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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

he obviously has an alt, like cmon

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.

>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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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