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Comment by dark-star | Hacker News Reader

What will happen to Reddit to make it unusable? I feel a bit out of the loop here...

Pricing out of third party clients via API fees > only official website and clients are available > they get worse with monetization attempts > smart people who don't want to put up with less-useful UIs leave > site becomes devoid of "good" content.

I exclusively use old.reddit.com and it seems pretty good.

How long you think until they dare take that away too? For all intents and purposes, old.reddit.com is just like any third-party client. Vastly preferred by its users, harder to monetize or exert control over.

I'm somewhat anxious about old.reddit.com going away, no doubt.

> harder to monetize

Honest question: how is old.reddit.com harder to monetize than 'new.reddit.com'? I've been seeing ads creep in over the past couple of years I think. (Not that I necessarily have any beef about that..)

Old reddit doesn't have many of those newer features in the main reddit ui that's geared to steer users to pay for premium. For example, old reddit users don't see avatars, which can be customized with premium stuff in the main reddit ui. Awards are also less pronounced. As an old reddit user, I'm sure you have no desire to spend money buy avatar gears and more awards. Users of the new UI got exposed to those stuff more often and thus more familiar and more likely to buy them.

I exclusively use relay for reddit, if they take that away, I'll probably stop using reddit. Their mobile app is shit. I only use reddit on mobile.

More context on that monetization bit is that they're apparently planning an IPO later this year.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-aims-ipo-second-ha...

Third party clients are going to be cut off. IMO the case is overblown: Reddit has their own mobile apps which are... fine. Definitely not amazing but they serve the uses of the vast majority of Reddit users.

The idea that a serious number of users would rather move to Usenet than use Reddit's official offerings feels like very optimistic thinking to me.

There's probably an overlap between people who use third-party clients and those who fondly remember Usenet or still use it.

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