Asklemmy

Control and money. They can serve more ads and harvest your data more easily if they control the platform

Reddit wants to show ads and to collect user data.

Tracking. Ads. Selling data etc.

Because they want control over their platform. They want full access to the user data so they can use it and sell it. And they want to be able show targeted adds because they are a business and the main purpose why they do what they do is because they need to make money.

Just from using reddit, I can only really see a few ways for them to make money.

1. Subscriptions/awards. Not many people do this, certainly not enough to keep the doors open.

2. Advertisements

3. Selling user data

Let's start with 2. The reason they re-designed the UI in both the app and the desktop version is because they need to create as much space as possible for them to put ads into- and still have it not be so annoying for the user that they stop using the site. Now, on the website they can still put adds on old.reddit, just not as many- so they haven't come for that yet, because it isn't draining nearly as much income as the mobile market. Their new mobile app does the same as the frontend redesign- it maximizes ad space, and also allows them to collect other user data such as location to sell to marketing agencies.

ALL of the alternative Reddit clients (or at least, all I have used) have adblocker built into them. For some of them, you pay the app for that- a payment which is often less than Reddit Gold is, and is usually a one-time payment. And these apps hold the user data that can actually be sold, like location. So third-party apps disrupt all three of Reddit's possible revenue streams by having people not pay for premium to hide ads, by blocking advertisements anyway and denying Reddit the ad revenue for them, and by keeping the user's data away from Reddit.

That's why I think they made the API price so ridiculously high- it isn't just meant to scare them away, it's meant to be a reflection of what they feel they are losing in revenue from users using third party apps. If it was just about any one of the 3 points above, the rate would be much more reasonable- but it's all 3.

Everything you have seen happen recently is in service to the upcoming IPO.

Expect a similarly sized drama explosion when they take huge action against the porn on the site.

App is tied to phone, phone for the most part kills the idea of you being anon. Which means glorious glorious user data, and problem users with multiple accounts get nuked based on their device and inside the app they can serve you anything anyone pays them to serve and unlike browser based stuff there is noting you can do to prevent or pervert it.

The third-party API doesn't let them see how people interact with the app, only what the user is accessing.

It's just to further monetize the user's interactions and sell the data, because the executive team are greedy little pigboi.

If they streamline how users get access to Reddit, then they get to determine what they see. Now the third-party apps will get killed, the access through mobile browsers will be limited with the idea to force users into the app, old-reddit will be gone at some point as well. And then Reddit can spam users with ads and also force users into buying premium services to see no/less ads. Since all alternative ways of using the website will be gone, people have to swallow that pill no matter how big it is.

Eyes on ads

Click through data

Ad impressions

This is why the often run “experiments”.

Profit. Simple as that.

A native app offers the most control. Ad blockers are harder to obtain and use.

Don't know if it's been posted yet.... money

Money. Not only can they better monetize it, it makes their numbers look better for the potential IPO.

Ads.

Ads and data mining

Ads and tracking.

So $$$.

They can force-feed ads to you and track your every click and sell that gobs of data to companies using it to make more $$ and to further develop their tracking to make yet more $$$

So, as always, the answer to such questions is: Money.

Because Reddit wants money.

Just to comment about blocking people on phones using browsers... My android Firefox' division of privacy fighters says 'hi' (uBlock, Privacy Badger, Ghostery).

While I'm using these addons, Reddit website can't spam ads or get data to sell.

It wants to keep control of how people get access to its data. The recent massive surge of interest in A.I.s means that there's a lot of people looking for good quality datasets to train new models. Reddit is sitting on a goldmine, and it currently handing out gold nuggets for free.

It wants to charge these desperate users of its data through the nose for that access, and $12,000 per 50M API calls is the market rate it has determined (and it is clearly comfortable that existing commercial users of its data such as marketers will also pay those rates).

The fact that this will kill third party clients is just the icing on the cake. If reddit wanted to kill such clients it would just turn off voting and comments in the API.

Because they want to go public and get as much money as possible. They won’t be able to do that unless they demonstrate that they can monetise their platform.

They don’t make money off of our regular interactions on the site. They make money by selling tracking packages of users to advertisers.

In an app made by them, they can track so so much of what you do. Much much harder to get data from someone using a third-party app.

Capitalists love monopolies. The closer they can get the better. Third-party apps compete with their own.

I see it as a good old Foucault problem of Knowledge/Power.. By using their app, more knowledge can be visualised about the subject. More knowledge - > more power. Which in turn makes them more interesting to investors.

Money. It's always just money.

Well, tracking, they can track how much have you scrolled, that should have gave you a hint.