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Comment by adhvaryu | Hacker News Reader

That would be a valid idea if Reddit wanted to keep 3rd party apps alive.

Perhaps they don't but it puzzles me why. With the suggested approach they would have mutual interest in making 3rd party apps flourish. Now they alienate the community and will certainly drive many people away.

more useless statistics to show to investors before the IPO to squeeze more money

Or knew how to make money in the first place.

Why do they want to kill them so bad if the end user was a paying customer?

Killing 3rd party apps lets them funnel traffic to the official app instead, or the official website. Not sure if you've compared 'old' reddit to new (on desktop), or the app to 3rd party ones, but there's a lot of gamification, ads, bad patterns they're pushing with what they have. I suspect it's largely to monetize on the user more significantly via tracking data and such.

I assume they'll kill off old reddit shortly here, once they implement the API changes.

I just don't believe that you couldn't charge enough for a single user to be worth more, subscribed and in a 3rd party app, than they would make on the website as an advertising target.

You are right, and we know this factually from YouTube premium providing more revenue than free users. I, the end user of Reddit, should be able to pay for the api access directly to Reddit the company without having to impose risk on Apollo to front massive api bill. There’s no need to funnel anywhere since there’s no ads to be sold.

Am I missing something here? It seems like a blatantly obvious compromise.

> Am I missing something here?

reddit's ceo does not behave like a logical actor but instead is driven by emotions, mostly negative ones towards 3rd party apps.

Yes exactly. Even if it doesn’t work out in practice, a user forced into the official app is theoretically monetizable any number of ways, whereas a premium subscriber using a 3P app is only ever going to use the core product the way they always have. Their ability to shove whatever they want in front of the user while also mining their data is probably helpful for their IPO prospects.

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