Seems that someone at Reddit decided to grant read access to RIF, this morning I opened the app just for kicks and it wouldn’t load anything. Well I tried again after lunch (Europe CET time) and it could access the front page but I was logged out. Trying to login shows a different logon page and even with valid credentials gives out a ‘Bad request’ response.
That means they are not just feeling the heat, they are probably burning really bad.
I’m leaning more toward “incompetence” as the explanation for this. What good does it do Reddit to leave RIF intact, but simply disallow logging in?
Reddit’s value depends on content creation and interactions driving ad views. Read-only RIF users create no content or interactions with the site. And for many like me who purchased the premium ad-free version, we see no ads.
Admittedly, I’m not sure if the RIF ads in the free version are Reddit’s own ads or not, but without the content creation, and the interactions driving more engagement, RIF does little but drag on the site.
The ads in the free version are rif ads, so that revenue would go to talklittle. That was one of the sour points of the API change; anyone utilizing the API aren’t allowed to run their own ads. So not only was the new API absurdly expensive, but reddit was also blocking 3PA developers from getting any revenue outside of subscriptions
So Reddit is now getting nothing at all from RiF and the dev still gets ad revenue? Brilliant move