this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
278 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
59323 readers
4891 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If it was just about monetizing scraping for AI models, they could have easily had different pricing for AI uses than they did for 3rd party apps.
If it was about the lost revenue from the lack of ads on third party apps, they only needed to give existing 3rd party apps a longer period of time to transition their business models. 3rd party app users would have been paying way more than Reddit was losing from the lack of ads.
No Reddit wanted to kill off the third party apps. They used the AI scraping as an excuse to shut them down. They wanted to force people onto their shitty app.
I don’t know what their actual reasoning for that is, but there’re basically two possibilities I can think of:
Their executive team and board of directors is ridiculously incompetent.
Their shitty 1st party app is harvesting significantly more data about you than the 3rd party apps did, and they can sell that data for more than the $2-5 per user per month they would be getting if they gave the 3rd party apps time to transition to a paid business model.