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I had been under the impression it was relatively common knowledge that the reason Reddit had been keeping both the API and old.reddit alive was that power user
by tesseract 3y ago
I had been under the impression it was relatively common knowledge that the reason Reddit had been keeping both the API and old.reddit alive was that power users - both moderators and the most prolific content submitters - disproportionately used those interfaces and were considered too valuable to alienate. I have been surprised not to see much discussion about what, if anything, changed about that situation leading up to the current kerfluffle. Have enough power users been moving over to new.reddit and the official apps? Or has Reddit's calculus as to the importance of that segment of the user base shifted?
- lozenge 3y agoThey want to IPO and that means bringing everybody onto an experience they can control- in terms of ads, showing awards and any other features.
- gAI 3y agoThey also found out that GPT 2.0 was trained on reddit links and that other companies were using their API to train their generative AIs. There would have still been pushback with the API lockdown, but it wouldn't have been nearly as large if they'd updated the official app to include better mod tools, features to help those with disabilities, and a better user experience first.
- throwawaymobule 3y agoarchives of most of the site's content are already available elsewhere on the internet, I don't see why anyone would be using the reddit api to get that data, if they knew what they were doing.