Of course the CEO during an IPO year is going to downplay the shutdown. That said, there's no way the shutdown is going to change reddit in this case. They will replace the mods on the bigger subs.
They may downplay it but it is likely true. On the Google Play Store alone, the Reddit app has 100 million+ downloads, third party apps have <5 million downloads each. Like it or not, third party users are in a bubble, most people don't care to use third party apps and will see ads just fine.
And yes, due to these kinds of numbers, the shutdown will do nothing. Hell, many subs opened up today and r/all is back to normal.
I wonder if participation rates are disparate across those apps, i.e. maybe official app is popular for lurking, but all content posted from mobile actually comes from better third-party apps. (In general, a small number of people produce overwhelming fraction of content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule?useskin=monobook )
On the other hand, if you count downloads of all the 3rd party Reddit apps on Google Play, it'll sum up to at least 10m. So 3rd party apps users might actually be in range of 10%-20% of users, which is far from negligible
That's only on Android, on iOS it's likely another 100 million or likely more (Reddit has around 500 million to 1.5 billion monthly active users, the vast majority of which are mobile, based on their stats). Apollo is around 10 million, so 20 million total / 200 million is 10%, which is high but not that high compared to overall.
> Amir Shevat, Twitter’s former head of product for the developer platform, who
> lives in Round Rock, was responsible for ensuring that the tools Twitter
> provided independent software developers using the platform met their needs.
> He said about 17 percent of engagement on Twitter, historically, was through
> third-party apps, which played a vital role in defining Twitter’s identity.
That's 17% of _engagement._ I strongly expect that with both Twitter and Reddit there's a sort of double Pareto distribution going on: the majority of _users_ go through the first-party site/tools/clients, but the majority of _valuable_ users go through the third-party site/tools/clients. The users who are invested enough in the platform to have strong opinions about how things should be done and who use the platform enough that they seek out tools that actively meet their needs rather than just taking the default tools, are also users who are worth, at the very least, _placating_ because those are also the users most able to cause problems if the platform stabs them in the face the way Reddit and Twitter have done.
And yes, due to these kinds of numbers, the shutdown will do nothing. Hell, many subs opened up today and r/all is back to normal.