> They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so

> They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point. I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites. It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done. In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it. To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making. If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.