this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.
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Yeah, that was going to be the outcome of all the third party apps. I get the feeling a lot of people didnt understand that.
And theres nothing wrong with that. I mean, it sucks, but reddit wanting to make money from giving access to its APIs to third parties is fine. What wasnt fine was the ridiculous price they pulled out of their ass, and the lack of any real time for app developers to prepare for it (this was Apollo's issue with the situation).
But had the API pricing been reasonable and a fair timeframe for app developers to implement it, this is what we would have seen, all the third party apps charging a subscription to access reddit. The other option would have been a higher initial cost for the app, to cover costs for the estimated average liftime of the app.
Yup, it's no surprise for me either. Still something to document about it.
Besides being done in a scummy way (that you already addressed), it's overall bad for the platform in the long term. Those third party apps didn't generate direct profit, but they generated value - it was yet another "chain" keeping users in Reddit, as the official app is trash. And Reddit consistently picked features from those apps to actually improve theirs, now this is gone.
I never understood why reddit didn't go to asking for a cut of the third party sales for a revenue sharing model over this api usage tier.
But then a look at the permissions asked of the official reddit app made me understand.
Data-mining, right? It's that sort of shady as fuck activity that every business and their subsidiary dog is doing nowadays. If not for that, theoretically they could feed the advertisement directly into the third party apps, or demand them to show ads from Reddit in order to operate. (They'd probably do it - their devs were eager to dialogue, before the recent events.)
It's one of the reasons I've moved over to lot of Foss apps over the years, and opting for using lite apps through the browser over downloading official apps.
Reddit Is Fun actually had a revenue sharing agreement with reddit.
Spez ripped it up when he came back as CEO