Something interesting to me, they seem to be talking about the trust users put in other users, for example on buyitforlife and suggesting advertisers can access that.
We’ve obviously been aware of self promotion on Reddit for a long time, new users showing up and promoting an app or a film exclusively without marking it as an ad in any way, but I guess I never realised Reddit might be monetising that.
Probably very naive of me but it explains why reporting those users doesn’t do anything.
The thing is, I don’t think that most third party app developers would have really been against this. Give them enough time (say a year) and they’d probably get on board and do this, such as showing ads and sending back to Reddit whatever “signals” Reddit requires to use the API for free.
I think this is definitely part of the story but if this was the only problem, then I think negotations would have gone differently. There’s probably more to it than just this, though this is undoubtedly a big part of it.
I heard elsewhere that the app store doesn’t allow you to renegotiate an app contract that you have on an annual basis mid-contract, which is why Apollo suffers from such huge loses. But Relay, an Android app, is going to try to work with the new pricing. I wonder if it’s only the Apple App Store that has this requirement then and if only iPhone apps are affected?
