I'm not entirely sure why Reddit was going to charge outlandish fees for the third-party APIs. Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it. It's really a combination of pushing them out of the market and then being a smug little bitch that really nailed it in the coffin for a lot of people.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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i don't think they were trying to make money off of the API changes. like others are saying, it has to do with AI and they figured they might as well take the chance and knock out 3rd party in the same swoop so that they can funnel more people onto the official app
they can data harvest much better that way
It would have been perfectly possible to charge a different rate for AI harvesting than for Reddit Apps.
of course, but they wanted to kill 3rd party apps without explicitly saying "we're killing 3rd party apps"
this way they can (or at least they thought they could have) had plausible deniability saying stuff like "we tried to work with them" and this is essentially what they tried in the first couple of days
AI has nothing to do with it other than a convenient, topical scapegoat.
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Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it.
But that is exactly what his goal was. If he really was interested in working with the 3PA devs, this would have been handled completely differently. The fact that it was handled as it was, with essentially zero engagement between the company and the community, and with essentially zero flexibility on the part of the company on the implementation, is pretty clear evidence that their goal all along was to drive the 3PA's out of business.
Every user they lose they'll replace with 10 bots.
This isn't about longterm thinking, this is a push to control how many "users" they can put on their IPO docs. Steve and the current board (VC monies) are going to cash out and what happens to Reddit after the IPO is the least of their worries.
Every fewer third-party app is one fewer datum that they are lying about the number of real, fleshy users. This has nothing to do with AI training or APIs or anything but legitimizing bot activity to pump up the numbers.
The outright lies about blackmail didn't help.
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Reddit killed internet fora. By being easier and cheaper, while making no profit.
If they suddenly do want to make profit?
The terms change, there are alternatives.
I agree. They built a better mouse trap and now they want to go back to the old one because they figured out they can sell cheese. The better mouse trap still exists.
Nobody is against them making money, but personally it was just the iicong omn the cake. The censorship was my biggest issue, then they started requiring emails, etc....losing my apps and then threatening mods was it.
I definitely wouldn't be as upset as I am right now. I would consider paying to be able to continue to use the service.
However, right now, I wouldn't come back to Reddit even if they called off the whole thing and decided to leave free access to the API. I have zero trust in Reddit after all that happened. To be honest I'm kinda glad it all went down like this. At least we got to know their real colors.
That IS what happened, in april.
What happened this month is that the API users (aka 3rd party authors) expressed their dismay at trying to work with reddit's announced changes or getting any movement out of reddit that would allow them to continue.
I think it is within the company's right to revenue increasing opportunities. That said I view the slandering of the Apollo creator as the turning point. It was very poor taste and their communication around this has been horrendous. It kick started the migration to the fediverse and a critical mass has adopted it. So now there is no good reason to go back to Reddit even if they reverse their decisions. Heck, had there been a different stimulant to fediverse adoption without any missteps from Reddit, I would still have transitioned my usage to a system where the users are more in control.
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It wasn't what they did it was how they did it. If they wanted to I'm sure they could have worked out a comprise where everyone stayed happy.
A good way to foster resentment is to profit off a bunch of mods and devs donating time for love of community and then spit in their face by forcing them out. I think it's one the most blatantly asshole things I've ever seen a corporation do, one for the history books.
I do wonder if it will really make a difference. I think it might be their undoing. Social media users are a somewhat fickle bunch and can move on to the next big thing, that's historically been the case.
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Two things would have done it for me. They could have offered a user token subscription that I could port to all my accounts. Sure there could be token sharing with that method, but for a "modest" user cost, I might have been tolerable of it. They would have had to open the third party apps at the same time, but it would have bought time. The second thing would have been extending advertising through the third party app. That might discourage users of the free third party app, but it would also have given time to readjust the market price. Maybe the compromise would be that the free app could still be free of Reddit ads, but it wouldn't be customizable or would be limited in the number of additional subreddits with certain ones that were fixed to those free accounts. The key in both cases would be to work at making Reddit still available to those third party apps via the API and not the way it was brought to those developers. Lose the third party support, lose the support of moderators who have learned to be efficient with their way of using the site, lose the site.
IMO the issue that people are upset about, and as a result all the publicity going on, is just related to how much they wanted to charge people for the API.
If they rolled out something reasonable for pricing, and allowed people to use their own individual API keys in third party apps on a free tier, I think a few would have complained here and there, but otherwise it would have been fine.
Obviously they need to make money to pay for costs of running things somehow, there's nothing wrong with that.
And how little time they were giving. And quite frankly, the incredible entitlement spez has shown in the wake of the incident. And honestly from the start as if reddit had cause to be frustrated OpenAI built something cool off of Reddit users' content. As if he built the whole of reddit and all its content without decades worth of free hours from users and mods alike.
He doesn't want to build a platform for communities. He and his company want personal enrichment he already feels entitled to. He's making that pretty clear. Otherwise, IPO tomorrow and use it as a cash infusion rather than a liquidity event.
Let's not forget that they also nuked NSFW content on the API, which is at least 50% of the uproar. Nobody likes to mention it, but it's a big reason that a lot of people use Reddit.