Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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You're ignoring the other effects of third party apps - which is to have significantly added to the number of users they have to show ads to in the first place.
Making their API free encouraged active development which increased user engagement. So it absolutely did increase their revenue because it helped to increase the popularity of their site in the first place.
This.
Put more explicitly:
3rd party apps bring more people to the site, or keep them there longer.
Those people create content in the forms of posts proper and comments— hell, even down to just voting— that feeds the site engagement for users through 1st party interfaces(the ones getting ads), keeping them there longer, and seeing more ads.
Better moderation tools help mods keep online communities healthy, and the kinds of places we are happy to spend unhealthy amounts of time on.
Lest we forget how dumb reddit is, they didn't have a mobile strategy in 2014, which necessitated buying Alien Blue.
If you look at the history of reddit, it has succeeded entirely in spite of management decision. Gotta say, even being on the site since 07-08, even I got this wrong. I expected reddit to do something dumb, I just didn't expect them to do the most dumb thing.