Recent and related:<p><i>Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083</a> - May 2023 (1265 comments)<p><i>Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162235" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162235</a> - June 2023 (396 comments)
> They reiterated that their goal "isn't to kill 3rd party apps" -- in fact, they said they were "confused" by claims that they want to do that,<p>Honestly I am confused by their confusion. Are they receiving a different messaging internally, than that being sent out to end users and developers?
Reddit is effectively dead to me if the third-party apps that make it bearable go away.<p>The few subs that I am in now are pretty low-quality overall, with most posts being either the same questions asked over and over by people who can't be bothered to read the sidebar or use the search feature, or image meme shitposts. I won't be missing much if I can no longer access them on my own terms.<p>I feel like Reddit is somehow jealous of the success of Facebook and Twitter for vapid content and is taking their best run at digging themselves down to the same level. Quantity over quality always wins on the modern Internet I guess.<p>(Edit: The fact that they don't even want their users browsing Reddit on a smartphone web browser should have been a giveaway that they were going to lock down their assets further eventually.)
thinking um "out loud". Looking at the reddit api, there isn't that much, once you ignore some of extra features like live, friends, flair etc...<p>It might an interesting idea to just have an api website and people can just plug in their own front ends and use it how they wish. apps more or less just switch their hostname.<p>other then trying to fund the infra for an api, it seems easy. clearly paying isn't an option and with all text there's no ads to show.<p>lemmy at a glance looks confusing, i don't want to join a bunch of mini reddits.
This is probably going to kill Libreddit, a light web front end for Reddit I'm a maintainer for. The first major FOSS project that I'm a major contributor for might be killed off :'(<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit/">https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit/</a>
No idea what the overall timeline would look like, but I don't see how Reddit's current trajectory leads to any play other than hiring mods for the top N subreddits (which they probably have reams of data showing are responsible for a huge percentage of their ad impressions) and making the rest read-only. A bunch of subreddits have already explicitly announced that they're shutting down if they can't use third-party apps to moderate, there have been many more general complaints about the inadequacy of the official moderation tools, and it seems like the company simply doesn't care.