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Comment by yanderekko | Hacker News Reader

Mods can be replaced. Do the actual valuable users rely heavily on Reddit's API or 3rd party apps? I doubt they'd leave over pure moral outrage on this issue, although a large amount of generic brand damage could cause some attrition.

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The (relatively small) percentage of people that generate the bulk of the content on Reddit do rely on third party apps (and therefore indirectly on the API). A lot of the mods crucial to the site also rely heavily on the API or tools which are built on the API. Reddit has shown no signs of improving the mod tools, and without the ability to moderate NSFW content using the new API, Reddit will get objectively worse. It doesn’t matter if leadership remods subreddits and forces them open; mods and content creators now objectively have a worse experience and will produce worse content/decisions.

> The (relatively small) percentage of people that generate the bulk of the content on Reddit do rely on third party apps

Is that published somewhere? I would find those kind of usage stats really interesting to see.

There's no evidence for that whatsoever, it's just bullshit conjecture stemming from hope and a tenuous idea that third party app users are "power users" and therefore must be eminently important.

I’d love to see a source for “people that generate the bulk of the content on Reddit do rely on third party apps” because that seems categorically impossible when you consider the number of users able to post (i.e. subscribed) using these third party apps.

Lol. People will definetly leave. Once I cannot use my fav 3rd party app I'm done. That's the end of reddit for me. We'll see if after the purge reddit will still have enough critical mass to keep going but acting like this before an ipo is nuts.

People who use third party apps are power users, most users simply don't care. I also highly doubt power users will leave, they say that but they're the ones that use Reddit the most, so it's very likely they might take a break for a while but begrudgingly come back in a month or so.

I guess we'll see. Anecdotally, I will stop using it and have been using it since the beginnings. Same sentiment from all long term users. We'll juat see

Yes, more than zero people will leave. I'm sure Reddit has already factored this in to their analysis.

How likely do you believe their analysis sucks and they didn't properly account for the 2nd order effects of this exodus?

I don't want reddit mods leaving and ruining other sites. They should stay on reddit.

I left when Twitter killed off Tweetbot and I‘m happy I did it. Colleagues of mine don‘t want to go without their dev bubble though. It‘s time for a better tool to catch-up to the newest stuff.

I also left Twitter when Tweetbot died, but only because I can’t use Twitter without a chronological timeline and keyword filtering. My impression is that third party Reddit apps had some nice quality of life features, but their main purpose wasn’t to literally alter the underlying content. Happy to be proven wrong though.

But where will they go? If there was a good alternative, it would make sense, but there isn't. You don't "just quit" heroin, people who like reddit and use it a lot will continue using it.

You're right that usually you need a new addiction but it doesn't have to be the same type of addiction.

I used to like reddit and use it a lot. After all the dick moves over time I am not sure I like it anymore

The valuable users are the mods that rely on third party apps lol.

I don’t think yall realize how much free labor the mods are doing.

There will still be mods doing free labor after whatever purges. Less effectively, sure. But I think Reddit clearly believes that they can be replaced with nearly zero negative impact, or even a positive impact if some particularly toxic powermods can be erased.

I don't think you realize how much mods/power users, who act like a funnel for a lot of content, rely on third party apps and api access. The built in mod tools are hot garbage, with critical features going years without development or progress.

I have heard numbers in the realm of 10% of users make content and only 1% ever submit things. What happens when your users aren't getting that constant dopamine drip of new content when a decent portion the people submitting stuff use third party apps stop submitting content. Or even worse, they head to another platform and submit stuff there, which is how Reddit got its big start from digg.

For folks who were around during that time, things like lemmy or the fediverse are in a similar state that Reddit was in when the digg exodus happened.

Reddit needs to realize they aren't just losing users, but adding users to a competing platform, which is arguably a worse sin.

> Do the actual valuable users rely heavily on Reddit's API or 3rd party apps?

For start: unpaid moderators.

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