Has Reddit Overplayed Its Hand?

It’s a tale as old as time. A wildly popular but terminally unprofitable company decides to make big changes to improve its financial position, even though the changes risk undermining what made it so popular in the first place. We watched this slow motion car crash play out with Elon Musk’s Twitter transformation, and now I’m wondering — is Reddit heading in the same direction? The current controversy started when Reddit made a sudden decision to start charging the clients, bots, and tools that access its API. The planned fees are immense, with a popular client like <a href="https://apolloapp.io/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Apollo</a> and Reddit Is Fun facing millions of dollars in charges. Unsurprisingly, they’re both about to fold. But you can see the value in Reddit’s strategy. Properly executed, API fees satisfy two goals: <ul> <li>They sideline the competitors that have built better Reddit apps. If their users are forced back to vanilla Reddit, then Reddit has the chance to put ads in front of them, which is its only real source of revenue.</li> <li>They lock out generative AI tools. Today, these tools can train themselves on years of Reddit discussions and flame wars. Tomorrow, they can’t, unless they’re willing to pay handsomely or crawl the site on their own.</li> </ul> Ruthless, yes. But as the leadership at Reddit has correctly pointed out, they don’t need to subsidize someone else’s business. And they’ve got bigger things on their mind, like a plan to become profitable and launch an IPO. <a href="https://medium.com/young-coder/has-reddit-overplayed-its-hand-502776e98da7">Visit Now</a>