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Comment by bunga-bunga | Hacker News Reader

Good for you. Reddit will not cease to exist.

People are comparing this to Digg, but Reddit is not changing at all, so the vast majority of users will stay and will continue to comment share and moderate subreddits for free/points.

People think they have any power whatsoever over “their” subreddits, I don’t know how they can think that Reddit won’t just lock their accounts and reopen the subreddits.

Don’t forget that Reddit can and already did close a bunch of subreddits that they didn’t like, so it’s their community, not yours.

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> Reddit is not changing at all, so the vast majority of users will stay

Cutting off and/or driving up the cost of third-party apps through which users access Reddit is changing Reddit. The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average, so even if they are less efficiently monetized as eyeballs, they are large indirect contributors to Reddit’s revenue. Making their experience worse will, it seems near certain, cost content that brings the users that are purer eyeballs to monetize with ads, and thereby cost ad revenue. How much is, of course, unclear.

> Don’t forget that Reddit can and already did close a bunch of subreddits that they didn’t like, so it’s their community, not yours.

Sure, and they can take over the moderations, and the content creation, and the viewing for ads from the users that they chase off. Not sure how that will work out for them as a business plan, though.

> The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average

Are you saying that most users who post content also use third-party apps, or that most third-party app users post content? There’s a big difference here.

Back of the napkin math: You have to pay to post with some third-party apps like Apollo which has 50k subscribers. Reddit has ~500M monthly users, so we’re looking at… 0.01% if every person subscribed to Apollo posts. Even with a 10x safety factor, there’s no way shutting down third-party apps has a meaningful effect on the volume of content posted to Reddit.

This.

Add the addictive nature of Reddit and you’ll see the same people back on the site and native app. I hate Reddit but I still open it at least once a week.

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