10 ms·

The problem is the business model is terrible. You need to sell ads to survive and the ads ruin the site.

by rapsey 3y ago

hackernewds 3y ago
and when you try to rein in expenses to show less ads, the community begins to propose $10M buyouts and every refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls.
- imauser 3y ago
  The developer has already clarified that Apollo was not the top user of the API. It was also confirmed by a Reddit employee.
- nvy 3y ago
  It's patently obvious that they're just trying to drive up ad impression numbers on the app to inflate their financials before IPO/acquisition.
  - rapsey 3y ago
    Reddit is still not profitable.
    - libraryatnight 3y ago
      Maybe forums and digital commons shouldn't be.
      - ako 3y ago
        How do you suggest they survive long term if the continue to lose money?
        Eisenstein 3y ago
        Stop spending so much money developing features that are useless for adding value to the site; stop hiring devs to create new 'resume' features like counter-productive reverse-blocking and hire devs to fix modding tools. Stop spending money hosting videos and multimedia when your core value is text conversations. Don't make stupid decisions like destroying your most popular features (the AMA subreddit, the secret santa) because you are stupid. Fire your CEO who is doing all of these things. There is no reason reddit can't be profitable if they did these things. They don't need 100,000,000 users watching videos to bring in ad revenue. They need 10,000,000 users generating good content that ends up as top google results and they can find clever ways to monetize product tie-ins, annual meetups (those were a thing in a lot of cities a while ago), events, merch, and subscriptions. It isn't rocket science. The top stockholders just have to be satisfied to be millionaires instead of billionaires.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      It's not trying to be. They only care about the value of the equity, not about profitability. It'd pretty easy to be a profitable company with a $10 million turnover, but you're not going to be a unicorn this way. Founders and VC wants high return on their equity, and today being enormous without profitability is valued more than being reasonable and profitable.
      - randomdata 3y ago
        spez's comment "We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable." suggests a real concern about not being profitable. In fact, the whole ordeal reeks of panic – a last ditch attempt to right the ship before bankruptcy sets in. There was once an age where investors would buy in simply on the belief of unicornedness, but that ship sailed several months ago. Investors have become much more critical of tech businesses, showing substantially less interest in tech companies that aren't displaying strong fundamentals. A recent Fidelity report indicates Reddit's own valuation has dropped by 41% on that change in sentiment.
        littlestymaar 3y ago
        There's no reason to buy's spez's words, nor any other executives in any company for that matter, their job is to spread a narrative. In fact, if profitability was the goal, then he should have been ousted at this point, because he's been back for 8 years now without succeeding to make the company profitable. I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, profitability was just never the goal. Getting the biggest possible IPO is the goal, but the timing is actually very bad for them for the reason you mention and now they're trying as hard as they can, including by creating fake subreddits with translated old content for non-English speakers (at least French and German speakers).
        vxNsr 3y ago
        > I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, profitability was just never the goal. Just fyi, reddit rose around the same time as Facebook so it’s likely they share a similar governance model, where founders control an outsized part of the board/voting shares. Since Uber and wework semi-imploded investors are less forgiving of that sort of thing but legacy companies like Reddit likely still are run that way.
    - Rebelgecko 3y ago
      Profit depends on 2 things, revenue and expenses. Reddit has tripled their headcount over the last few years so they can focus on new features like NFTs. If they were concerned about sustainable profitability, IMO they should've kept their headcount around 500 people and tried to grow revenue without totally blowing up their costs.
      - sznio 3y ago
        I wouldn't be surprised if reddit was profitable/at least broke even 8 years ago. Reddit needs 300 people max to run, and they got like 1500.
        rcxdude 3y ago
        AFAIK they have never been profitable.
        Nextgrid 3y ago
        Considering moderation and basically all community upkeep is relegated to unpaid volunteers, even 300 is a lot.
    - conradfr 3y ago
      If one of the most visited website/app in the world with highly cacheable and free content can't be profitable the internet is doomed. But did they try to be?
      - goykasi 3y ago
        How is reddit highly cacheable? Maybe old/infrequently accessed discussions are cacheable, but the live set is too dynamic. So there probably isnt much of a win there. The feeds are definitely not cacheable (except for maybe on a per user basis with a low ttl). Popular and all are never the same upon reload. And every user is going to have a different combination of subreddits. Those feeds have to be generated on the fly. Most of the data is too dynamic and ever-changing to cache effectively.
        conradfr 3y ago
        https://medium.com/@sevebadajoz/exploring-cache-optimization-with-reddits-infrastructure-f5682325990d https://medium.com/@sevebadajoz/exploring-cache-optimization... Also a lot of their content is not "hot" and "commentable" anymore.
        raverbashing 3y ago
        - Cache for unlogged users, have a less dynamic front page (let's say 10s cache), that would help a lot - Cache of most popular topics (again, even a 10s invalidation time) would help For the logged users you could do something more dynamic, for example, cache the front-page snippets of the main subs + add the ones for the user. And again cache that (unless the 'new reddit' makes this harder, to which I would say - well deserved! ;) )
- mosen 3y ago
  Spez?
- onli 3y ago
  This references the Apollo client discussion and is wrong on many levels. 1. They are not "reining in" expenses, they are purposely pricing out 3rd-party clients (which probably has the goal to show more ads, not less) 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. 3. There were no suggestions for reasonable optimizations of API calls. Apollo claims they already optimized whenever possible and whenever they were asked for it, and that client was specifically not listed in an earlier discussion about ineffective API usage. Reported measurements confirm that, the official API uses more calls. Regardless, later Reddit made this accusation, showing that they are not truthful in this discussion. Your pro-reddit position is not reasonable.
  - miroljub 3y ago
    > 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. If something loses me 20M$ per year and I have an option to buy it for 10M$ or kill it for 0$, I would choose the latter without much thinking. And that seems to be exactly what Reddit is doing. And that is something that any client using a third-party platform should expect that will happen eventually.
    - dgb23 3y ago
      The “without much thinking” part is likely the mistake here.
    - onli 3y ago
      That sounds completely reasonable - if you assume the users currently on Apollo 1) Can't be made to pay, directly with a price for the app or micropayments or indirectly via ads 2) Would move to the official app if Apollo shut down and 3) Don't bring in posts and comments with which other users engage, raising money that way. Sounds to me that shutting it down is the one sure way to lose money, but I also don't trust that the reddit team had made that calculation properly. This all seems like a short term profit or like a power play to me.
- matkoniecz 3y ago
  > refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls [citation needed] (and not from someone known for lying and editing comments made by other people using their root access)
- Mindwipe 3y ago
  The community is not proposing $10 million dollar buyouts. That is literally a joke that if the API has the value Reddit claims (which it doesn't) then they are defacto putting those sorts of valuations on the app. Reddit already bought a third party app with Alien Blue, and they ruined it so badly that they had to close it down and start again. Nobody wants Reddit in charge of the third party clients, they have awful UI designers and a user hostile UX team. The whole point of a third party client is that it has to actually design a UI that it's users like, or it dies.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
MattGaiser 3y ago
I personally don't find the ads at all objectionable on the old.reddit.com site. They blend in with the other content reasonably well (so you see a Jetbrains ad when on /r/programmerhumor), don't slow down the site, either fit the flow well or hang out on the side, etc. I find the targeting to be good enough that I look forward to the ads to a certain extent as I have found all sorts of fun products that way.
- mr_mitm 3y ago
  Plus, they have the Reddit gold program. Not sure if that is enough, but does Reddit really need 2000 employees and hundreds of millions of CV money? I have a hard time estimating what it costs to run a site like Reddit.
  - dgb23 3y ago
    My guess is that many marketing based sites bloat their staff and expenses to a self perpetuating and useless degree.
  - Nux 3y ago
    Wow.. Didn't know this. It sounds like something has gone wrong there. Good old greed maybe?
  - primax 3y ago
    I'm a very attached reddit user and I have no idea what they could be doing with 2000 employees. I'm honestly shocked. The development they've done in the past 5 years could have been done with like 50-100 people, including keeping all the SRE going. Insane.
  - vxNsr 3y ago
    Reddit has been overwhelmed by a certain type of employee that spends more time worrying about the political opinions of their colleagues and less about excellence and productivity. Similar to twitter which turned out to be a finely tuned Rube-Goldberg machine that required hourly maintenance to keep online. Im not saying I’m smart enough to make things work well but that such people exist and they don’t/didn’t work at either twitter or Reddit.
antupis 3y ago
Current ads at Reddit are not that bad, it is nothing like youtube which is borderline unwatchable at the moment. But for Reddit general there is like lot of astroturfing currently and if Reddit could start capturing some value from that and same time show for regular user that this is commercial/pr account would be win-win for Reddit and regular users.
- mike_d 3y ago
  I would bet money that Reddit has the highest percentage of ad blocking users. Either by way of browser extension or third party apps. They just don't have enough impressions to cover the outlandish costs associated with running the site. Combined with lax content moderation policies, advertisers see more value going with third parties that can push a viral story about a product to the homepage. There is no one problem with Reddit, and that is the problem. They have to reboot and build Facebook 2.0 (or whatever) without a highly fickle user base turning tail and running. Rock, meet hard place.
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    Reddit hosts its own ads, so seems like it would be relatively trivial to overcome the adblockers and insert them directly into the feed server side. Sure, that will piss a few people off, but more than this?
    - xxs 3y ago
      They should not use any CSS b/c lots of blocking is just based on elements and their style.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        IIRC doesn't the FCC and equivalent regulatory authorities require online ads to be clearly distinguished?
  - blitzar 3y ago
    > There is no one problem with Reddit, and that is the problem. Actually there is one singular problem ... money. They could accept that "reddit the product" is a 2-5bn market cap business with solid 0.5bn revenue; staff up on that basis, scale their infrastructure on that basis, M&A on that basis, set investor expectations on that basis.
that_guy_iain 3y ago
I would say the problem is that the user base are low value users. They're the sort of people who will do a mass protest because one for-profit company wants to charge another for-profit company money. Advertisers don't want to advertise to them, seriously. Any other company with a different user base with that amount of users and traffic would be making a billion a year easily. Probably multiple billions. But Reddit users are low value. There the sort of people if a company tries to engage with them with just be hostile. This means the amount of money Reddit can charge for ads isn't that high. Which means the companies advertising on Reddit are generally on the lower end of the scale or it's just a tiny part of a bigger ad campaign. So if ad revenue isn't going to do it. Then it needs to be a freemium model with subscriptions. They probably get 25% of their revenue from reddit premium. That also means, charging for the API. The problem for many of the third party apps is they've also been running a freemium model with very low overheads due to the fact Reddit has been largely funding their freemium model. They've been charging next to nothing for their premium options ($1.50 a month) and they have massive amount of very active users. They're so big that paying a reasonable per API request fee results in a massive bill. A bill they can't pay due to a freemium model and super low fees that don't pay for the freemium users. Third party apps directly compete with Reddit, therefore it's fair they pay Reddit for the resources they use as well as the lost potential of the users they did take. Those paying for premium on an app would probably pay premium on Reddit. Then comes in the low value users, who are outraged the free toy they have wants to make a profit. "It's too much money" - funny enough Reddit users think they're worthless - was one of the main cries. "This third party app IS REDDIT" - well if they're Reddit they shouldn't need Reddit access. A userbase who resists being monetised. Either they're monetisable or they're not. If they're not the company can't survive. What the Reddit users need/want is a non-profit.
- barrkel 3y ago
  Thing is, high value users won't use a site that has no content. There's no there there any more without the userbase.
  - that_guy_iain 3y ago
    High value users are a completely different demographic. Realistically, there are a large amount of people who don't care about the protests. They're going to be creating content. I wouldn't be surprised if the people most outraged are the ones who don't even comment that often.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
They also sold awards / points / things, which seemed pretty popular for a while at least; I have no idea how much that earns them though. But there's plenty of avenues they have for generating revenue that doesn't involve shutting down 3rd party clients, e.g. commercial promotions, signal / post / comment boosting, subscriptions for advanced / exclusive features, etc.

The problem is the business model is terrible. You need to sell ads to survive and the ads ruin the site.

by rapsey 3y ago

The problem is the business model is terrible. You need to sell ads to survive and the ads ruin the site.

and when you try to rein in expenses to show less ads, the community begins to propose $10M buyouts and every refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls.

imauser 3y ago
The developer has already clarified that Apollo was not the top user of the API. It was also confirmed by a Reddit employee.
nvy 3y ago
It's patently obvious that they're just trying to drive up ad impression numbers on the app to inflate their financials before IPO/acquisition.
- rapsey 3y ago
  Reddit is still not profitable.
  - libraryatnight 3y ago
    Maybe forums and digital commons shouldn't be.
    - ako 3y ago
      How do you suggest they survive long term if the continue to lose money?
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        Stop spending so much money developing features that are useless for adding value to the site; stop hiring devs to create new 'resume' features like counter-productive reverse-blocking and hire devs to fix modding tools. Stop spending money hosting videos and multimedia when your core value is text conversations. Don't make stupid decisions like destroying your most popular features (the AMA subreddit, the secret santa) because you are stupid. Fire your CEO who is doing all of these things. There is no reason reddit can't be profitable if they did these things. They don't need 100,000,000 users watching videos to bring in ad revenue. They need 10,000,000 users generating good content that ends up as top google results and they can find clever ways to monetize product tie-ins, annual meetups (those were a thing in a lot of cities a while ago), events, merch, and subscriptions. It isn't rocket science. The top stockholders just have to be satisfied to be millionaires instead of billionaires.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    It's not trying to be. They only care about the value of the equity, not about profitability. It'd pretty easy to be a profitable company with a $10 million turnover, but you're not going to be a unicorn this way. Founders and VC wants high return on their equity, and today being enormous without profitability is valued more than being reasonable and profitable.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      spez's comment "We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable." suggests a real concern about not being profitable. In fact, the whole ordeal reeks of panic – a last ditch attempt to right the ship before bankruptcy sets in. There was once an age where investors would buy in simply on the belief of unicornedness, but that ship sailed several months ago. Investors have become much more critical of tech businesses, showing substantially less interest in tech companies that aren't displaying strong fundamentals. A recent Fidelity report indicates Reddit's own valuation has dropped by 41% on that change in sentiment.
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        There's no reason to buy's spez's words, nor any other executives in any company for that matter, their job is to spread a narrative. In fact, if profitability was the goal, then he should have been ousted at this point, because he's been back for 8 years now without succeeding to make the company profitable. I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, profitability was just never the goal. Getting the biggest possible IPO is the goal, but the timing is actually very bad for them for the reason you mention and now they're trying as hard as they can, including by creating fake subreddits with translated old content for non-English speakers (at least French and German speakers).
        vxNsr 3y ago
        > I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, profitability was just never the goal. Just fyi, reddit rose around the same time as Facebook so it’s likely they share a similar governance model, where founders control an outsized part of the board/voting shares. Since Uber and wework semi-imploded investors are less forgiving of that sort of thing but legacy companies like Reddit likely still are run that way.
  - Rebelgecko 3y ago
    Profit depends on 2 things, revenue and expenses. Reddit has tripled their headcount over the last few years so they can focus on new features like NFTs. If they were concerned about sustainable profitability, IMO they should've kept their headcount around 500 people and tried to grow revenue without totally blowing up their costs.
    - sznio 3y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if reddit was profitable/at least broke even 8 years ago. Reddit needs 300 people max to run, and they got like 1500.
      - rcxdude 3y ago
        AFAIK they have never been profitable.
      - Nextgrid 3y ago
        Considering moderation and basically all community upkeep is relegated to unpaid volunteers, even 300 is a lot.
  - conradfr 3y ago
    If one of the most visited website/app in the world with highly cacheable and free content can't be profitable the internet is doomed. But did they try to be?
    - goykasi 3y ago
      How is reddit highly cacheable? Maybe old/infrequently accessed discussions are cacheable, but the live set is too dynamic. So there probably isnt much of a win there. The feeds are definitely not cacheable (except for maybe on a per user basis with a low ttl). Popular and all are never the same upon reload. And every user is going to have a different combination of subreddits. Those feeds have to be generated on the fly. Most of the data is too dynamic and ever-changing to cache effectively.
      - conradfr 3y ago
        https://medium.com/@sevebadajoz/exploring-cache-optimization-with-reddits-infrastructure-f5682325990d https://medium.com/@sevebadajoz/exploring-cache-optimization... Also a lot of their content is not "hot" and "commentable" anymore.
      - raverbashing 3y ago
        - Cache for unlogged users, have a less dynamic front page (let's say 10s cache), that would help a lot - Cache of most popular topics (again, even a 10s invalidation time) would help For the logged users you could do something more dynamic, for example, cache the front-page snippets of the main subs + add the ones for the user. And again cache that (unless the 'new reddit' makes this harder, to which I would say - well deserved! ;) )
mosen 3y ago
Spez?
onli 3y ago
This references the Apollo client discussion and is wrong on many levels. 1. They are not "reining in" expenses, they are purposely pricing out 3rd-party clients (which probably has the goal to show more ads, not less) 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. 3. There were no suggestions for reasonable optimizations of API calls. Apollo claims they already optimized whenever possible and whenever they were asked for it, and that client was specifically not listed in an earlier discussion about ineffective API usage. Reported measurements confirm that, the official API uses more calls. Regardless, later Reddit made this accusation, showing that they are not truthful in this discussion. Your pro-reddit position is not reasonable.
- miroljub 3y ago
  > 2. The $10M buyout comments was a reasonable comment countering the statement that reddit loses $20M each year by users using Apollo. A comment which was a half-joke, as the audio recording shows clearly. In that case, buying Appolo for $10M would have been a steal and Reddit would have jumped on it. They didn't, their prior statement was probably a lie. If something loses me 20M$ per year and I have an option to buy it for 10M$ or kill it for 0$, I would choose the latter without much thinking. And that seems to be exactly what Reddit is doing. And that is something that any client using a third-party platform should expect that will happen eventually.
  - dgb23 3y ago
    The “without much thinking” part is likely the mistake here.
  - onli 3y ago
    That sounds completely reasonable - if you assume the users currently on Apollo 1) Can't be made to pay, directly with a price for the app or micropayments or indirectly via ads 2) Would move to the official app if Apollo shut down and 3) Don't bring in posts and comments with which other users engage, raising money that way. Sounds to me that shutting it down is the one sure way to lose money, but I also don't trust that the reddit team had made that calculation properly. This all seems like a short term profit or like a power play to me.
matkoniecz 3y ago
> refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls [citation needed] (and not from someone known for lying and editing comments made by other people using their root access)
Mindwipe 3y ago
The community is not proposing $10 million dollar buyouts. That is literally a joke that if the API has the value Reddit claims (which it doesn't) then they are defacto putting those sorts of valuations on the app. Reddit already bought a third party app with Alien Blue, and they ruined it so badly that they had to close it down and start again. Nobody wants Reddit in charge of the third party clients, they have awful UI designers and a user hostile UX team. The whole point of a third party client is that it has to actually design a UI that it's users like, or it dies.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

MattGaiser 3y ago

I personally don't find the ads at all objectionable on the old.reddit.com site. They blend in with the other content reasonably well (so you see a Jetbrains ad when on /r/programmerhumor), don't slow down the site, either fit the flow well or hang out on the side, etc. I find the targeting to be good enough that I look forward to the ads to a certain extent as I have found all sorts of fun products that way.

mr_mitm 3y ago
Plus, they have the Reddit gold program. Not sure if that is enough, but does Reddit really need 2000 employees and hundreds of millions of CV money? I have a hard time estimating what it costs to run a site like Reddit.
- dgb23 3y ago
  My guess is that many marketing based sites bloat their staff and expenses to a self perpetuating and useless degree.
- Nux 3y ago
  Wow.. Didn't know this. It sounds like something has gone wrong there. Good old greed maybe?
- primax 3y ago
  I'm a very attached reddit user and I have no idea what they could be doing with 2000 employees. I'm honestly shocked. The development they've done in the past 5 years could have been done with like 50-100 people, including keeping all the SRE going. Insane.
- vxNsr 3y ago
  Reddit has been overwhelmed by a certain type of employee that spends more time worrying about the political opinions of their colleagues and less about excellence and productivity. Similar to twitter which turned out to be a finely tuned Rube-Goldberg machine that required hourly maintenance to keep online. Im not saying I’m smart enough to make things work well but that such people exist and they don’t/didn’t work at either twitter or Reddit.

antupis 3y ago

Current ads at Reddit are not that bad, it is nothing like youtube which is borderline unwatchable at the moment. But for Reddit general there is like lot of astroturfing currently and if Reddit could start capturing some value from that and same time show for regular user that this is commercial/pr account would be win-win for Reddit and regular users.

mike_d 3y ago
I would bet money that Reddit has the highest percentage of ad blocking users. Either by way of browser extension or third party apps. They just don't have enough impressions to cover the outlandish costs associated with running the site. Combined with lax content moderation policies, advertisers see more value going with third parties that can push a viral story about a product to the homepage. There is no one problem with Reddit, and that is the problem. They have to reboot and build Facebook 2.0 (or whatever) without a highly fickle user base turning tail and running. Rock, meet hard place.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Reddit hosts its own ads, so seems like it would be relatively trivial to overcome the adblockers and insert them directly into the feed server side. Sure, that will piss a few people off, but more than this?
  - xxs 3y ago
    They should not use any CSS b/c lots of blocking is just based on elements and their style.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      IIRC doesn't the FCC and equivalent regulatory authorities require online ads to be clearly distinguished?
- blitzar 3y ago
  > There is no one problem with Reddit, and that is the problem. Actually there is one singular problem ... money. They could accept that "reddit the product" is a 2-5bn market cap business with solid 0.5bn revenue; staff up on that basis, scale their infrastructure on that basis, M&A on that basis, set investor expectations on that basis.

that_guy_iain 3y ago

I would say the problem is that the user base are low value users. They're the sort of people who will do a mass protest because one for-profit company wants to charge another for-profit company money. Advertisers don't want to advertise to them, seriously. Any other company with a different user base with that amount of users and traffic would be making a billion a year easily. Probably multiple billions. But Reddit users are low value. There the sort of people if a company tries to engage with them with just be hostile. This means the amount of money Reddit can charge for ads isn't that high. Which means the companies advertising on Reddit are generally on the lower end of the scale or it's just a tiny part of a bigger ad campaign. So if ad revenue isn't going to do it. Then it needs to be a freemium model with subscriptions. They probably get 25% of their revenue from reddit premium. That also means, charging for the API. The problem for many of the third party apps is they've also been running a freemium model with very low overheads due to the fact Reddit has been largely funding their freemium model. They've been charging next to nothing for their premium options ($1.50 a month) and they have massive amount of very active users. They're so big that paying a reasonable per API request fee results in a massive bill. A bill they can't pay due to a freemium model and super low fees that don't pay for the freemium users. Third party apps directly compete with Reddit, therefore it's fair they pay Reddit for the resources they use as well as the lost potential of the users they did take. Those paying for premium on an app would probably pay premium on Reddit. Then comes in the low value users, who are outraged the free toy they have wants to make a profit. "It's too much money" - funny enough Reddit users think they're worthless - was one of the main cries. "This third party app IS REDDIT" - well if they're Reddit they shouldn't need Reddit access. A userbase who resists being monetised. Either they're monetisable or they're not. If they're not the company can't survive. What the Reddit users need/want is a non-profit.

barrkel 3y ago
Thing is, high value users won't use a site that has no content. There's no there there any more without the userbase.
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  High value users are a completely different demographic. Realistically, there are a large amount of people who don't care about the protests. They're going to be creating content. I wouldn't be surprised if the people most outraged are the ones who don't even comment that often.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

They also sold awards / points / things, which seemed pretty popular for a while at least; I have no idea how much that earns them though. But there's plenty of avenues they have for generating revenue that doesn't involve shutting down 3rd party clients, e.g. commercial promotions, signal / post / comment boosting, subscriptions for advanced / exclusive features, etc.