If the market for initial public offerings recovers in the new year, one company that aims to go public early on is Reddit. An IPO will put the spotlight on the prospects for Reddit’s advertising business, which has fallen short of ambitious growth targetsoutlined by executives two years ago. ...
Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.
They feel like they get shorted because many of those users don’t contribute to ad revenue from 3rd party apps but instead of improving their app to lure users in they instead tell those users to fuck off.
A user is a user, even if they don’t contribute directly to ad revenue they contribute content to make the site more alluring for those who will contribute to ad revenue. As well they help spread the word about reddit to those who don’t use it regularly yet by sharing that content outside of reddit.
They were pretty short sighted by doing what they did.
It’s just many power users and mods were power users and mods thanks to tools in these apps, and Reddit still didn’t provide anything comparable. Many small communities I still care about have a lot less posts if they don’t have bots. It’s not like Fediverse won Reddit, but something changed in them. NSFW OC subs are still good, but idk if they make the image spez wants from that platfom. The only thing we def should do is to stay online and be welcome for stray redditors to join.
A bunch of subs that I like and that are niche had the mods say “fuck it bye” and they are no more. Some migrated here, some on discord, but the fragmentation means less users overall, so less content. It’s a shitty situation.
I would have been happy to pay to get API access for 3rd party apps on my account. Maybe 1 or 2 dollars per account and month would have been reasonable to cover the costs without ad revenue. Double it to please greedy shareholders.
Instead they asked for such ludicrous amounts from 3rd party developers, basically telling them to fuck off.
Either they were mad for control or got greedy over their „golden data“ for AI training. Or both. In any case, they never were interested in finding a user friendly solution so fuck them.
The phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” comes to mind.
I believe it’s “spider-face.”
Edit: lol, guess we don’t have a lot of fans of The Office around here.
Some app dev mentioned they wanted to work with them to introduce ads that Reddit would have made profit from in the free version of the app and it’s Reddit that said “Nah it’s ok”…
They should have just made third party API access a premium feature you buy with gold. Not nearly as many people would have left. And if Reddit didn’t want competition in the UI space, they should have made their own interface at least somewhat usable. A mobile responsive website is not exactly difficult to accomplish these days, but for some reason Reddit just can’t do it.
Do you have a citation on that 25% figure?
Source: my bias