The unpaid bots effectively squatting? Sure. The paid for bots, part of the marketing firms that pay Reddit? No.
The API change is simply Reddit shaking off the louse that are the freeloaders. That's most of the site and the real content that draws so many people. I think it's a piss poor way to increase monetization, but wtf do I care? I can't wait until Reddit no longer exists.
We all know that free discussion on the net drawing to an end. For most of us it drew to an end around 2014.
Their Chinese masters certainly help subsidize it, but I suspect the ads carry the bulk of the responsibility for whatever they bring in. With a very simple ad-blocking setup you won't see any ads at all. They probably spend more time and money figuring out ways to track people evading account bans than they make in ad revenue! I suspect their masters were only willing to let reddit drain money as long as it had some certain level of usefulness pushing the fascist neo-marxist and sexually perverted messaging for the mentally diseased trans and gay crowd.
The unpaid bots effectively squatting? Sure. The paid for bots, part of the marketing firms that pay Reddit? No.
The API change is simply Reddit shaking off the louse that are the freeloaders. That's most of the site and the real content that draws so many people. I think it's a piss poor way to increase monetization, but wtf do I care? I can't wait until Reddit no longer exists.
We all know that free discussion on the net drawing to an end. For most of us it drew to an end around 2014.
So how does Reddit actually earn revenue? Ads? Paid AMAs? Paid native marketing?
Their Chinese masters certainly help subsidize it, but I suspect the ads carry the bulk of the responsibility for whatever they bring in. With a very simple ad-blocking setup you won't see any ads at all. They probably spend more time and money figuring out ways to track people evading account bans than they make in ad revenue! I suspect their masters were only willing to let reddit drain money as long as it had some certain level of usefulness pushing the fascist neo-marxist and sexually perverted messaging for the mentally diseased trans and gay crowd.
I think the bulk of their cash is from investors, but they make money from ads, selling reddit gold, and selling their dumb-as-fuck avatar NFTs.
Another question is: what are their costs?
They don't pay mods, they don't host files, they don't even have people developing profitable ad-ons (as these third party apps are, apparently).
They host text and pay a handful of people to keep the site from crashing. How much do they actually need?
My guess would be like most tech companies over there they've picked up a lot of dead weight.
They need to pay server costs somehow, though. People not looking at ads is gonna keep them from doing that.
Good point. They do host a lot of pictures and video though. People have moved away from linking to imgur.