this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Third party apps cost a lot in terms of server usage but contributed nearly nothing in terms of value. Money changing hands is normally very profitable. Way more than ads.
The only way to know how much of an impact third party apps made on their profit is if we can see their revenue / profit figures. Plus, it's their own fault that their official app is so damn bad compared to apps made by solo devs.
It definitely acted as a drag. Every API request was a cost without a way to make money
The real problem is that investors piled into reddit and bloated it into an unsustainable pile of death without knowing how it could make money.
Now they're squeezing it for cash and will slowly kill it as a result. But at the end of the day you can't just have a free open API because websites do cost money.
IMO. The problem is that reddit priced to kill the apps in order to serve your shitty microtransactions and track you to death. They could have had a slimmer site and a more reasonable price for the API, and that would have been fair.
The value was the content provided for free by the people, the company ran ads against that content and are now trying to sell it to AI companies to train their models against.
Server costs money to run. Company has to make money or it'll go out of business. Either the people making the posts have to pay or the people reading do.
And apparently Reddit wants to pay people for their content now anyways.
I'm not rehashing this again, but there were many ways to tweak things, such as serving ads to the apps through the api, to charging a small reasonable fee to 3rd party app users. Instead they killed off the other apps.
I'm saying the people reading pay via ads, and outside companies pay for the content itself which breaks your false choice.
I don't think that's because they want to.
Even if not a huge threat today, it's pretty obvious that apps like Lemmy can completely replace Reddit for users. All Lemmy needs now is just enough critical mass of interactions like comments. Reddit has to come up with ways to keep people around because it's core features are way too basic and replaceable.
They contributed lots in terms of value, just not straight up cash value.