In interviews with multiple publications, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman defended business decisions made by the company.
From the article:
In response to Huffman’s comments, moderators are trying to find ways to make blackouts effective. Alternatively, some communities are also setting up servers on alternative sites like Lemmy and Kbin.
He can't be citing real statistics. I don't know 3% of their reported 57 million users but I do know that every person I know that uses reddit uses third party apps.
Someone on data is beautiful found that all third party apps accounted for only 10% of the official app downloads. Taking that into account, it is likely that the vast majority of Reddit users only use the official app and don't know what the fuss is all about.
But then, that mirrors the idea that most people are lurkers on Reddit.
I don't know, I think it could be true. 57 million daily users according to the article; older numbers claim 400 million monthly users.
Apollo claims 1.5 million users (monthly, I think) and is one of the biggest (if not the biggest?) third party apps.
That may be true, but it is still presenting a distorted picture. The power users who interact with Reddit most are almost certainly more likely to have at least tried other (i.e. 3rd party) apps - furthermore it doesn't seem to be being debated that the official app is missing key tools moderators find useful which would suggest moderators are are more likely to use 3rd party apps too.
Not all users are equal, some are more equal and others!
Most of my friends who use it only every now and then couldnt give two fucks about third party apps and probably didnt know they existed. Most of them have joined in the last two years, so it was when the site became a lot less hard care