this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I just posted it elsewhere, but that's only the beginning. They also announced their intent to turn reddit into an even more ad-infested hellhole than it already is: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/investing-in-what-makes-reddit-unique-introducing-contextual-keyword-targeting-and-product-ads
This is the future of reddit everyone - abandon all hope ye who clicketh here: https://www.redditinc.com/assets/images/site/image2.gif
Translation - we don't have control of the 3PA and they are getting in the way of moooore profit, so we want them gone.
What a shitty job at astroturphing there.
"Won't someone think of the corporations! The evil third party apps (that we admitted were less than 10% of our userbase) are (somehow) bankrupting us! They're using so much API (even though our website uses at least 5x the API calls)
[Translation: There's 10% of the people we could shove ads in front of who are getting around it and I want to sell this sucker so I can buy another vacation property]
I’m 100% convinced the reason they think 3PA API usage is unusually high per user is because all the high engagement users use 3PA, because their app actively repulses people from wanting to spend time on it. It seems like such a classic product misinterpretation of the stats, I’ve seen this from the inside as a developer before, ironically also at a company trying to IPO and failing spectacularly by completely misreading the room and their users
I hadn't thought about this but it makes sense. It's widely known that their largest contributors are 3PA users, I wonder if they did take the bias into account
IIRC they used some Reddit outage causing API usage to blow up on all platforms as some sort of anecdote toward 3PA API usage...