I can’t wrap my head around this, it seems so bizarre. The only reason I’m here now is because I joined Apollo right after Reddit changed its app to remove the sort by rising feature. It completely changed my experience on the app for the worse and I sought out an alternative, and I know I’m not the only one that had this complaint. I was a faithful Reddit user/poster on the official app for 6 years until just a few months ago. Why would they make their app less user friendly a few months before announcing the crazy API changes. They drove me away from their app and then drove me away from the site altogether.
Anyone have any thoughts on this? It just makes no sense to me
To start, I don’t agree with what Reddit are doing. However, to play devil’s advocate, the company is losing money. They’re not profitable. What if Reddit had to declare bankruptcy due to it? How do you propose they make money? Asking for donations? Even with offering Reddit Gold, or whatever pay-for entitlements, they aren’t profitable.
ChatGPT is seemingly making a lot of money off of comments on Reddit, and Reddit are giving them that data for free. It makes sense, to me anyway, to charge OpenAI, Microsoft, et al., for access to that data. It seems third party app users were caught in the crossfire. Perhaps that was a lack of foresight, but perhaps it was a calculated (albeit incorrect) risk.