[weaksauce]

> There may be SOME percentage of the 3rd party app users who transition, but if the 3rd party traffic is as trivially small as Reddit has claimed, not sure how that will overnight magically transform them into being profitable.

he said 97% of users are on the reddit app. he also said there is a significant opportunity cost to having those 3% of users not on the app. so for both of those statements to be true that 3% of users must be very active and providing a lot of content and value.

[philistine]

And he’s alienated virtually all third-party apps, putting those 3% user at high risk of just leaving the platform, destroying that supposedly huge opportunity cost.

A competent CEO would have found a way to keep them in the family.

[pcthrowaway]

What's bizarre to me is that the app inhibits activity.

Like, I can type 20 comments on my laptop in the time it would take to type one on my phone, and they'll be more well-thought out too

[michaelt]

If the speaker was setting out to bullshit you, "significant opportunity cost" could mean a lot of things.

Perhaps they mean a non-financial opportunity cost, like they could modify their API if they didn't have third parties depending on it, and they're missing out on the benefits such modifications might hypothetically provide.

Or perhaps "significant cost" means, say, $100k per year. Significant at a human scale, insignificant at the scale of a multi-billion-dollar company.