The cynic in me thinks this will slowly morph into charging access for third-party apps too.
Third-party apps don't show ads; there's no reason ads couldn't be included in the feed and required to be shown as a condition of using the API, but I imagine it makes tracking impressions etc far more difficult. Any new features they add also need to either be incorporated into the API or remain unavailable for those users.
My only hope is that third-party apps remain niche enough that Reddit leaves them be; the first-party experiences are all awful to the point where I would probably just stop using Reddit if third-party offerings become unavailable.
They also might be pulling a Tumblr. I really hope they don't.
> For NSFW content, they were not 100% sure of the answer, but thought that it would no longer be possible to access via the API, I asked how they balance this with plans for the API to be more equitable with the official app, and there was not really an answer but they did say they would look into it more and follow back up. I would like to follow up more about this, especially around content hosting on other websites that is posted to Reddit, as well as different types of NSFW content (a text post marked NSFW due to a gory moment in a story, for instance).
Third-party apps don't show ads; there's no reason ads couldn't be included in the feed and required to be shown as a condition of using the API, but I imagine it makes tracking impressions etc far more difficult. Any new features they add also need to either be incorporated into the API or remain unavailable for those users.
My only hope is that third-party apps remain niche enough that Reddit leaves them be; the first-party experiences are all awful to the point where I would probably just stop using Reddit if third-party offerings become unavailable.