There will be no observable long term impact from Reddit banning third party apps.
Only a few power users cared about it and no one cared about them.
Only a few power users cared about it and no one cared about them.
On social network websites, the vast majority of people are only lurkers, a relatively few people commenting, even fewer people posting, and fewer people still who want to put in the effort to build up a community.
Reddit's soul sits in those handcrafted small communities, the big ones sure will stay around and be popular, but there's lots of other places where one can get 5 second cat videos, and memes.
This event eroded a lot of the remaining trust between moderators and the admins, and while that can feel like it's not relevant to normal users, over time this will cause fewer people to be interested in starting a community on Reddit.
Power mods suck, but power users are the backbone of the site. I predict information quality and density will continue to decrease rapidly on Reddit until it becomes no different from Instagram.
(I’m not personally a power user, I’ve just been on Reddit for a while)
Apollo finally went dark yesterday, I deleted it, and haven’t felt a single compulsion to check the mobile Reddit site. About the only Reddit related thing on my mind is whether I’m petulant enough to mass overwrite my posts - I’m only too familiar with the struggle of searching for something and finding dead blogs and forums a few years back.
I don’t think Reddit the company owes me anything, but I wonder how many other “high value” users (in terms of both content and value to marketers) simply drifted away once the iOS apps went dark.