I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is small
I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.
If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority.
Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.
So if the impact of the change is so small, why does the CEO of this company with thousands of employees feel remotely compelled to concoct a fantasy story where the Apollo developer is an evil villain that is so unbelievable and verifiably unbelievable it doesn't last six hours before blowing up in his face?
Even if you completely accept these policy changes as a long-term positive for reddit's growth, how can you have confidence in that leadership? How can you trust anything they tell you as an investor?
Steve has some kind of problem. It's been apparent before with editing comments in the live db, and it's apparent now. This problem is a risk for reddit. "Don't lie on or about phone calls" is pretty basic risk management and he can't handle it.
That's the thing, because of Huffman's instability and childish behavior in previous years, his words have no meaning here.
Reddit is still a decent-sized company with a whole team of people who've likely been running the numbers. Third party apps like Apollo are a nerd concern anyway, and nerds are outnumbered on Reddit these days; I'm sure most users are happily poking away at the first party apps.
It doesn’t matter if the “nerds” are outnumbered. Lurkers outnumber actual content creators by insane multiples, yet everyone knows that the content creators are the ones that keep people coming back.
What about mods? Looks like many of them use 3rd party apps to help moderate their subs. They are outnumbered too, but are they worth less than millions of lurkers? I think not.
Reddit is betting that the loud minority are not the ones bringing value to their site. If they are wrong, it may be too late.
Comments are content too and often more insightful. Moderators for all the bashing some deservedly get are key to keep content creators happy. Each forum is a small organization. The sum of the heads of these orgs. and the identities of users is what makes Reddit valuable. We are however entering an age where identity becomes more portable so mess with all the leads of your teams at your own peril.
The problem is, a very very very large portion of the mods are using third party apps. If the mods go away (because their tools don't work anymore), reddit will have a very big problem on their hands.
Yes people are missing the point here. I'm in Australia and I know when I check reddit groups moderated in other countries they are full of hate - like 4chan when the mods are asleep. I've seen an unmoderated reddit even just for a few hours, the site will be destroyed if people give up their unpaid voluntary work. They need the tools because it's not their fulltime job.
Based on many of the mods' behavior, that might actually be a big win for users. Their persecution and abuse of users makes Reddit the cesspool that it is.
After all, Reddit is so shitty that HN will ban you for pointing out behavior here as "Reddit-like."
You're welcome, and it's ok - I get how hard it is to remember these things and also how easily it can seem like we've banned an account for a bad or unfair reason. If you (or anyone) have that impression again in the future, you're welcome to ask. In a few cases there are details we can't disclose, but in most cases we're working with information that's public (like comment histories) and can tell you why we banned an account. You might not disagree with the reason and that's fine, but I'd rather that people disagree with the actual reason and not an incorrect one.
I'm sure there are plenty of bad ones. But I haven't participated in groups where those have been a problem.
I was banned from all field-recording-related subs because I asked a question about microphones, and the lack of a particular kind in the market. More people piled in, and eventually we contacted the CEO of a mic company who engaged with us and said he'd make a modified version of a product if enough people expressed interest.
Everyone involved with the thread was banned and it was deleted, with no excuse. I never raised the topic again, but was immediately banned from another recording-related sub when I answered a question about a recorder... as if my account had been flagged by some inbred cabal to auto-ban if I ever showed up.
This behavior utterly defeated the purpose of the forums and stole from users. Yes, stole. It's time that people took stock of the fact that the time we spend to compose questions and answers on forums is not free, and those who deliberately steal it should be called out every time.
That is one of the exact things I'm talking about. Mass banning from subs you don't even participate in, or that could not have been related to whatever you're being persecuted for.
> "Dumb question, but why is OS or browser support necessary? Couldn't an HTML canvas element and some JS that can parse the file format display any kind of image that you might want?"
Sometimes posts get downvotes "in the noise"; I've had some of my posts go to -1 or even -2 before jumping to >30. It happens; people have axes to grind, think you're stupid for asking a question, etc. and by chance sometimes they cluster just after you posted. Don't assign too much value to it; it's very rare that I see a normal on-topic question like that downvoted.
> if the impact of the change is so small, why does the CEO of this company with thousands of employees feel remotely compelled to...
We see this all the time on social media, where companies respond to the very vocal minority, because even though they may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media. Not saying this is the case here, but it's why companies often respond even when the real impact may be small.
> may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media.
The same organization that is dealing with that, also accepted that when they entered a market to where their potential profibility reaches a vast higher amount of people.
The companies asked for that level of audience. They got it, they're operating on a smaller staff than traditionally you would need for that level. Now they're upset they're paying the pipper.
> So if the impact of the change is so small, why does the CEO of this company [...]
A thousand times this. Plus their repeated insistence that they "aren't like Twitter" (which is true, I think. They're worse.) They are obviously running scared of something, and that something can really only be that the impact of this is potentially enormous.
This breathless take that capitalists aren’t propagandists taking advantage of every step and spreading FUD at every other is shockingly naive. The CEO of Reddit is trying to punish this guy for overstepping because capital naturally positions itself at the top and bullies all threats it perceives
It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO I don’t even know how you think people will “lose trust in leadership”. They are stoked they’re about to make ridiculous stacks of cash, and the few that aren’t don’t matter.
> It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders
It’s absolutely insane to call them freeloaders. Reddit’s business model is not “we serve pages with ads and advertisers pay us”, it is “those ‘freeloaders’ create content that is the whole value of the company, it is nothing without that — and this results in every traffic that hits the site”
> They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO
My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point.
I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites.
It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done.
In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it.
To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making.
If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.
All of these 3rd social media clients really are “freeloaders” though, I don’t get what’s so controversial about shutting them down. If I made my own Netflix client that bypasses their revenue stream, and implemented my own revenue stream on top of it, would anybody be upset or surprised if it was shut down?
The users don’t belong to Apollo. Reddit provides a service to Reddit users, Apollo freeloads on that service, cuts off Reddit’s revenue stream, and replaces it with its own. Why would anybody think that Reddit has some obligation to allow this, or that Apollo has some right to do it?
Nobody thinks that, not even the Apollo author, which is why the problem is not that Reddit is charging for access to the APIs, but that they are charging far more than the amount they’re losing.
The moderation tools offered by Reddit don’t have support for accessibility. If you are in r/blind for example… How are you gonna moderate that? And for those who don’t need those tools, third party apps save them a lot of time since the official app is so bad for such things.
plenty more people want to moderate, seriously, why should they pay them? hear me out:
If you pay them "a livable wage" you'll get people in the chair who don't want the job, just the pay. If you pay them less, suddenly you'll run afoul of minimum wage laws, overhead of having employees, etc.
you could auction off the job (mods pay reddit for the privilege, given that more people want to moderate than currently can) but that would encourage the mods to monetize their sub (the more successfully, the more subs would become part of ebaum's world)
voluntary moderation actually is the happy medium, people who love the job and the sub are willing/want to do it.
Like they say "everything can't be measured in money" (ok, I never say that, but there it is)
I never asked for them to be paid. I'm saying that reddit can exist due to their generosity, and that these people use third party tools and the API to do this. That's being taken away.
I obviously don’t believe in capitalist philosophy but you’re joking if you think the market doesn’t consider ad-free users as a drain regardless of reality.
Which is what I’m trying to say: you’re framing the actions of Reddit’s CSuite in terms or morals and long term outlooks, which is not how the market will look at their ipo. At all.
Sorry, but "the market" doesn't think anything. That's a category error.
If by that you mean something like "VC investors", sure. They are people whose job is trying to turn money into more money while filling their own pockets to bursting. They are zero-sum people by nature and practice. If they really understood and cared about communities, they'd mostly have different jobs.
But that doesn't make it true. And there's nothing wrong with framing Reddit's execs actions in terms of morals and long-term outlooks. We should generally not concede anything to the world-view of the greedy. Whether or not this will hurt Reddit's IPO is worth discussing, but we shouldn't confuse that with hurting Reddit the community, which it certainly will.
Wow, you’re really going to argue pedantically here?
Let me be clear for the fools in the room then. The behavior exhibited here is perfectly rational and likely to be rewarded from the perspective of a pre IPO company looking to pump its financials wrt user count, engagement, and ad views, and therefore any objections about moral or long term behavior ignore the fact that this playbook has been wildly profitable for many people many times, and thusly explains what the Reddit CEO is doing
Looking forward to when people start panning this system / status quo instead of acting like following the incentives is confusing
Asking you to be more precise where it matters isn't pedantry.
The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term. On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".
I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either. Which also isn't pedantry, because in analyses where we seek change to a system, we have to understand exactly who is involved and what their motivations are. So in this case it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO, but as a founder it's possible he's conflicted enough that he might depart from his short-term economic incentives to protect the think he's spent a major part of his life working on. Maybe some of the execs if they came in to prep in for an IPO.
So now we're not talking about the whole company, which is 2,000 employees, thousands of volunteers, and millions of content creators. We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people. That's a much more tractable number.
> Asking you to be more precise where it matters isn't pedantry.
It is when you're about to restate what I've said...
> The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term
Do you think a company has non-economic incentives?
> On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".
Right, and I call these people capitalists. Did you genuinely not glean that?
> I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either
> it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO
> We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people
Right. Thus why I said: "capitalists are propagandists who will position themselves at the top and bully all threats they perceive to their system"
It really reads to me like you took bad-faith readings of all my comments, and then restated them differently, while stating it isn't pedantry. You've delivered exactly 0 insights to me. Maybe you were trying to elucidate others, but I don't really see that.
I non-obviously do believe in the capitalist reality underpinning the universe (it's value-add all the way down) but you’re smoking if you think the market doesn't recognize ad-free users are relatively cost-less compared to their positive network externalities.
that doesn't mean that some free-to-choose sites won't experiment with paywalls, etc. in an attempt to enhance cost-covering revenue.
Exactly. I'd argue the true freeloaders at Reddit are the Reddit execs and the venture capitalists squeezing for profits. Everybody here developer here knows they could rebuild Reddit in short order; there's no technology moat. The valuable asset is the community. Beyond recovering enough money to pay for servers and some core staff, everything else is parasitic.
1. I feel like you didn't read the comment you replied to. It says in a compelling way that reddit wouldn't do this if they didn't feel a threat
2. > But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App
A solid takeaway from the original post is that you can't trust Reddit
3. All the bad press surrounding this is infinitely worse for their brand. The subreddit strike, for instance, could force their hand into taking authoritarian control over the platform, as they've hinted at. "Reddit abandons democracy" is a pretty damming headline, and they just can't seem to stop digging their hole deeper
Sure, but what does that even mean? I cannot trust them to load the topics from /r/ruby or /r/haskell correctly because of nefarious purposes? Perhaps they have replaced all the posts with Python propaganda in the hope I wouldn't notice?
You're forgetting the adage, "there is no such thing as bad press". If you're not a user of the 3rd party apps, then none of these decisions affect you, and most people are just not going to get upset about things that don't affect them directly.
Look at companies like Theranos where it was the investigative reporting that ultimately led to their downfall.
And as someone who has been on Reddit for 16 years and has never used a 3rd party app this decision does affect me. a) I think less of the company and the site which will affect my engagement and b) It affects everyone else on the site which in turns affects their engagement and the quality of their posts.
Theranos was doing shady shit and ripping off investors. That's illegal. Bad press didn't shut them down. Criminal investigations shut them down and the CEO is now actually in jail.
Confusing illegal activity with activity you disagree with is not doing the conversation (or society in general) a bit of good
I agree but I think the more damning thing about this update is the slander. Maybe it still doesn't come down to a case, but letting it get this close to begin with is absurd, even for a CEO that got into a piss fight with his users.
HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.
This is false. I only browse reddit in the browser version on my phone. It annoys you all the time to install their app, but you can read and post perfectly fine.
Your rebuttal is false and the parent is accurate. Reddit will throw up a full screen interstitial on most popular subreddits preventing even viewing and redirect you to download the app. This is on the mobile (not old.reddit desktop-only) site. Their UX is shite and full of dark patterns.
If you log in, the mobile site is perfectly usable. You might also have to set a preference as well (like the old.reddit preference). It has been so many years of using it this way I don't remember.
You can on old.reddit.com. Their redesign was so unpopular with users they agreed to keep supporting the old design which doesn't nag you into downloading the app.
And I can guarantee that there are approximately five people using Reddit via a browser on mobile. Mobile means the app, to a precision of two or three significant digits.
As one of the five, I didn't believe this so went trying to determine more realistic numbers.
Per the link below, mobile web is anywhere from 15 to 60% of mobile traffic. Reddit isn't listed, and it's 4 years old, so who knows, but I'd imagine it falls somewhere in the same range, probably closer to the lower end?
I'd wager you're completely wrong. Reddit at this point gets a ton of traffic from search. Remember the old 90/9/1 rule. 90% of users are just browsing cat pictures and are eyeball fodder for ads.
old.reddit is starting to come apart at the seams, tho. (maybe it's because r/subs don't keep the style sheets up to date or something? i dunno) in many cases you can't up or downvote, there's no search button, there's no sidebar with the flair and the rules/mods, etc.
I used "style sheet" in a generic sense, rather than to mean CSS (I remember Microsoft (Multitool) Word v1.0) and I was referring to the layout of a subreddit home page which I've never played with but I'm aware the moderators have some control over.
I know how to turn off Page Style in Firefox (manually for every page) which is CSS related, but otherwise have no idea what you are referring to
I am one of the five. I use the Reddit website on iOS Safari and have for years. I only read one subreddit, so my usage pattern may be different than a normal reddit user. The only thing that annoys me is the ever persistent ‘website or app’ modal dialogue but I’m used to it now.
I try to use mobile websites instead of apps because I feel like the tracking data a company can get from a web browser is less granular than app tracking data.
I'd wager that most Reddit users these days, casual or not, are only dimly aware that the platform even exists as a website. Or at least a large plurality.
According to [1], Reddit has 52 million daily active users (and 430 monthly users), while according to [2] the Reddit app has 17 million daily active users. Both numbers are from 2021. So only about a third of DAUs would be using the Reddit app. Apollo has 50,000 yearly subscribers, so is probably more on the negligible side.
> Apollo has 50,000 yearly subscribers, so is probably more on the negligible side overall.
Note this figure does not include free users, nor the users of the plethora of other clients... But regardless
Clearly, Reddit has deemed 3rd party clients pose a huge cost to their platform, otherwise they wouldn't charge through the roof. IMO, all these numbers are meaningless given this fact.
I’m not sure what Reddit’s rationale is here. Third-party app users are less than 1% (can’t find the link where I read this). The most plausible explanation is that they want to get rid of a potential future threat, because I don’t believe that current third-party usage constitutes any substantial loss. Otherwise buying out Apollo as mentioned in TFA should have been an easy decision.
Wouldn’t an ad support guideline be enough for third party apps to continue coexisting with the official Reddit app?
Call it that, or sdk. But if ad based revenue is so important for Reddit, getting Apollo and the rest to properly display and track ads is imho a no brainer and would totally solve the issue at hand.
As I said maybe I am too naive, and I only see part of the picture.
We’ve got lots of web devs and startup space folks on this site, I guess somebody must know how to look this sort of thing up?
I googled “percentage of reddit mobile traffic in app” but got a bunch of marketing sites, and wasn’t able to sort out which ones were bullshit. I bet there’s a good source for this sort of thing though.
In any case, we don’t need to wager right? It seems like this ought to be measurable.
Yeah I've used reddit daily for over a decade. I just use a mobile browser. I tried a couple apps a few years back, but just when back to mobile browser after a few weeks.
> the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority
The loud minority argument assumes homogenous cohorts, and that the loudness happens to cluster around inconsequential things. These criteria are almost never satisfied in practice.
Any online community today has extreme differences: usually a tiny minority contribute almost all content to the site (posts, comments). In Reddit’s case, moderation is also done by human volunteers assured by 3p bots (as opposed to automated ML policing + human intervention when someone famous gets sour). The vast majority of users are passively consuming, occasionally upvoting/downvoting.
Now, Reddit gained a massive amount of users in the last few years (something like 2x-4x) so bean counters start drooling over ad revenue from them. They may think that the old timers, power users and mods are a minority that can be gradually replaced by the new user pool without major incident. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that the bean counters don’t know either, simply because the graphs they’re looking at don’t have the predictive power they think. They’re risking the company’s main asset to find out.
You're neglecting the tools and bots that use the API, which are heavily utilized by most mod teams. One of the pillars of reddit is unpaid moderators, and if the tools that make that job doable on the scale of reddit stop working, then you will see a mass exodus of those unpaid moderators. That means the death of most of the big, well moderated communities like AskHistorians, AskScience, AITA, etc.
I've already seen many of these subs having moderator led discussions about relocation options for the communities.
Reddit has expectations of what moderators are to do, and has expectations of what they are not to do, and will remove them from roles if they fail to meet those expectations. That set of expectations would make them employees if compensated.
As for liability, the Ninth Circuit in Mavrix v LiveJournal held that if an agent of a user-content-hosting ISP (social media) has the means and opportunity to moderate, they also have the means and opportunity to interdict reasonably known copyright violations, and failure to act on those would jeopardise their DMCA Safe Harbour.
And there’s a lot of registered copyright holders that will 100% line up to be a creditor on statutory damages.
Reddit moderators do not directly deal with DMCA takedown requests. If Reddit is presented with one, they will take the offending post down directly. Moderators can be suspended or removed, however, if they encourage rule-breaking behaviour in a subreddit (such as by soliciting content that results in DMCA takedowns).
The primary social role of moderators is to curate the community. That involves enforcing some site-wide rules, but it also involves more local rules like "stay on-topic." It wouldn't do for a forum about NFL football to be taken over by discussion for The Bachelor, even though that's not actionable at a site-wide level.
Traffic is really a bad way to look at it, Traffic exisits because there is content to view
If the majority of people posting, commenting, etc are coming from the other interface it does not matter if the bulk of the "traffic" which is largely going to be non-power users that just read reddit comes from the web and the new interface.
There seems to be this idea that reddit will need to see massive traffic loss to die, no they need to see massive loss of quality link submissions and comments to die, that is a very different metric
So have I only used the official apps, and I believe most users are in the same bucket.
But. I'm not a mod. I don't know what mods use. And the only reason reddit is good is because communities have tools to moderate themselves.
What I use is kind of irrelevant if the people who keep the communities I visit consistent and relatively clean are pissed and walk out. A casual user won't drop the site when Apolo closes, it would be slightly later when reddit becomes 4chan in absence of moderation.
There are some amazingly good alternatives. I personally use Boost which presents threads in a much more readable manner and allows you to easily swap between different contexts. Before they disappear it might be good to give some alternatives a try and see just how terrible the native app experience is compared to what it could be.
And this belief is based on what exactly? If you think critically about this, it stands to reason that the impact should not be small if it's worth it to Reddit to get people off of 3rd party mobile apps and put eyes on ads in the first party app.
If they didn't want to support 3rd party apps, then that's a decision they are allowed to make. It sounds to me as if that's the decision they want to make but don't have the moral fortitude to make out right. Instead, they've tried to make the API unappealing for someone to want to use. In the end, it is the same result. So just because they are putting a very high price tag does not mean that's the actual cost/worth, but just a number they put out to scare people away.
As contractors, we have the same option to us by responding to a request with an outrageous fee that you think nobody will pay so you can avoid having to actually say no.
I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is small
In terms of user counts that's undoubtedly true. In terms of user influence I think that's yet to be determined. I think June 12-13 will be fascinating as a view of just how much of reddit and reddit content is managed by people affected by and unhappy about these changes.
Mods and highly influential users aren't evenly distributed across the user base by account age. Older accounts are more likely to be in both of those categories, and they're also more likely to have shifted to third party apps at some point particularly when those apps addressed problems they were having. There are communities that will never come back from this, and there are users who've earned reputation who will react by removing all their content and their accounts.
In a lot of ways HN is like a single highly-active subreddit - what would the impact be if the chronically underappreciated dang got fed up, removed everything he'd ever posted, and quit? How about if in his position as moderator he decided that it was time for the sub to go away and applied automoderation in such a way as to remove all posts?
Only if you believe that all users are equal, but just like free to play games that have whales Reddit has power users that create most of the content and are typically the mods that work for free. They are going to be the most impacted by the API cost changes, and if they leave Reddit will not work.
Then why raise the API rates if it so "insignificant"? Short sighted GREED.
See the Studios opening up their own streaming services to choke out NetFlix and observe how that is playing out even for DISNEY+.
I think you’re wrong - the audience that Reddit was built on is paying attention to this, and it’s going to have a lot of knock on effects. People who have been around for a while. Hell, I was one of the people that moved from Digg to Reddit in 2009 and I’m barely in my thirties.
Do I think it’s going to kill Reddit? No. But I think this is going to have a large effect on their IPO and they will be treated as a hostile entity going forward than a neutral one, and that will add up over time. There’s no plausible deniability.
The thing is, I think a lot of moderators use third-party apps.
So, while it may be a small percentage of users, I suspect that losing them (or even just impairing their ability to moderate) will have an outsized negative impact on reddit.
I've seen this argument in other places and it makes an error in assuming all users are equal in what they bring. It's common in MMO communities - why do the devs spend so much time working on high end raids enjoyed by only 1% of the player base? For Reddit, I would assume mobile users are more motivated - motivated enough to install an app at least - and probably contribute more UGC to the site. Not to mention unpaid moderators.
>I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.
Same. I have never used anything other than old.reddit on a proper computer, with the exception being when I need to edit the new.reddit sidebars for subs I moderate, which I still do on a proper computer.
the (passive) consumers may use the native interfaces, but the power users - especially the mods - use 3rd party apps. the bigger subs are pretty much unmoddable without them.
they might not lose many users, but they'll lose their most important users.
Uhh, I'm pretty sure that you and me and anyone on this site are extremely far from a representative sample of Reddit's userbase these days. It is a fact that their traffic is primarily from their official (and shitty) mobile app.
> I actually believe reddit when they say the impact is small
I think this neglects the power struggle that would occur if its many unpaid moderators who do use apps far more than any other group, either shutdown subreddits or straight up quit.
is this a rule of the internet about the most vocal part of the community tends to be a tiny percentage? the "people on the internet" are screaming about something again today. in a previous job, i was introduced to this first hand. that's when i learned people will just double down on an incorrect theory/comment when shown incontrovertible evidence. yet, when you look at the numbers of the people shouting online is just a tiny percentage, but causes so much work for people to defend against. they come across as petulant children throwing tantrums because they didn't get exactly what they wanted.
To be clear, that’s people paying a monthly subscription fee for an app that is free and has several premium one time IAP unlocks.
For example, I paid for Apollo Pro as a one time thing so I’m not a subscriber. Only people paying for Apollo Ultra every month are counted. That 50k is just the most invested and dedicated of Apollo users.
I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.
If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority.
Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.