Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

The percentage of people who use a third party app to read reddit is likely relatively small. They're also the most likely to be invested in the platform. Why make these users angry? Why even take the risk that some of your users might leave for another platform?

If the issue is displaying ads or gathering analytics you can deal with both of those without cutting off third party apps. If you are concerned that others are building big data tools or bots off your free API you can also just grandfather the existing popular clients as free or with a very large discount.

For that matter you can also just set different price tiers for API clients that are used interactively by real people to interact with subreddits vs anyone else.

The social media game is all about network effects. Putting up barriers to making reddit a core service is only a bad thing. What positive gain is reddit expecting from killing third party clients here? As I said ads and analytics can be handled by the license agreement. You can even require them to link a library you provide that does the ad displays and analytics by pulling code from your servers so if you really must have deep control of that experience you can.

The official app collects far more data points to identify users for ad targeting than the third party clients do (check the permissions asked). They may have decided there's no way to effectively monetize third-party app users to the levelling of targeting that their ad platform requires, so these users will always be a cost center instead of a profit center.

Then again these users are likely to disproportionately be posters and commenters, the people who create free content that keeps the broader userbase engaged, or are moderators keeping the site running for zero compensation, so pissing them off seems ill advised.

Based on this thread [1], where an admin accuses 3rd party apps of being inefficient API consumers but refuses to explain why, it's clear Reddit just wants these apps gone and isn't interested in whether anyone is alienated or upset by it.

The looming IPO and showing as positive user monetization numbers as possible is undoubtedly the motivation for this, unfortunately goodwill with the userbase that has taken years to build is getting trashed in the process.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...

> The official app collects far more data points to identify users for ad targeting than the third party clients do (check the permissions asked

I jusy checked the iOS app’s permissions. It asks for no permissions outside of live activities, for integration with Siri, notifications and background app refresh.

The iOS privacy permissions are different between the official app and Apollo:

- Official app https://i.imgur.com/fjgKlVo.png, see 'Data used to track you'

- Apollo app https://i.imgur.com/icykgJP.png, see 'Data not used to track you'

3rd party apps do not track users, which is a problem for an advertising-based business like Reddit.

Really? You don’t think Reddit can “track you” and use usage data when you’re signed in to Reddit with a third party app?

Apollo doesn’t track you. But Reddit is tracking you either way.

Of course they can track you to some degree either way, however the official app is using an IDFA (advertising identifier) [1] whereas Apollo is not, which makes tracking in the official app significantly easier.

The official app is also hoovering up other deanonymizing data like user location, which helps narrow down ad targeting even further. It's obvious why Reddit prefers you use their official app instead of a third-party alternative.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers

The Reddit app does not ask for your GPS location. Reddit has the same very course idea about your location whether you use the official app or a third party app - your IP address.

It’s also a system setting whether you allow an app to use IDFA - which according to at least FB - 80% of iOS users decline.

Yes it does request location, it says in the image I linked above. Advertising identifiers are declined roughly 20% of the time according to Adjust:

>In iOS 10, Apple introduced "Limit Ad Tracking" setting for users who do not wish to be tracked by advertising networks. If the setting is enabled the system returns a default all-zero id for that device. As of December 2020, it's estimated that approximately 20% of users turn on this setting.

Your own linked says that location data is not linked to you.

On iOS you can go to “Location” and Reddit doesn’t show up as even an option.

And you cited an article about iOS 10 that came out in 2017. As of 2021, it’s 88% that opt out of tracking

https://targetinternet.com/resources/how-apple-ios14-changes...

People who use third-party apps are the most likely to be invested in the platform but they don't matter at all to reddit, the company. I would assume that they are also the most likely to use old.reddit, the most likely to use adblockers on desktop, etc. Reddit would rather replace them with people that will just use the default mobile/desktop experiences because they're the easiest to set up. That is the gain. NPCs are easier to develop apps for because they don't care if the apps are actually good.

Bingo, all they care about is monetization. Simple

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