They would be perfectly monetizable if they wanted to. I'd happily pay for a Reddit premium subscription if I can keep using Apollo, because I use it for the better UX, not to skip ads. But clearly they would rather kill third party apps than take their money.

> I'd happily pay for a Reddit premium subscription if I can keep using Apollo

This is what I don't get. Isn't this the obvious compromise to make all parties happy? Third Party apps can only be used by Premium members. Moderation tools are explicitly exempted until their functionality is rolled into first-party tools. Reddit adds new tools to block scrapers and institutes API rate limits for things they recognize as LLMs/negative bots and instead offer an "enterprise" tier for those that is much more expensive. Something along those lines would likely meet the needs of everyone and wouldn't piss anyone off. Reddit users continue our doom scrolling on Relay and Apollo, Reddit monetizes previously-unmonetizable users.

I block ads, nuke cookies, and use old.reddit.com exclusively, but somehow I still manage to spend a lot of money on shit I don't need. Most of it was found on reddit. All of it got a google search that included "site:reddit.com" before buying. This anecdote is not unique. The fact that reddit gets $0 despite being part of my typical buyers journey is a failure of Steve Huffman, not the users.

If Reddit automatically added product links to comments like Viglink did in the bad old days, you wouldn't be using it. Reddit's failure to capture affiliate revenue is precisely what prevented it from being gamed, thus making it a credible source of information.

Reddit has been gamed for years and I'm still using it.

I have literally paid for the Reddit app that I use. And I would not mind paying a recurring fee if it was reasonable. Users for third party apps are most likely to be the most addicted users of reddit. If investors can't tell that, they deserve to watch their investment fail.

> It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it.

Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing controversy. People who aren’t generating the company any profit are shouting the loudest. I don’t think there’s much of a loss here.

The era of free money was always going to end and now it’s over.

But those people are also generating a large amount of the content that is being used to monetize users.

It’s not clear there’s anything “unique” about the set of users that both generate the content and will leave the site because of the API changes. From an investor standpoint, content is content and monetizeable users are monetizable users. Both are replaceable, and it’s better to have monetizable users that generate content than non-monentizeable users who generate content.

I go to Reddit to look for information on specific things. People talking about Med interactions, app support, very specific things. I don't interact with Reddit because it's a cesspool, and very politically slanted. I'll probably go wherever real people talk about real stuff, and it's almost always reddit. I wonder what percentage are like me, who have no value in "community"?

Most mods (who oversee the generation of new content) use the API because third-party apps offer superior mod tools. Instead of thinking about "shutting down third party apps" think about it as "asking your volunteer labor to do the job on hard mode". You can see why those people might get pissed off.

Do you have a citation for the claim that most mods use third party apps?

Ironically, the only citations I recall are on reddit, and I believe from blacked out subreddits.

And I should have added some cutoff there. It's mods of large enough subreddits.

But why else would the mods be so up in arms?

I understand why they’re pissed off, it’s just not clear to me that they are irreplaceable. Lots of people here are talking about their favorite niche subreddit but is that really where the value is derived, advertising wise? I doubt it. I’m fairly certain that the top 25 or so subreddits drive most of the revenue, and they have no dearth of people willing to mod them. Hell, if Reddit Inc just in-housed moderation of the the top 100 subs they’d probably be fine.

That's a claim, but only time will tell to what degree it is accurate. Some people certainly want to continue continue creating content and we will see the degree to which they figure out alternative subreddits if the blackout continues

I keep seeing people make this claim and frankly I don't buy it. While I think it's true that a minority of users produce a majority of the content, I don't think it's necessarily the people on third party apps. I think it's total speculation that there's a large overlap.

My own speculation is that a majority of the content is produced by people using Reddit in a browser on a laptop/desktop machine. It's much faster and easier to produce content in this mode.

People keep saying this, do you have any proof?

Who else is making Netflix money? Their catalog is currently so small and bad that it makes no sense to keep an account per person. Proliferation of streaming services doesn't help - individually, none of them is worth paying full price per person or household.

Netflix grew 4.9% YoY in Q1. They have introduced an ad-supporter tier, so it’s now advertisers that foot some of the bill for content in addition to subscribers and investors.

To your point about paying full price —- it would be interesting to have a breakdown of the number of “evergreen subscribers” vs “fair weather subscribers,” but I’m not sure Netflix would be willing to share such a breakdown. This would tell us whether a majority of its subscribers think of the basic value of the service.

The loss is that those people might not be generating content, but they do have eyeballs and those eyeballs aren't looking at the content generated by the monetizable people. That means they're also not looking at the ads Reddit wants to serve to users in exchange for payment from advertisers.

You're right about the era of free (well… really, really cheap) money being over. I think we're going to see that social media as we know it (which has _only_ existed in the era of cheap money) isn't nearly as sustainable without a bunch of VCs willing to shovel money into a furnace in hope for unknown future returns. There's going to be a contraction.

Actually I bought Reddit coins at some point (to give Awards) and I'm bothered by this. Hopefully Lemmy will be an alternative or maybe Reddit folks will change their mind. Obviously I'm okay with paying for services in principle but I think it requires that it's voluntary and affordable.

That said, the Reddit Web Frontend is not exactly the best. I've used - and paid - for a native Reddit client actually (Stellar). The app will be sunsetted though.

> It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it.

The Reddit users that are bothered by this also include mods that use third-party tools for moderation activities. If those users leave, or are no longer about to function, that has potential long-term consequences for Reddit.

That seems doubtful. The knives are already out, with moderators lower down the list requesting to become the new top mod, so they can reopen popular subreddits. Eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...

There's always more people willing to be mods, and mods from smaller subs wanting to step up. Reddit is a massive community.

I've had a Reddit subscription for mulitple years, and spent more than I care to admit buying coins to guild/gift posts and comments. I also paid for Apollo.

I deleted my account this week, being a monetizable person who is quite bothered.

I've paid for Apollo and I would pay at least a few dollars per month for my personal API access to keep Apollo working. Those of us who don't want to use the official app aren't unmonetizable, we just have good taste.