He’s said that very few people use 3rd party apps, but at the same time, he says “And the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant,” So are 3rd party apps very unpopular, or are they taking away a really significant number of users? He’s essentially saying- nobody uses Apollo, but Reddit is dying without Apollo’s users.
The thing he doesn’t comprehend is that third party apps were reddit’s value creation engine.
But if you think everything in life is a zero sum game you are delusional.
How many people would have happily spent some of the free credits Google play store awards on paying an annual £5 to be able to continue using RIF to cover API costs?
The thing he really talks about caring about is preventing LLMs from getting his data and using it to provide answers that reduce traffic to Reddit. Except LLMs weren’t purely trained on Reddit, and the high majority of the internet where the training data did come from doesn’t have a convenient API… so that makes it a little harder, I guess, but it really has no effect.
Then other times, he complains about the advertising revenue, but contradicts himself and says actually the 3rd party app userbase is 3% of all users and inconsequential but people just want to bandwagon the poor multi-hundred million dollar company. Yet it’s such a big opportunity cost that can’t be ignored and there’s just no better way.
He’s said that very few people use 3rd party apps, but at the same time, he says “And the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant,” So are 3rd party apps very unpopular, or are they taking away a really significant number of users? He’s essentially saying- nobody uses Apollo, but Reddit is dying without Apollo’s users.
The thing he doesn’t comprehend is that third party apps were reddit’s value creation engine.
But if you think everything in life is a zero sum game you are delusional.
How many people would have happily spent some of the free credits Google play store awards on paying an annual £5 to be able to continue using RIF to cover API costs?
The thing he really talks about caring about is preventing LLMs from getting his data and using it to provide answers that reduce traffic to Reddit. Except LLMs weren’t purely trained on Reddit, and the high majority of the internet where the training data did come from doesn’t have a convenient API… so that makes it a little harder, I guess, but it really has no effect.
Then other times, he complains about the advertising revenue, but contradicts himself and says actually the 3rd party app userbase is 3% of all users and inconsequential but people just want to bandwagon the poor multi-hundred million dollar company. Yet it’s such a big opportunity cost that can’t be ignored and there’s just no better way.
So many contradictions in that interview. He’s panicking lol