Would you be willing to bet a token amount, say the current base cost of a Vision Pro ($3500), that in 48 months (giving you some buffer here) Apple has fully withdrawn support for the Vision line and does not release a new model? That’s the real test of confidence. I personally think you’re way off the mark and am willing to put money on the line. Are you?
> all monetization of api calls has to be done through Reddit and the API itself
How does this work with IAP and ads? Or do you mean that only Reddit Premium users should have access to third party apps? Because that would be much more expensive than the $2.50/mo that people are riled up about with the new API pricing.
It’s impressive what a determined, vocal minority can achieve with just a bit of drama. I hope this ends quickly so everyone else can get back to aimlessly doomscrolling on Reddit.
GP is saying Reddit could trivially skim 30% off of third party app revenue. How is checking app API traffic levels relevant? This is revenue that apps would get through IAP or ads, where Reddit has no visibility. Good luck enforcing any kind of revenue split contract with hundreds of hobbyist devs.
I also left Twitter when Tweetbot died, but only because I can’t use Twitter without a chronological timeline and keyword filtering. My impression is that third party Reddit apps had some nice quality of life features, but their main purpose wasn’t to literally alter the underlying content. Happy to be proven wrong though.
I’d love to see a source for “people that generate the bulk of the content on Reddit do rely on third party apps” because that seems categorically impossible when you consider the number of users able to post (i.e. subscribed) using these third party apps.
The number of users on these platforms has increased considerably. Orchestrating a “movement” consisting of hundreds of millions of people takes a really significant forcing function that affects everyone, not just a vocal minority.
So third-party devs would have to manually cut them a check every month? How would Reddit validate that they’re getting the correct amount? Multiply this logistical nightmare by hundreds of third party developers.
> The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average
Are you saying that most users who post content also use third-party apps, or that most third-party app users post content? There’s a big difference here.
Back of the napkin math: You have to pay to post with some third-party apps like Apollo which has 50k subscribers. Reddit has ~500M monthly users, so we’re looking at… 0.01% if every person subscribed to Apollo posts. Even with a 10x safety factor, there’s no way shutting down third-party apps has a meaningful effect on the volume of content posted to Reddit.
Hypothesis: Apple is a hardware company that also does software, and that ethos allows them to ship more complex products over much longer time scales than their competitors.
Christian interned for a summer at Apple. I don’t understand why he pushes this narrative given that Apollo is good enough to stand on its own without shady marketing tactics.
I’d be willing to be the opposite given how hard Reddit is pushing this. But like you said, it’s impossible to tell without a separate category for third party apps.