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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Reddit is not public, so it’s just private investors at this point that funded series tranches. They, of course, are pushing to have Reddit get profitable and then IPO.
I guess we will see what happens, but Spez may have totally messed-up their plans with the inept API pricing and the response to the concerns about it.
It could have been totally averted if they just introduced a reasonable user fee and license that could be used in any third party app.
Spez could have even required 3pas to carry Reddit ads - a lot of us would have grumbled, but stayed.
But Spez didn’t want that, did he? If I had to guess, I'd say Reddit's official app is even more rigged with tracking than Tik Tok. That's why it lags - it phones home every time you pause in your doom-scrolling, to log what stories you're interested in.
That's the most bizarre thing to me. Without knowing Reddit's financials, it seemed like everyone could have their cake and eat it too. We could get a UX catered to how we choose to interact with Reddit and Reddit could make money hand over fist. We all knew the totally free experience wouldn't last. Reddit very easily could have been like "ok guys, party's over. We need to force ads on 3rd party apps". We'd bitch about it, but it'd ultimately be fine. This scorched earth approach to how they handled it is just so out of left field.
You're right. I highly recommend Duck Duck Go browser app on your phone. It has a beta feature that blocks all tracking requests from your apps, and you can go look at what apps are submitting the most requests. Someone took a lot at the official reddit app compared to 3rd party and it submits an absolutely absurd amount of tracking requests. Like multiple orders of magnitude more, and higher than any other social media app.
They never even updated the API to show ads... Like, you could've worked on that at any time, it's your own API.