[Nathan2055]

This is the best solution, and really what Reddit should have done.

There’s no reason they couldn’t have required Reddit Premium to access the API from third-party apps. Then the app developers don’t have to deal with the burden of payment processing, Reddit theoretically earns more than it would under the API plan (the Apollo dev estimated the monthly API cost for an average user would be $2.50 (but would be much higher for actual customers due to needing to pay the Apple tax and for development costs) while Premium is $5 per month right now and already removes ads), and nobody gets angry.

Plus then you have people’s credit card information, and thus you can avoid the regulatory issues that Reddit is claiming they’re encountering with NSFW content.

The fact that Reddit seemingly refuses to even consider this option really confirms that this is being done purely out of spite over both not being able to monetize OpenAI’s training data collection plus spite over most of the third-party apps being more financially stable than Reddit currently is.

[flutas]

I agree with pretty much your entire post, but do want to disagree with a part.

> The fact that Reddit seemingly refuses to even consider this option really confirms that this is being done purely out of spite over both not being able to monetize OpenAI’s training data collection plus spite over most of the third-party apps being more financially stable than Reddit currently is.

I think it's a combination of spite for the LLMs (which IMO is short sighted, they will just turn to scraping HTML), but also they assume that they can make more off the data vacuum and ads serving to those users than even Reddit Gold would pay them every month.

[SheinhardtWigCo]

I don't think it's spite, I think it's rational. (Not that I approve.)

They're widely expected to IPO imminently. One of the most critical metrics in the S-1 will be mobile app DAUs/MAUs. They can't credibly include the 3P app users in those figures. They also don't want to be in a situation where most of their paying subscribers are insulated from future "features" and UX "evolutions" that investors will demand.

So, it makes sense to me that they would induce a scenario where users are forced to choose between migrating to the official app or quitting reddit.