once everyone is burned out on Johnny O?
Dunno, but doubt users currently posting & clicking maymays of the now will get bored & come up with a new forms of 'protest' (which, you guessed it, will also involve posting, scrooling & clicking on reddit).
Reddit provides the beer, but in reality it doesn’t.
OK, substitute "kegs" for "beer." Kegs (servers) & staff to run them costs, and reddit wants to stop subsidizing the bar across the street (3rd-party apps). Honestly see nothing wrong with that. Was cutting off the subsidies in this fashion a good business decision? Don't know, bad at money stuff.
RIF scrapes.
So API not an issue?
force large apps offline.
Sure, 3rd party apps break reddit's business model.
increase is the protest posts
Posts are posts, clicks are clicks, all grist for the mill. From the article:
"traffic is up in subreddits expressing their discontent with photos of Oliver. Traffic to r/pics, for example, is up 564% compared with last month, while traffic to r/Aww is up 152%"
It’s much more cost efficient to provide an API
Apps using reddit's API (e.g. Apollo) don't display reddit's ads. Imagine you run a bar & serve free beer. You can do this with this one simple trick: constantly spamming ads on every TV (display panel) in your bar. Advertisers pay for the beer & your overheads.
Along comes a guy with a garden hose, sticks it in your keg, and starts siphoning your beer to the bar he built across the street. His place is much better than yours, the alcoholics don't have to watch ads to get drunk.
wat do?
web scraping which is objectively more resource intensive
Pretty sure app devs are not not_scraping out of concern for reddit. If they could, they would (I know I would).
forced to moderate against their will
How does one force unpaid jannies to keep working for free? Asking for a friend.
keep the sub open
Reddit wants content and clicks, 'site engagement,' which r/piracy provides. It couldn't care less if you post John Oliver pix, the Unabomber manifesto, or plot cunning ploys to oust u/spez -- 'long as you do it & do it on reddit.
pictures of sexy pirate john oliver
Why would sexy pirate john oliver pix in r/piracy bother reddit more than posts about piracy?
pretending they were community-moderated.
Unless you remember electing your mods, "community moderated" simply means "we don't pay the jannies, they literally do it for free lol!" It was never about the "community" having a voice.
And it works, see /u/delcake's comment.
Don't you need a paid version of Apollo to create threads (honestly don't know, never used it)? Users of 3rd party apps don't see reddit's ads (neither do i, old.reddit & adblocker), so aren't high value users for reddit. Will see how this plays out, here's hoping this place keeps growing.