll down on a post, i want to read the comments.... plural, as in many... not just one or two, and then a new, unrelated post, and having to click a button to show the rest of the comments... the only "thing" you have (commenting/discussions), you're destroying now.

How are engineers proud to work at reddit when their primary job is maintaining a worse version of the website full of ads, tracking, dark patterns everywhere and fake loading screens?

It's also slow, very slow.

There are people who can do engineering done without feeling proud or particular care about ethics. I've seen those at uni. Looking at IT through the money lens and no personal projects, no dev work outside of study, no books that are not absolutely necessary etc.

I mean.... you have to eat... if reddit pays you enough to make shitty software... why not. I'm sure they have a gajillion teams doing A/B testing, and using only advertising metrics to decide how it looks and what it does, so it's not really the devs choice of what to do,... they just have to implement it.

I mean it goes deeper. i.reddit.com and v.reddit.com are terrible places to put content if you want someone else to see it on reddit, there are serious performance issues there... and I'm on a wired connection to gigabit fiber in the Bay Area, not on 3G up in the mountains.

It speaks volumes that the best way to browse their social media platform is through third party tools or the deprecated interface. Not only is it a superior way to create and engage with communities (the only good subs are the comment/text driven ones these days anyways, if I want stupid videos I'll go to TikTok and Instagram where all that content comes from anyway), it's more performant.

I don't know what's going on at Reddit HQ but I guess there's a reason I've never heard anyone brag about working there.

old.reddit is the only reddit.

Yep, I've actually had to turn off the new site. Not sure what they are doing, but whenever I use the new skin my browser slows to a crawl and freezes after a few hours of leaving it up.

> which is great as a user, but horrible for monetization

That's Reddit's fault, though. They don't include ads when a user uses the API.

Even if they did, it'd be trivial for a developer to exclude the ads, and why wouldn't they? Obviously Reddit could try and enforce that via ToS, but even then they'd have to track offenders down and threaten them with revocation.

Don't be so sure, a lot of Reddit content looks like product placement to me.

Cant they use an API Key to track down offenders?

...or meter their API requests until they comply.

I wonder how advertisers would feel about their ad showing up in arbitrary unofficial applications. I'd guess ads sent via API to be shown on unofficial apps would be less desirable than ads on the official app (which has known behaviors that reddit can document). Maybe the price would be lower or they'd only pay per click?

Do any other APIs include ads to be shown to the end user? It's an interesting idea!

You can control for that... "[ ] show ads on reddit third-party apps" and you can also allow advertisers to blacklist or whitelist third-party apps. You can even push a link through to a 5 second ad first if it's a video for example. There's plenty of ways to monetize.

At some point advertisers will need to accept they cannot have their cake and eat it too as we fly forward in technology progression.

Plus, most of these objections are based on moralism which is bogus and misused in the first place.

I could see companies putting ad data in an API and saying, "If this block shows up, you must show it in order to continue using this API for free; or pay." Seems fair to me.

I can't understand this view. Particularly when advertiser objects having their ad shown next to a questionable content. I can print something ugly and tape it next to my laptop screen and now all ads are showing next to something ugly. What's the difference if it is in an app?

A lot of top posts in the popular subs are ads anyway, and it's likely they are already monetizing those.

Like all social media / user generated platforms, paid promotion is constantly being passed as legitimate content in some shape or form - but there's not really any reason to believe that reddit capitalizes on that themselves.

To look at how reddit is monetizing their platform, it seems straight forward to look at their advertiser page, and see how they try to pitch their ad platform. Paid promotions - which have become somewhat of a first party feature on Youtube for example -aren't discussed.

If they did though, wouldn’t a third party client at least give the option to strip them out given their presence makes the app worse for most users?

Reddit could then revoke the API keys easily.

Given that the US courts have definitively ruled web scraping legal, doesn't that present a risk that third-parties could create their own APIs to interface with Reddit, especially as it relates to fetching content? I think if Reddit tries to lock down its content, that becomes a losing battle, when there are probably much more creative ways to monetize.

I think the legal situation is more complicated than you’re suggesting. It’s one thing if you’re scraping without logging in, which is possible on Reddit but of course limits you to read-only access. If you want to participate in discussions, on the other hand, you need an account, which means you’re agreeing to a EULA, which means unauthorized clients can potentially be sued over either breach of contract or contractual interference. Maybe. I believe those legal aspects are still largely untested in this context.

I believe that whatever the user wants to do on their own device is allowed; this is why adblock is legal, regardless of what a website's EULA says, for example.

If I had a local software client that automated posting of content to Reddit, it would seem difficult to detect and stop. If detected, would Reddit ban my user account? Doesn't seem like the kind of relationship I would want with my power users. Why not out-compete the third-party providers (who are bubbling up CX research for free) which should be easy if the platform owner itself takes it seriously.

There is a huge difference between adblock and a scraper. The scraper is automated browsing and data harvesting. This can be quantified and creates extra load. Adblock works with local data after the server did it's part and sent all data to the device. It doesn't create additional load on the server.

A fair compromise would be a scraper that runs as a browser extension, so as to not create extra load (for example, RECAP [1], which scrapes PACER and ships the viewed case PDFs off for archiving and indexing).

Shipping post, link, and comment data somewhere globally accessible using a browser extension while logged in sidesteps Reddit’s walled garden efforts without any load beyond that which they would’ve expended serving typical user requests. Maybe IPFS as a target?

[1] https://free.law/recap

Yes. That would be a great middle ground.

As a side note:I am pro-scraping as long as common sense has a say in it and it's not abused. I do scrape one in a blue moon when I want to research a topic in depth.It's great for gathering a lot of information to help learn about a topic fast(er).

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