Several subreddits have ruled that they will now post only John Oliver related content as an alternate means of protest. I think it started on /r/pics, someone correct me if I'm wrong.

When asked whether his submersible could be used to rescue those on the Titan before they run out of breathable air, Newell looked up from his crowbar and said only "These things, they take time."

Yep. The battletech comunity on reddit is like 45k subscribers and stays active. Kbin's /m/battletech has 56 subscribers. There are 5 threads. It's gonna be quite a while before niche communities actually have any momentum.

They did just do a round of layoffs recently that dropped something like 5% of their staff. I won't be at all surprised if that ends up just being round 1.

Yep, spez is a greedy pig boy and this whole thing reeks of him being personally offended that any portion of the userbase can use apps where reddit can't squeeze quite as much value out of them. A deal could easily be worked out to appease all parties if reddit was willing to be even slightly less greedy, but corpos gonna corpo I guess.

Agreed on the 97% thing. I think that's reddit counting pc browsing in with mobile just to make the number using third party apps seem even smaller than it actually is. Which is ridiculous since the actual number isn't that much different. Going by the downloads on google play they still have something like 90% of the mobile users on official.

And in the end they rely entirely on users to deliver content.

Isn't it amazing how he's so insistent on how unfair it is that third party apps are profiting off of someone else's content when that's essentially reddit's business model?

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's true. Have you looked at the numbers in the app stores?

The official reddit app on the google play store has over 100 million downloads.
RIF has only 5 million downloads. Boost, Sync, and Baconreader are all sitting around 1 million downloads each.
It looks like about 90% of mobile users are on the official app and won't notice any change.

The 'normies' don't go beyond searching for the word "reddit" and installing the first thing that pops up.

As long as it's optional. I absolutely despise sites trying to decide what I want to see based on a few vague interests. I know that works for most people, but I can't be the only one who would have a negative impression of that being the only onboarding option.