I can’t wrap my head around this, it seems so bizarre. The only reason I’m here now is because I joined Apollo right after Reddit changed its app to remove the sort by rising feature. It completely changed my experience on the app for the worse and I sought out an alternative, and I know I’m not the only one that had this complaint. I was a faithful Reddit user/poster on the official app for 6 years until just a few months ago. Why would they make their app less user friendly a few months before announcing the crazy API changes. They drove me away from their app and then drove me away from the site altogether.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? It just makes no sense to me

  • mike94100@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago
    1. Reddit could have gotten ad revenue from third party apps by requiring them to display ads they deliver as part of the API, but never did so. Third Party Apps were never able to deliver Reddit’s ads. Most people are just using the official app anyway.
    2. Don’t really see a way they could charge for Reddit without it being useless (as it is now), or detrimental to the experience (like a subscription for posting). They could have increased the amount of ads or preroll ads before opening posts. Worse user experience, but not any worse than what is happening anyway.
    3. LLMs can just use web scraping to get data from Reddit without access to the API, which is even more costly to Reddit.

    The only way their move makes sense to me is to push people into using the official app so that they can collect usage metrics and sell that data or use it to better position/sell ads.