why does Reddit want us to use the official app so badly?
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.
Not only ads, but their app is the only one that supported their NFT system. And their Twitter Spaces clone. And their upcoming shorts feature. And so on. They desperately want to be every other social network, and that means copying features that are mobile-centric.
I really don't get why all these social platforms try so hard to just be copies of each other. I like having diverse and different platforms for different things. Once they all started homogenizing, I really stopped using most social media.
And when LinkedIn added their ripoff of Instagram Stories I was like...aaaaand that's it for me. Why does a professional site need a stories feature?
If they streamline how users get access to Reddit, then they get to determine what they see. Now the third-party apps will get killed, the access through mobile browsers will be limited with the idea to force users into the app, old-reddit will be gone at some point as well. And then Reddit can spam users with ads and also force users into buying premium services to see no/less ads. Since all alternative ways of using the website will be gone, people have to swallow that pill no matter how big it is.
They can force-feed ads to you and track your every click and sell that gobs of data to companies using it to make more $$ and to further develop their tracking to make yet more $$$
So, as always, the answer to such questions is: Money.
Just from using reddit, I can only really see a few ways for them to make money.
Subscriptions/awards. Not many people do this, certainly not enough to keep the doors open.
Advertisements
Selling user data
Let's start with 2. The reason they re-designed the UI in both the app and the desktop version is because they need to create as much space as possible for them to put ads into- and still have it not be so annoying for the user that they stop using the site. Now, on the website they can still put adds on old.reddit, just not as many- so they haven't come for that yet, because it isn't draining nearly as much income as the mobile market. Their new mobile app does the same as the frontend redesign- it maximizes ad space, and also allows them to collect other user data such as location to sell to marketing agencies.
ALL of the alternative Reddit clients (or at least, all I have used) have adblocker built into them. For some of them, you pay the app for that- a payment which is often less than Reddit Gold is, and is usually a one-time payment. And these apps hold the user data that can actually be sold, like location. So third-party apps disrupt all three of Reddit's possible revenue streams by having people not pay for premium to hide ads, by blocking advertisements anyway and denying Reddit the ad revenue for them, and by keeping the user's data away from Reddit.
That's why I think they made the API price so ridiculously high- it isn't just meant to scare them away, it's meant to be a reflection of what they feel they are losing in revenue from users using third party apps. If it was just about any one of the 3 points above, the rate would be much more reasonable- but it's all 3.
Couldn't they have integrated ads as posts, then it'd show on any third part app. And I saw other ideas floating around about making third party app access a feature behind Reddit Premium. So many alternatives and they choose the most idiotic one
The IPO is everything, I'm sure. So much of any valuation is entirely speculative, but the higher that speculation is the more money the stakeholders will be able to get out when they sell.
Presumably spez is a major stakeholder, and if so, a short-term inflation of particular usage metrics would directly mean more dollars in his pocket when they sell. It doesn't matter if it then all falls over in a heap, if the monetisation isn't actually viable; he (and others) have already cashed out, and the folks who bought into the valuation are left holding the bag.
Yeah. Twitter was already a financial disaster before the Musk buyout. There's a reason the board pushed the sale on him when he tried to back out. We're in a tech-bust era where it's not enough to dangle the new shiny in front of investors, profit be damned. Who's to say that reddit will do any better?
App is tied to phone, phone for the most part kills the idea of you being anon. Which means glorious glorious user data, and problem users with multiple accounts get nuked based on their device and inside the app they can serve you anything anyone pays them to serve and unlike browser based stuff there is noting you can do to prevent or pervert it.
Because they want control over their platform. They want full access to the user data so they can use it and sell it. And they want to be able show targeted adds because they are a business and the main purpose why they do what they do is because they need to make money.
Just to comment about blocking people on phones using browsers... My android Firefox' division of privacy fighters says 'hi' (uBlock, Privacy Badger, Ghostery).
While I'm using these addons, Reddit website can't spam ads or get data to sell.
Because they want to go public and get as much money as possible. They won’t be able to do that unless they demonstrate that they can monetise their platform.
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.
They can, but that would be a) more work than just paying to use the API b) easy to spot and hamper if done at scale c) really difficult to explain to investors.
Again, if Reddit wants to kill third party apps, it just needs to turn off comments and votes through the API.
I see it as a good old Foucault problem of Knowledge/Power.. By using their app, more knowledge can be visualised about the subject. More knowledge - > more power. Which in turn makes them more interesting to investors.
They want to make sure you see ads so they can get revenue. A user that uses a website, even on mobile, could be using an adblocker. By forcing you to use the app they have full control of what ads you see and how often, thus incerasing the price at which they can rent that ad space.