“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Mir says. “The content of the users is what makes the platform worth visiting. These hosts kind of run into this confusion that their hosting is the reason people are going there, but it’s really for the other users on the medium.”
Ironically, if Reddit has been up front and said they were killing third party apps, and kept their mouths shut they would have faired better. For a stupid play like this, speaking only makes it worse. This is going to be taught in business school on how to kill a business.
They could have even gotten third party apps to pay for API access. They just needed to set a fair rate and a workable timeline for the change.
Instead, they said “we’re charging $20 million starting next month. Good luck trying to stay afloat with those sudden costs!”
Reddit could have increased their profits and kept users/moderators happy, but they chose Burn It All Down instead.
BIAD.
I like it.
Either way, I’d be preferring alternatives. On desktop, old.reddit.com plus RES (which is not entirely clear if they will be effected, though it looks like it will not be), but the mobile experience is not good on a mobile browser and I really don’t like the official app. Without RiF, I would not be participating much even without a direct alternative.