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Do any other large social media companies allow third party clients in the same unfettered capacity that people seem to be expecting from Reddit?
by anonred 3y ago
Do any other large social media companies allow third party clients in the same unfettered capacity that people seem to be expecting from Reddit?
- kitsunesoba 3y agoNo, and for many that's one of the selling points of Reddit. It's one of the few social media services that lets you use the client that suits you best instead of having no choice but to be force-fed whatever the marketing department and C-suites have had the engineers shoddily build into the first-party app. I see the argument that this openness makes the service harder to monetize, but it's not as if Reddit (or Twitter) ever gave it any actual effort. For example they could mandate that API usage past some threshold requires the app using it to present ads delivered by the API, and if users want to get rid of them they could subscribe to Reddit Premium. I don't think there'd be much resistance to this from heavier Reddit users — most realize that the free ride wasn't going to last forever, but the prices being asked for now are outrageous and many times greater than what Reddit is losing to users not seeing ads.
- hnick 3y agoI don't know if they do. But the fact is Reddit did offer it (presumably because they saw a benefit from doing so), so that is why people now expect it. Changing the rules on people like this is always going to upset them because they get used to it. But I think unlike past situations, there's no good target for a mass exodus so it probably won't impact them much.