But it would be very simple for Reddit to require ads to be served in Apollo. They could say that in order to view a feed of posts at scale, you'll have to include ads that are injected into the feed. They could revoke the API token for any clients which don't do that. In fact, there are plenty of ways for Reddit to get their money back.

Simply put, the Reddit CEO definitely wants to kill 3rd party apps. He just knows that saying it out loud would have an even bigger backlash. With the current approach, he can pretend to care about 3rd party apps, but do everything to make it financially impossible to run one.

Why not simply charge for the API, and let Apollo figure out a funding model that works for them. It could be subscription, it could be going with a different ad server.

Having Reddit need to do audits of clients (where the clients could do things like quietly reduce the number of ads you get if you've tipped $9.99 or more - or not serve ads if your ID is on this special list so that friends don't see the ads or use a developer special trial build) is impractical and would mean that its even more of a call of if the client is in compliance or not.

What's more, ads served by the API to a client that isn't controlled by Reddit are less valuable - Reddit would have less information about how much engagement they had with the ad.

> What's more, ads served by the API to a client that isn't controlled by Reddit are less valuable - Reddit would have less information about how much engagement they had with the ad.

That's the key: Reddit and Twitter and Facebook and the like are not selling ads, they're selling you, the user. The users are the product. They're collecting every bit of data about you, building personal profiles. 3rd party apps would never be that intrusive. Delivering eyeballs on ads is not enough.

Certainly seems that way. They had been giving access. Then made pricing outrageous and 30 days to comply. A way to kill them off without straight up removing their access or shutting down the API to third parties in full.

Curious how would that be implemented. How do you ensure that third party app actually shows the ads?

Register for an API key, ban people who don't follow the rules. It doesn't need to scale programmatically.

> our work

A lot to unpack here.

Ah, well, I'm sure a real response from Reddit would be much more careful than I was to point to the costs of their infrastructure and away from all the work users do to generate content for free.

I think they are implying that accidentally let slip that you work at reddit. The way I read your comment is you were speculating what somebody from reddit would say.

Maybe I should have used quote marks for everything after the first comma. I don't work at Reddit.

The thing they seem to completely miss is that the value these apps brought comes from the dedicated/addicted users who generate the only thing of value: content. And needing a 3rd party app to make regular use viable from a mobile device has always been a thing.

It’s totally fair for them to say they need to address the ad issue. But to claim these apps bring no value is pretty ridiculous on his part.

They could also just require a user to have a Reddit Gold membership - which already doesn't show ads anywhere.