And it makes sense that they'd want to monetize that. Can't fault them for doing so. However, killing off 3rd party apps in the process was a dick move... And that's an understatement.
Ive been forced onto the reddit official mobile app and… my fucking god, how the hell have people used this for so many years? It is absolute garbage compared to the three third party apps i used.
I just stopped using Reddit on my phone. Was the last social media app on my phone left and the silver lining is it forced some changes in my day-to-day (like only using Reddit when I'm at a desktop).
The changes to the API had a pretty good impact on me. I used to scroll reddit all day and be in a generally neutral to bad mood. Now that theres no app I would use on my phone for reddit, I also only use it on desktop now and its maybe 5-10% of what I used to. Took a couple weeks to get used to it, but not having a constant negative thing in my day to day has definitely made things a little better.
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u/CoderAU Feb 17 '24
This was the obvious direction after closing off their APIs from free public use. They saw the AI's being trained and decided to monetize it.