The theory is that their July traffic numbers are probably down so they’re boosting them with /r/place traffic so that the drop due to 3rd party apps doesn’t look as bad to investors. Reddit probably sees the increased server costs as an investment to boost their IPO valuation.

They make them money because:

• they use reddit
• spez gets some nice usage stats to show off
• as a direct consequence, advertisers keep paying to put their ads
• also as a direct consequence, investors’ confidence in reddit continues to recover; there’s a real possibility that, when it IPOs, it will actually go for a decent price

Now, if enough people go commit ad-block, and advertisers somehow become wise to that fact… then maybe it will hurt reddit’s bottom line (at which point spez will start trying to emulate youtube’s anti-ad stuff).

But as it stands, especially if most of reddit’s usage is through reddit’s mobile app… I’m not really sure how you can block ads there.

by adding to it you’ve created some tiny bit of content

It’s sort of hard to visualize the split between collective and individual. If a prolific user decides to stop using reddit, reddit maybe becomes 0.001% worse. It doesn’t sound like a lot on its own, but when millions do it… it becomes significant.

A little becomes a lot. If a significant chunk of reddit just decided to stop using the site, reddit would lose a lot of money.

Remember when reddit traffic was down like 3% a couple weeks ago? Let’s say traffic to reddit and the money reddit gets from advertisers are strongly correlated. So if traffic drops 50%, they get 50% less money from ads.

It’s probably not exactly the same, especially during a short time span like a week, but just for the sake of discussion.

With an annual revenue of $350 million in 2021, they avered $29 million a month and $7 million a week. What’s 3% of $7 million? About $210k

$210k is not much for a company like reddit, but it’s a significant amount of money. Now imagine we increase the traffic drop by a factor of 3 and increase the length of time down up to a month. We’re talking $1.6 million.

That hurts. And it could start a downwards spiral. Prolific users leave and there’s less content so there’s less reason for users to come back. Which causes less content and so on

Unfortunately, I think the majority of redditors have probably moved on from the whole API affair. We still see “fuck spez” like for example in the /r/place but unless reddit creates another scandal in the near future they should be able to recover from this.

We simply don’t have the numbers to hurt reddit so I say go ahead and use /r/place without guilt if you want to

Apparently it’s app only, which can’t easily be adblocked

If you are using an account in their service, they still have at least some data about you, which they can sell to third-parties under some conditions (unless they changed that part of their privacy policy). It’s probably not a lot, but it adds up I guess.