[vismwasm]

Thanks for your insightful reply!

> they're not trying to win over users; they're trying to extract money from them.

Fair enough. But was there ever an attempt to extract money and/or data from the users through third-party apps? For example by forcing third-party to serve ads?

I'm actually questioning if it's in the long-term monetary interest of big tech to force users into subpar experiences. My guess is that current big tech apps don't even serve their purpose of maximizing profits & data extraction optimally. I'd expect a talented indie dev to be able to provide a better UX & monetizing users at the same time.

I mean if we want to go the evil route, we might even incentivize 3rd party devs. Let everyone build a Twitter or Reddit client, but they must serve ads and might get a fixed or percentage share. If someone can build an app where users actually like and click on the served ads, great.

[nostrademons]

Of course it's not in the long-term monetary interest of big tech to force users into subpar experiences. Nobody cares about the long-term at a public company, because you can just sell your stocks as long as doom is at least a quarter away. In many cases the subpar user experiences are in service of short-term monetary interests, which the stock market (and by extension, your management chain) very much cares about. It also probably doesn't matter all that much, as the only thing that matters in business is transactions, and relatively few users are going to quit using Reddit because the client sucks compared to the third-party options.

The "here, run ads in your third-party app and we'll give you a cut" business model has been tried, and is actually pretty successful. Try for example AdSense or an Android F2P game or AdMob. The difference is that the app itself is usually branded separately from the ad network, so users know they are using the 3rd party app and not the main service. I think that's the main concern for say a 3rd-party Twitter or Reddit client - at some point a critical mass of users start to think of say RIF as "Reddit", what's stopping them from redirecting their client at a new service and cutting off the real Reddit backend? This was basically how Imgur started, as "Image hosting for Reddit" and then they became a site in their own right.