“We’ve known for over a decade that people come to Reddit to talk about the products they love – take r/BuyItForLife for example, a community of over 1.5 million redditors who have been sharing recommendations and advice about their lifelong, must-have purchases since 2011. These updates will uplevel the search-and-discover experience for both brands and our users by tapping into our differentiated value as a hub for actionable conversation”
For me too this was a big question, but the answer is in their incompetence. They deserve a Darwin award on eliminating themselves. They could tweak their API indeed, even to accept ad through 3rd party. Even they could come up with a business model that both 3rd party and them would earn money. All these would also need time and the time that the 3rd party was asking to even adopt with their current “model” of API. and they even didn’t give that a chance.
Lemmy and kbin and others, for sure have the potential to eat the whole reddit. Reddit was nice for its simplicity, and it is definitely not hard to reproduce. The more “algorithm” reddit introduced, the worse it became.