Why doesn't Reddit just acquire 3rd party apps?
If people are using 3rd party apps because the 1st party apps suck, why don't Reddit just acquire the 3rd party apps. The 3rd party developers get an exit, and the users get to keep the experiences they like.
It's not accidental at all that the first party apps suck. Any banner that says "it is better with our mobile app" should have a steaming pile of poo emoji next to it.
The whole point of the new reddit (and many other sites like Anandtech and Tony Ortega's blog) is to make you click on ads accidentally. Someday the world will wake up and realize this is not just annoying but it is good old fashioned fraud... but it will still take a while.
One advantage of a mobile app over a mobile web site is that you can use the accelerometer and other sensors to predict when somebody is going to click on something and you can trigger a layout shift and... oops!
The problem is that BigCos destroy the 3rd party apps that they acquire. The same thing happened after Twitter acquired Tweetie.
Indie devs and BigCos have vastly different incentives. Simply acquiring an app won't help, because the app will no longer be developed and managed by an indie dev. Wreckage is inevitable.
Because reddit is running out of money, and the investors have stopped giving any more. At least, that is what I infer from their direct statement of "Reddit must be self-sustainable". I have no inside info to know for sure.
So buying apps would just shorten their runway even further. And even if they did, they would just be bringing in more users of the same type they have today - users who are unwilling to pay for reddit accounts.
They need to figure out what their business model is, not just buy apps that keep them running down the same path they have been on for years without profitability.
The third parties are incentivized to deliver a good user experience. Reddit has incentives that inevitably lead to the opposite. Any good app under Reddit's control would cease to be a good app.
It's not an accident that Twitter just went through this too. We're in a new era of too-big-to-be-disrupted enshittening.
That would solve user issues, but nothing for Reddit the company.
If have seen versions of this serveral times, and it assumes that what is good for users is good for Reddit. It is like asking "if people like free lunch, why dont all restruants serve free lunch. Imagine all the customers they would have."
In reality, there is a trade-off between happy customers and customer revenue.
Many of these 3rd party apps are made by single developers, some are open source. Reddit could clone or recreate them easily if they wanted.
reddit (and big tech in general) doesn't want users to have experiences that users like, they want users to have experiences that advertisers like. Ideally there's some overlap there (otherwise why would you use a service) but usually companies making money from advertising lean towards the ideal experience of the people who give them money, ie, not third party app users
Uh oh, you just threatened them.
They're not necessarily trying to do the optimal long term thing right now. They're making short term moves to boost their valuation for the IPO. Doing things like showing an increase in ad revenue is a nice boost for that, no matter how it's accomplished.
I believe the API changes are not about third party apps or LLMs (at least directly). I think it's all about bots and spam. They only want to do business with real enterprises through their API. This raises the value of purchasing real ads through their platform vs buying upvotes and other subversive ads on grey markets. Once the API access is restricted I think there will be a huge dropoff in spam and bot accounts. You'll have to scrape endpoints and fight the built in anti spam detection on the app/website in order to game the system versus using the free highly available API that has fewer built in protections.
Apps can scoop up much more telemetry data about the users.
Likely because the issue isn't third party apps, but people scraping for LLMs
grain of salt and everything, as it's a conspiracy theory off twitter...
Because Reddit app does not suck. Why would a tech company buy out a bunch of free loaders?