There's tremendous lack of tact about how this is being managed. Completely unnecessary and generally not good for business.
this is think is the disconnect, they do not believe that is what they are doing, and given my tech bubble I am not sure they are wrong.
they have the data, i dont. I am sure their "most passionate users" are the ones using the official apps, and new interfaces, posting, upvoting, and commenting on cat photos, and cute animal memes, which is where their ads are targeted.....
If all this negative press ends up driving attention in the broader stock market, it will probably work out come IPO.
So far, so good for preferred stockholders.
I also don't trust what they are saying with regards to 90% will fall into the free plan. Is that 90% by volume of requests, by api key, by user id? It seems like the data isn't being shared in a transparent way.
You can have 90% of Reddit oauth clients never hit the free tier limit, but that doesn't mean shit if 90% of those oauth clients aren't actually being used. The fact that Steve keeps getting called out with receipts doesn't give me confidence in their assertions, given the lack of data.
I think is he, I think they think this will be better for the long term, users will be upset for a little while, but will not actually leave.
He has already said 3rd party apps make up a small amount of "traffic" and "90% fall in to the free plan" anyway.
So they are betting this is a tempest in a tea pot...
Sadly they are probably right because people are sheep and creatures of habit, for me I am going to archive my data before the 30th and purge all of my accounts. I personally am done with reddit, but I am likely the minority