If it wasn't hurting them they wouldn't be doing damage control.

• Spez wouldn't be doing (awful) interviews (going so far as to praise Elon Musk)
• They wouldn't be publishing whitewashed versions of history
• They wouldn't be changing the rules to silence dissent
• They wouldn't be plotting to overthrow protesting mods to install compliant ones
• They wouldn't be lying about trying to work with devs
• They wouldn't be preventing people from deleting their old comments/posts
• They wouldn't be forcing subreddits to reopen
• They wouldn't be advertising on Facebook for new advertisers
• They wouldn't be trying to smear Apollo's developer
• They wouldn't be posting propaganda notices on new reddit's homepage
• They wouldn't be censoring discussion about alternatives like Lemmy and kbin

It's working, keep it up.

funny how the article does not mention lemmy or kbin, but put in disclosure that their parent company have stakes in reddit. And the best the author can do is

If users have invested significant time in a community, it’s going to be a pain to find something amid the sea of federated upstarts that all claim to be the next best thing.

The mentioned article by Rory Mir actually mentioned lemmy and kbin, cause it's EFF. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/what-reddit-got-wrong

Mir offers another business metaphor for the tension on Reddit: “If you have a really good music venue, but you break relations with every notable artist, you’re not going to be a very successful venue. You need to really prioritize the needs of the folks providing the value on your platform.”

Brilliant. Reddit looks out at a crowd of people at a packed show and says "ok we could lose 5%". But those are the ones who return another night as musicians. And you cant run a music venue long term with open mic 7 nights per week.

Corrected headline: The Reddit API Cash Grab is Breaking Reddit

What really did it for me was Huffman’s quote on how “Reddit users, communities, and discussions are one of the largest data sets that cannot be given away for free” (summarized quote).

The rumored IPO made an entire corporation do a 180 so ruthlessly and clumsily in a way that I have never seen. It’s destroying itself and rightfully so.

I want it to hurt them. I want it to fail. But I fear they're doing this now because they've run the numbers and are pretty sure the vocal minority that will leave permanently won't be noticed in a month.

I hope Redditors don't cave and cease protesting, clearly it's working if Reddit has to force subs to reopen.

“Any plan that involves endless and continuous growth is bound to run into scale issues, which is where I think Reddit and Twitter are running into problems,” Mir says. “You can’t inflate the balloon forever. It will pop at some point.”

I'm looking at you too, Netflix.

Reddit’s plans—driven by an urge to make the company more profitable as it inches toward going public

Correction: Reddit's plan is driven by an urge to make the company profitable.

It boggles my mind that I read this sentence near the end of the article:

"Force everyone to interact on one app, and it’s easier to fill their feeds with whatever advertising you want."

This isn't a quote from an expert, these are the actual words of the author of the article. "fill their needs.... with advertising."

Nobody has "advertising needs." It shows how fucked-up the internet has become when a journalist writes something like this unironically, without even attempting to explain themselves. They just assume everyone believes they have advertising needs. Unreal.

Glad it is doing something.

Not trying to sound like La Palice but in all the articles and posts about this issue, they seem to miss the core of what is making users mad (the mods fight is different, although in the same direction, but solvable).

The thing to the user who's generating content and not only swiping their finger is: they don't want to experience Reddit as other users experience Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or Twitter. They follow issues, not people. If you get in the middle of this relationship between the anonymous user and their discussion on an issue, with your tricks to track them, to show them your promoted content, etc. you'll be told to fuck off.

There's nothing to improve in the Reddit Official App. Everybody hates the principles it's created on, much ahead of the poor design choices and lack of features. That's what's being taken from us, by hijacking third-party apps: the possibility to focus strictly on what's being discussed.