[crazygringo]

No, because it's still a for-profit corporation, and one that's taken lots of VC funding and has also been looking to IPO. Owners change, management changes, priorities change, that's what happens in the business world.

If you don't think you're taking a major risk, then you're just being naive.

(I'm not defending Reddit here, but I am saying anyone should have been planning for this highly probable outcome.)

[hakfoo]

It's weird how we see the business people making this same sort of mistake on community after community. It's like there's a blind spot surgically implanted in them during the MBA programme.

It's well known that most online communities are 1% super-contributors, 9% modest contributors, and 90% lurkers/occasional contributors.

"Third party app users" are far more likely to be 1% and 9% users. They're committed to the platform enough that they're willing to seek out or even make software to improve their experience on it. The lurkers will just download the official app if it's the top match in the App Store and deal with the inconveniences.

So if you take that away, you disproportionately punish your most valuable users. Note I say "valuable" not in terms of "they click a lot of ads", but rather "they bring the content that makes the other 90% of users stick around and click ads."

It feels like a bar cancelling "Free Drinks Ladies' Night" because they figure that the 10 female patrons will buy 20 bottles of beer, then acting surprised when the 50 men who would come in to hit on them (and buy four beers each) don't show.

[janoc]

Keep in mind that those MBAs making these decisions are not going to be there to go down with the ship when that happens. They will collect their bonuses they got for increasing the short term profits, sell their vested equity and move on, leaving the wreck for someone else to deal with.

It is a perfectly reasonable and rational thing to do. They are not thinking in the same terms and caring about the same priorities.

We can discuss how reprehensible or short sighted that is but business is ultimately about making as much money in as short time as possible. And that is exactly what they are doing (and what they have been trained for in those MBA courses).

[gretch]

> Third party app users are far more likely to be 1% and 9% users. They're committed to the platform enough that they're willing to seek out or even make software to improve their experience on it.

You’re speculating at this while the Reddit team just has all of the data and knows exactly where traffic comes from.

Also maybe the 3p app user, while being the most prolific poster, is simultaneously a high % of toxicity.

[chongli]

Reddit has a long track record of incompetence. The site has historically been very unstable and their attempts to replace the front-end UX for both the browser and mobile apps have been widely panned. Therefore, it's reasonable to suspect that they be making a mistake with this decision as well, despite having access to all of the relevant data.

[garbagecoder]

Put another way, Reddit began enshitiffication no later than the "new" style and since it's intentional, it's only a mistake in the medium and long term, as has been noted they're trying to squeeze a few bucks out of its hulk before it dies.

[phpisthebest]

MBA programs almost exclusively teach short term gains over long term stability.

The business world has been forever changed by the creation of the institutional investor, which was largely created by pensions, 401k's and other such funds where by the actual people putting in the money is several steps removed from the people investing that money.

So now the business world, for public companies, lives and dies on the quartely report.

[K0balt]

It’s insane though. Just about any company can show higher quarterlies by doing shortsighted things that deeply undermine their long term value proposition.

Apple could license off a bunch of crap. Boeing could sell assets and designs. Toyota could just rebadge cheaper vehicles and sell all of their factories.. all of those could make record “profits”.

Are we doomed to everything just being a pump and dump scheme from here on out because why shouldn’t everything just be speculation?

[phpisthebest]

Dont worry, BlackRock is trying their best to ensure profitability plays no role at all in investment choices. Not sure their plan is better, but it a change

[garbagecoder]

Not every company runs like this. It's pretty common among tech companies that needed a lot of bootstrapping, but there are plenty of stodgy old producers who do not and who do plan more long term. Value investing is a long-standing philosophy and it has a dedicated "cult" but you don't hear a lot about those companies because they don't need a reality distortion field to make money, because they've basically already got a good concept.

Reddit is none of those things. It's a VC Frankenstein at this point and it's probably never going to make real money, so it makes sense that they're trying to change the recipe to at least get something back.

[mattkevan]

It’s because no-one who runs a social network site actually understands how or why it works.

I worked at one of the larger UK social networks and people there were terrified to make changes in case it suddenly stopped working.

From what I’ve heard the old Twitter management didn’t understand why it worked and were therefore very conservative with making changes. Mind you, the new management also doesn’t understand why it worked but are quick to make changes, and we’ve all seen how well that’s going.

[grantmcc]

He probably didn't see it coming because they told him to his face they wouldn't "ruin the API" as recently as January. That was in a call he had with folks at Reddit.

Fast forward only a few months and they are now:

1. Charging exorbitant prices for the API. 2. Removing the ability for apps to display ads to free users. 3. Removing NSFW subreddits and content from the API.

Said in another way, they are:

1. Decreasing app revenue (no ads). 2. Increasing app expenses (paid API). 3. Making third party apps worse (removing NSFW from the API).

That's...about as close to "ruining the API" as you can get.