People have been using third-party clients to access Reddit for more than 13 years. When you have that kind of history, a change like this is difficult to seem like anything but a rug-pull.
If you're ever in a situation where this happens, consider it you're big flashing warning sign about trying to run a competing offering!
(Mac users of a certain age will remember Apple buying SoundJam MP.)
It came with a stereo RCA to 1/8th inch adapter cable, for digitizing audio files straight from your record player / cassette player.
I also remember being bummed that iTunes never properly supported aliases [0] when running under Mac OS 9. And I remember Audion [1]. Heady days indeed!
0. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...
If not, then there isn't much to complain about
If you don't think you're taking a major risk, then you're just being naive.
(I'm not defending Reddit here, but I am saying anyone should have been planning for this highly probable outcome.)
It's well known that most online communities are 1% super-contributors, 9% modest contributors, and 90% lurkers/occasional contributors.
"Third party app users" are far more likely to be 1% and 9% users. They're committed to the platform enough that they're willing to seek out or even make software to improve their experience on it. The lurkers will just download the official app if it's the top match in the App Store and deal with the inconveniences.
So if you take that away, you disproportionately punish your most valuable users. Note I say "valuable" not in terms of "they click a lot of ads", but rather "they bring the content that makes the other 90% of users stick around and click ads."
It feels like a bar cancelling "Free Drinks Ladies' Night" because they figure that the 10 female patrons will buy 20 bottles of beer, then acting surprised when the 50 men who would come in to hit on them (and buy four beers each) don't show.
You’re speculating at this while the Reddit team just has all of the data and knows exactly where traffic comes from.
Also maybe the 3p app user, while being the most prolific poster, is simultaneously a high % of toxicity.
It is a perfectly reasonable and rational thing to do. They are not thinking in the same terms and caring about the same priorities.
We can discuss how reprehensible or short sighted that is but business is ultimately about making as much money in as short time as possible. And that is exactly what they are doing (and what they have been trained for in those MBA courses).
The business world has been forever changed by the creation of the institutional investor, which was largely created by pensions, 401k's and other such funds where by the actual people putting in the money is several steps removed from the people investing that money.
So now the business world, for public companies, lives and dies on the quartely report.
Apple could license off a bunch of crap. Boeing could sell assets and designs. Toyota could just rebadge cheaper vehicles and sell all of their factories.. all of those could make record “profits”.
Are we doomed to everything just being a pump and dump scheme from here on out because why shouldn’t everything just be speculation?
Reddit is none of those things. It's a VC Frankenstein at this point and it's probably never going to make real money, so it makes sense that they're trying to change the recipe to at least get something back.
I worked at one of the larger UK social networks and people there were terrified to make changes in case it suddenly stopped working.
From what I’ve heard the old Twitter management didn’t understand why it worked and were therefore very conservative with making changes. Mind you, the new management also doesn’t understand why it worked but are quick to make changes, and we’ve all seen how well that’s going.
Fast forward only a few months and they are now:
1. Charging exorbitant prices for the API. 2. Removing the ability for apps to display ads to free users. 3. Removing NSFW subreddits and content from the API.
Said in another way, they are:
1. Decreasing app revenue (no ads). 2. Increasing app expenses (paid API). 3. Making third party apps worse (removing NSFW from the API).
That's...about as close to "ruining the API" as you can get.
The same can't be said for the Meta properties, and so I'd argue we're seeing something different/worse here.
Edit: As many metaphors do, it works on multiple levels, but the fundamental message is don’t be a chump.
What made Lucy like that?! I often think of the trope in the context of US politics, and specifically progressive capitulation to capital. I find it one of the darkest and yet prescient parts of Schultzes lore.. (Snoopy being an adult with a long, colorful history yet still treated as a dog, being another)