This could also be used as a NSFW flag.
Enough people use 3rd party apps that this would also cover the high fees that they wish you could charge to LLMs. Which, due to LinkedIn vs. HiQ -- they're just going to scrape publicly anyways. I build anti-captcha systems for bot scraping, it's trivially easy to bypass bot protection...there's no way around this without making logging in and agreeing to ToS necessary just to view comments.
Hell they could even still include advertisements that come through the API as native posts and would not only be difficult to filter, but also be against API ToS to filter out. Yeah they wouldn't be as precisely-targeted but I mean, if someone is on a niche subreddit, how much more targeting do you need when you're already getting subscription fees from the same user you'd be showing additional ads to.
Point is, they can still be extremely greedy while not kneecapping 3rd party clients that don't suck like their app does.
Regardless of the AI/ML play on the data - I suspect they just aren't willing to lose the user signals.
Frankly - it's a good way to provide more compelling numbers around advertising effectiveness and impact, and it lets them tap into that information to generate more effective campaigns.
I think reddit's advertising success depends a lot on being able to help companies approach the userbase effectively (and charge money for that service). Otherwise... it's a really tight position - because companies will just do an end run around paid services by generating their own organic looking content and posting it directly to the site (Why pay reddit for an ad for these boots... I can just generate some posts on r/buyitforlife and then bring it up in the comments)
Those are certainly strong signals, and yes - they can probably capture that data through api interactions.
That's not what they're after. They're after - how long did the user view X, which item did they pause on, what did they hover over, how long do they scroll, etc...
I'd be willing to bet good money the reason one of the complaints against Apollo was them being "inefficient" is a result of basically exactly the following conversation between product/engineering:
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Product: Can't we just capture exactly what the user is doing through the API?
Engineering: Sort of - we have some idea, but clients tend to load comments/posts in batches. We don't know exactly which one the user is looking at, or for how long.
Product: So the client is pulling more information than it needs? And that's causing us problems with our analytics?
Engineering: umm ... We can capture that data if the user is on the official client.
Two problems with this from their perspective:
- It cedes control of the user experience to third party apps, forgoing potential monetization "opportunities" (aggressively pushing NFT avatars, etc) and possibility of keeping users perpetually sucked in TikTok-style
- It greatly reduces the amount of data that can be harvested
Clearly, they value these things more than the do keeping around "core reddit" (chronological list of posts) users who only care for the base product, even if they contribute disproportionally relative to average users.
Which the paying subscriber is paying to avoid.