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It’s a fun thought experiment, but I tend to revert to the simpler explanation:

They’re cutting off third party apps to increase their control over the user experience, to show more ads.

The relationship with OpenAI might also be a thing, but I think it’s the ad numbers they need to juice for their IPO.

I think that explanation certainly the simpler one (and thus more believable), but one thing that stands out to me is that Reddit's ads are really bad. I don't know how much of a business it is. I think the value as a corpus is much greater. If I owned both Reddit and OpenAI, I'd prioritize OpenAI since its upside is bigger.

Of course, I think another good explanation is that, OpenAI aside, Reddit simply wants to get paid for their data, which they now realize is valuable. Scraping aside, that might be the real goal here.

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