They don’t even want you to use the website I don’t think. They’ve even done experiments where they blocked people from using the mobile website. The more they want me to use their app, the more I want to avoid Reddit all together.
Reddit wants to show ads and to collect user data.
The best answer I was hoping for here.
When the original app dropped, I was a user of the app for a good while, because it gatekeeps the Reddit Chat feature outside of web browsers. Reddit’s official app is very Instagram like, so what they are doing is making the UI show posts in such a way that you as a casual user cannot distinguish between ads, astroturfing and real posts. Instagram’s content is 2/3rd ads (actual ads and influencer reel ads), for reference and context.
Money. Not only can they better monetize it, it makes their numbers look better for the potential IPO.
Money. It’s always just money.
It wants to keep control of how people get access to its data. The recent massive surge of interest in A.I.s means that there’s a lot of people looking for good quality datasets to train new models. Reddit is sitting on a goldmine, and it currently handing out gold nuggets for free.
It wants to charge these desperate users of its data through the nose for that access, and $12,000 per 50M API calls is the market rate it has determined (and it is clearly comfortable that existing commercial users of its data such as marketers will also pay those rates).
The fact that this will kill third party clients is just the icing on the cake. If reddit wanted to kill such clients it would just turn off voting and comments in the API.
AI datasets can be built by scrubbing web content and doesn’t require API access.
This is about making sure Reddit controls the user experience and users can’t, say, block their ads or hide Reddit awards. It’s also a cold (and short-sighted) calculation: some people are making money from our product without sharing our costs, better kill them.
