What are the chances Reddit goes down this path and kills the many amazing third-party clients? I absolutely love the one I use and detest the official Reddit app.
Reddit has learned a lasting lesson from Digg's self-destruct, that's why old.reddit.com is still around too. It's been over a decade so they might be starting to forget but perhaps the Twitter meltdown will be a good refresher. Don't piss off your core userbase.
old.reddit.com has been gradually accumulating minor bugs and quirks. I don't think this is due to anything other than simple neglect, but it would make sense as a deliberate strategy to gradually push people away from it without having a hard exit point like just shutting it down would.
Given the amount of users that use and evangelize Apollo for iOS (including myself), that might hurt Reddit more than the loss of third-party apps for Twitter.
Not much. No one cares about Reddit that much, it doesn't have the ridiculous level of venture capital attached that forces leadership to short-term benefits only, and most importantly: Reddit caves when the mods of major subs do collective action. Twitter and FB have in house moderation, whereas Reddit is completely at the mercy of the volunteer mods.
I don't think this is true. Reddit is a corporation. If they decide they want to replace the mods in any sub with new mods they can do just that. There is no property ownership in the reddit domain. They just avoid doing so, but they can, just like how they shut down subs they don't want to see around. They do have control of the platform. The reddit mods are unpaid de-facto employees as they perform work on behalf of the corporation. I also suspect that some of them are actual employees of reddit.
Reddit does have access to capital, one of their owners is Tencent.
I think anyone that is using a service for free by sidestepping the official client that has ads will eventually get a rude awakening. Especially if those 3rd party clients are making money from their users.
