people won’t care about Reddit’s internal governance policy when researching mattress toppers, but they will care about finding relevant, recent information. Th

people won’t care about Reddit’s internal governance policy when researching mattress toppers, but they will care about finding relevant, recent information. The gamble Reddit is taking is “do we think we can provide a competitive user experience and ecosystem without 3rd party developers?”. If the answer is yes, people will keep using and contributing to Reddit and it will remain a valuable source of information regardless of the lack of 3rd party apps. It could pay off, but if the Googles and Metas of the world just start offering AI training data as a product, it wouldn’t really benefit OpenAI if Reddit in particular locked down some older data at the expense of it’s user base. Time will tell if the move will work out for Reddit in the long term.