this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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VC money very likely dried up and the IPO was the opportunity to raise more funding. all they needed to do was put ads in 3rd party apps and they take a cut of revenue…
I honestly thought that after all these things they would spring back but I honestly now feel like they’re going to go the way of Digg
Well you see, finding a way to reliably deliver ads via the API would have taken far too much developer brainpower for a company that can't make a functional video player or a mobile app that doesn't annihilate battery with ridiculously excessive cpu use and keepalive requests...
It honestly wouldn't be that hard at all. You deliver ads via the API alongside actual posts, as if they are an actual post, and forbid altering them in the developer ToS. If you want to be anal about enforcement, run popular 3rd-party apps in an emulator to verify that the JSON returned by the site is unaltered when it's rendered in the app. You could put this together in a weekend.
Which really just speaks to quality of talent at reddit, or the management at reddit suppressing that talent. Or both.
I'm pretty sure the real issue is the data collection Reddit wants about user habits. They can't get thst from 3rd party apps, even if they make browsing habit data (scroll speeds, post linger time, ads displayed, etc) a mandatory part of the API they cannot verify what the 3rd party app is reporting and it becomes junk data that advertisers cannot rely on. They need complete ecosystem control to make the marketing optimizers happy. So, fuck the consumer!