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A comment on Image Hosting on Reddit. Parent comment

Re:Image Hosting on Reddit by cookiecaper on Tuesday June 21, 2016 @04:22PM (#11949109)
Yes. I also think that part of reddit's unspoken strategy with this is to get more people using their mobile apps instead of the high-quality third-party alternatives (which allows them to control the reddit experience more tightly, which they want to try to rehabilitate their image away from 4chanLite, and also allows them to get the ad views instead of giving them to third-party devs).

reddit is trying to squeeze back some of the juice from the third-party devs who use their API without being too overt about it, because they know the community would revolt. Twitter did the same thing much more loudly when they realized that they were giving away the farm by letting most of their userbase access the content via third-party apps.

This works because imgur and other image hosts are already well-integrated into third-party reddit apps, but reddit's image hosting isn't yet, and they can change things around/break it repeatedly until users get annoyed and just move to the official app to try to get a more seamless experience.

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Re:Image Hosting on Reddit by robbbbbbbbb on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @01:08AM (#11951688)
If this is their plan they aren't doing a very good job at executing it. Their mobile app is honestly outclassed by others. And their mobile web browsing experience is unpleasant to say the least. Each page takes a very long load time to load, despite it being a single page web app, and the load times cannot really be explained by what it is downloading, as other apps, and the desktop site, can load the same amount of data very quickly.

If the plan of trying to monetize mobile fails, I wonder who, or if, someone will just try to buy them out and try to do it better themselves. I am convenience that the reddit brand is very popular. The other day I started compiling something, and reflectively I alt tabbed and went to reddit, after realizing I was in the middle of doing something I closed it and got back to work, but I went their out of mussel memory - and I think that just goes to show how valuable their brand is.

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