And exactly what are they losing from business perspective? Few users that generate only costs?

Most of the content on reddit is created by power users who are more likely to use 3rd party tools. Most people who use the official app only consume content.

So do they really use a phone app to produce this massive number of content?

Then again. I hate using my phone in general, so I always think that any content creators would use desktop and maybe old reddit.

No, but power users are disproportionately to be invested enough to use third-party clients. Further, many power users play key roles as moderators. Community moderators on Reddit rely extensively on API access to enable the moderation tools that Reddit never really built.

On the other hand, you might also expect that being so invested, they won't quit over third-party apps, time will tell.

Mods will definitely have a much more difficult time of it if all the useful moderation tools break.

I don’t think that is as much an issue as all of the potential issues that would be dragged up by discussing any of the questionable or explicitly illegal content hosted on Reddit. The first time anyone ever saw a Reddit mod was seeing an adult man argue it was ok for him to moderate a subreddit consisting solely pictures of underage girls titled jailbait.

I post a ton of comments on HN, and at times, on Reddit. I do it all from my phone because my desktop is for work and my mobile is for leisure.

I can type just as quickly on a phone as I can on desktop, and in many ways I prefer it.

Do you have a source for that? I am sure Reddit knows the truth and took that into account in their negotiations.

Reddit was caught using AI to produce artificial content; so I guess that's what will happen.

A key element is moderation via automated tools using 3rd party access.

Imagine a free music festival with zero security. It would be chaos and the volunteer artists would stop performing.

It’s an ads business, so the game is always “giving away a huge number of requests for free to monetize an extremely tiny portion of those requests.” So as soon as bean counters look at the books, it’s easy to be tempted to just identify cohorts of those requests that are unlikely to convert and cut off those users.

It takes someone who is more than just a bean counter to realize that maybe, just maybe, the only reason people are interested in those free requests in the first place is because of the communities on Reddit that bring all the actual value.

And who knows, maybe one day everyone will realize that the “free social media monetized by ads” business just totally sucks and can only ever lead to situations like this.

The 3rd party apps don't have ads which is surely a gigantic part of why they're being banned. I would guess that most Apollo users literally provide zero revenue as they use adblock on desktop and most people never actually give reddit any money. The only argument for their value add is that they're contributing which makes other users likely to join but I suspect reddit has reason to believe they're too adducted to stop even when the app they use is banned,.

Others are saying "power users", but... I agree with you. It is just an assumption that the "power users" make the product better, although a reasonable one. However, Reddit was pretty awesome, arguably much better, before there were semi-professional power users and moderators.

Reddit old is as good as it's always been

Power users who generate the content that makes Reddit valuable to begin with.

This Is the corporate equivalent of "I can't give you money, but I'll pay you with in exposure on my socials". Reddit prefers to be paid in dollars, not with content. They likely have more than enough content from non-Apollo users.

Reddit's free APIs left a lot of uncaptured value on the table. This has become obvious by the sheer number of AI models trained on Reddit data. Free Reddit data goes into the machine, and piles of VC money comes out. Reddit wants in on it, but is unable to stop free API access without the consumer apps being collateral.

That doesn’t make sense. It’s not that Reddit the company wants to be paid in content, obviously. It’s that Reddit needs people to want to visit their website. Reddit gets paid for ads, but people don’t want to see ads, so Reddit needs to deliver content that people want so badly that they’re willing to see ads. Driving away content producers to lower costs just doesn’t make any sense at all, unless they actually have a plan to get cheaper content (GPT ain’t gonna be it, sorry).

> That doesn’t make sense. It’s not that Reddit the company wants to be paid in content, obviously. It’s that Reddit needs people to want to visit their website

We're not disagreeing. The comment I was responding to was saying they don't want to see ads, but they are "paying" Reddit with content. As you noted, Reddit doesn't want that, instead, it's asking API users to pay real money so they can see the content without ads. That in itself is pretty reasonable I think - what may not be reasonable is how much Reddit is asking for.

> Driving away content producers to lower costs just doesn’t make any sense at all

What's the breakdown of content producers on 3rd Party apps vs reddit.com and reddit apps? It is reasonable to assume this is a rational decision being made by Reddit after looking at the numbers and doing some projections.

> The comment I was responding to was saying they don't want to see ads,

I never said any such thing about ads.

I mean, I'd rather not, but that wasn't even part of the discussion.

I have edited to remove references to ads. However, it's clear to me that you consider content to be the value you're providing to Reddit in exchange for your usage of the API.

Their content is going to be porn bots and astroturfed product accounts. Maybe they want that as part of their enshittification process to extract as much value from the brand as possible during their quick death.

The vast majority of an online community's content is produced by a small fraction of users. Most are just reading posts. Without user generated content Reddit has zero value. Reddit fighting its most active, invested users is not a smart move.

YouTube got away with lots of bad changes because many creators are getting paid to produce content and competing with YouTube is near impossible. But Reddit is one of many primarily text-based online communities and they are currently destroying the only things holding people on their platform. Aside from the userbase Reddit has no redeeming qualities that would make anyone hesitate to leave.

Is there a built-in assumption of incompetence at Reddit in your comment?

If you assume they know all what you said, and that they have dashboards showing breakdowns of submitters/commenters/voters by client, can you imagine a charitable explanation of what may motivate their current actions? Even if you do not like the reason, do you think it may be rational?

The existence of this HN thread and the situation we are discussing is a very clear sign of Reddit's incompetence. Regardless of what their motivation was they have fucked up the execution in a big way.

> can you imagine a charitable explanation of what may motivate their current actions?

IPO value. This entire scheme, is a last ditch attempt to maximise exit value for the founders. The actions all point in that direction, many fo which are borderline illegal.

Let's break it down. Reddit has had a metoric rise in the past 5 years, adding like 200 million mobile users to their official app. This started in 2018 when the first news of the IPO began. Reddit started heavily advertising.

They initially redesigned the web version, started giving a worse mobile experience and had a massive, intrusive banner that said "try the official app" on the mobile client. So we have a "friendlier" web experince and an aggresive app marketing push.

We now have more users than ever. Should we focus on efficiency, tools for mods etc? Nope, the entire product stack of reddit since 2019 has been releasing Monetasation tools. From badly hidden NFTs as profile pictures, to reddit awards paid with money, to ads hidden as actual content on the front page of the new web and mobile app.

So now we have record users, a new set of money making tools what else can we do to maximise exit value? We reduce 3rd party users, this way even if a fraction come to the app we still have new record user numbers. And we generate as much content as possible, preferably in areas that will be considered growth vectors in teh sale.

So reddit made a ridiculous API pricing plan, with 0 time to implement to essentially kill 3rd parties but not having to do it officially. Other less verifiable events that seem to be happening is that bots have increased, and some non english subs like the french and german communities are having new content generated by badly translating popular reddit posts with AI. This would benefit reddit as more content (even if by bots) is a higher exit price and communities that do not speak english using reddit more would also be seen as a positive by whoever would buy reddit. This is not attributable to reddit, bt if it was, it is straight up fraud. However the timing of the bot activity increasing and the non english subs seeing increased activity directly benefits the IPO plan therefore it is worth mentioning.

In other words, the charitable explanation is that this is the last hurrah in a 5 year plan to make the owners of reddit rich before they off load a website full of bots and angry users to whoever is silly enough to think they can fix this mess.

You do know that Reddit doesn’t pay for moderation but uses an army of volunteers?

That's the thing, to use an overused adage: it's a feature not a bug. They want these people gone. They calculated their contributions and decided it won't hurt, or hurt badly enough, for them to care. They'll all make millions on the IPO, step away, and sell. None of this makes a difference to that master plan. The sooner everyone accepts this the less time will get wasted on trying to convince Reddit this is a mistake. It's not a bug.

Reddit is a shell of what it was when I started on the platform 14+ years ago.

I'm sure Digg had the same line of thinking. Worked out great for them.

Reddit's whole value proposition is user generated content (and moderation).

Labeling that as "only costs" is extremely shortsighted.

The opportunity to stand out from other enshittified platforms. But I guess now we need to find a new thing for VCs to fund for us. Maybe an app that pretends to use AI to create memes or something.

Those users generate content. They’re literally the ones creating value, reddit doesn’t have a product without them.

Not being able to understand indirect value as a business is seriously why so many businesses fail.

Mods and other power users.

Mods. People working for free running the site.

Where’s Graham’s take on this?