Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark
Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark
'Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,' Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.
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They really should have just found out what the 3rd party apps -COULD PAY-. If it covered the cost of their usage and there was some profit on the top, it would at least bring in some money. Based on what I read by the Apollo dev, there was back and forth communication about pricing for a while until he broke the news.
It astounds me that they chose to cut them off entirely by offering impossible pricing. Isn't some money better than no money?
It's because the planned IPO. Allowing third party apps, that are better designed, show no ads and don't collect the same amount of telemetry data (seriously the official app spies constantly for user data), doesn't look good in the eyes of potential investors.
Also, the API feed doesn't push ads, so 3rd party ads don't have anything to show. Reddit should have redesigned their API so ads could get pushed out.
The idea was to kill 3rd party apps, duh.
Idk I use relay and he thinks he can do it for 3 dollars a month, but that's still giving into reddit. I'd rather then switch and start making Lemmy apps, or adapt their app over, might be unreasonable but just a thought
3 dollars a month for a lesser experience, mind. What with reddit stopping access to NSFW/explicit stuff via non-official apps.
But honestly, even if my app of choice - Sync - could do it, I'm not about to pay a corporation for content generated for free by us. The whole thing stinks of the slow slide of social media into the gutter. Happened with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit is no different.
Federated social media might take a little while to take off, but it will be so much less toxic and much more enjoyable without the ever expanding need of a corporation to deliver more and more profit at the expense of the user.
I’m not about to pay a corporation for content generated for free by us
That's actually a good point. I don't mind paying for access to an app, since it costs money to maintain, but our posts draw people into the site to read advice, news, and funny stuff. If Reddit is going full-monetization, there should at least be some payment for... upvotes? Views?
Not really a good point. Servers, bandwidth and employees cost money. Even if content is generated for free, those things cost money. A reasonable price is totally fair for an ad-free experience.
This. For those that understand that standing up the infrastructure costs money, I don’t think paying a reasonable price would be out of the realm. Even the Apollo dev was stating that API should not be free, but reasonable.
I feel like there's a weird disconnect in the way that a lot of people perceive physical and digital infrastructure.
For something like a road, it's natural to assume that maintaining it costs money - after all, you can see the wear and tear on it, you can see the guys patching it, etc. Because of this, things like paying tolls are an annoyance, but most everybody accepts it as the cost of keeping things running.
For a website, though, almost everything is hidden from the end user. You don't know how the server is doing beyond "is it up or down," you don't know how big the dev team was or how many people maintain it, or what costs they incur... And so, people seem to be more prone to assuming that "it just works," without considering the costs behind it.
Right, but the content is also what draws people in. Not just the infrastructure. So if some of that money made its way back to mods and top posters then they would be feeding the community instead of charging them for the content that brings in more viewers.
Others have speculated that the API pricing model is built around customers who want to use the data for AI training, not customers who want to build apps for public use. The $20M price tag is what they're hoping a mega corp will pay for data access and don't care about anyone who can't afford that much. Some money is better than no money, but for a lot of people the "chance" at BIG money is better than some money lol
If this is the case, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just separate into tiers, where mass data usage to feed into a language model is priced differently than people legitimately using and contributing content to the site.
they still have a lot to gain by killing the 3rd party apps and forcing the remaining users to the platform that will benefit their valuation the most. the pricing is to court the big whales to sell data to and the forcing people to use the native app is to improve the quality of the data they want to sell.
Precisely. Investors like apps because users cannot change their user experience, disable telemetry, block ads easily, and so on. They receive push notifications which drive engagement and allow easier tracking across accounts.
I think it's simply that they want to funnel all of their users to official channels. All of this "discussion" is a poorly veiled attempt at public justification. 30 days notice at the quoted price tag was very intentional. My hope is that Reddit seriously miscalculated the amount of damage this would cause. My suspicion is that /u/spez doesn't care and is willing to nuke the site for a one-time payout at maximum valuation.
This is what happens when a bunch of MBAs are detached from the product they're working on.
Hubris by the new execs they hired.