60 ms·

Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

• c7DJTLrn 3y ago
  Fuck you, Reddit. A guy develops an app way better than your dogshit for FREE and now you want to charge him for API calls? Frankly you should be paying him, and it should be a lot of money!
  • nklmilojevic 3y ago
    Well, it is not for free, he earns quite a lot of money for it. He is not a philanthropist.
• frodowtf 3y ago
  It's probably because their backend sucks as well.
• robbiet480 3y ago
  I'm shocked that Reddit has done this mere weeks after Twitter destroyed their thriving ecosystem of bots and apps by introducing horrific pricing.
  • raydev 3y ago
    What's funny is that Reddit's pricing is indeed more reasonable than Twitter's, but it's still too high to be make cheap third party clients feasible.
    • enlyth 3y ago
      It's probably the point, they want the official app to be the only choice, so they can control everything and show you more unblockable ads.
      • RobotToaster 3y ago
        I can see revanced reddit becoming a lot more popular soon.
      • TwoNineA 3y ago
        The day Apollo dies, the day I will stop using Reddit.
        • kitsunesoba 3y ago
          Fully agreed. Reddit without Apollo, Narwhal, RIF, Sync, etc is just plain unusable. The official site and app are so blatantly built around pumping "engagement" without regard to user experience and are engineered badly to boot.
        • rootusrootus 3y ago
          Along the same lines, once old.reddit.com stops working, it'll be the end of the line for me as well.
        • dkersten 3y ago
          Same. I can’t stand their web version or their own app. It’s Apollo or nothing for me.
        • elaus 3y ago
          I just wish one of the countless Reddit alternatives in the past ten years had gained any significant amount of traction (outside of very niche groups or groups far on the political fringe).
      • dirtyid 3y ago
        Wonder if they'll be sensible enough to acquire some apps after they become worthless to replace official app.
    • 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
      any dollar amount more than 0 is too much for an open source app like infinity or redreader who do not charge any money from users
    • rvz 3y ago
      It doesn't matter. It is their service and the API terms are subject to change at any time. So either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase access for a high price. Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse and TikTok have decided to ban third-party apps. Twitter and Reddit decided to charge for it. In this case with the developer of the third party Reddit client, unless he is making enough to cover the API costs, then it make no sense to build on someone else's API with little to no revenue. That is the risk. It is no different to TapBots (creators of TweetBot) doing the same mistake.
      • RandallBrown 3y ago
        Correct me if I'm wrong, but Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse, and TikTok all launched with first party apps. Twitter and Reddit both allowed a thriving third party ecosystem to develop before they made apps. (And in both cases they just bought the most popular apps.) Hell, the word tweet was invented by Twitterific, a third party twitter app. While it certainly is completely up to the platform to allow whatever they want, it's shitty to make a change that big and alienate many of your original most dedicated users.
  • PaulHoule 3y ago
    It is not at all accidental. Elon Musk has given cover for other social media sites to imitate many of his moves, such as Facebook introducing a subscription tier.
    • izzydata 3y ago
      Why would they want to imitate a failing business model?
      • PaulHoule 3y ago
        It's not about being rational, instead it is a kind of "vice signalling" between billionaires. It would be a better question to ask "Why did Mark Zuckerberg buy successful VR game companies and shut their games down?" (if you were having fun you wouldn't visit Horizon Worlds) or "Why did Zuckerberg damage a successful brand by renaming it?" It's not about money, it's about power. The primary currency of power is deference and if one powerful person demonstrates they can take an action and get deference that action is appealing to other powerful people who want to prove they can to do the same.
      • xeromal 3y ago
        Now that's the question. Is it a failing business model if everyone is starting to do it?
• jmclnx 3y ago
  I think it has all to do with AI accessing sites for "training", you can't blame reddit for wanting a piece of the action. Is the price high ? To me it is, but for a large company doing AI, probably not.
  • duskwuff 3y ago
    If it was about restricting access for AI training data, I'd expect them to give developers of actual, well-known client apps a break.
    • PaulHoule 3y ago
      It's all about keeping reddit safe for dark patterns. There is some good content on reddit still, if you look hard to find it, but one thing that makes it hard is that reddit blends ads into the content and I think also blends in non-sequitur content that further confuses the reader into looking at and clicking on the ads. They just can't let reddit clients provide a good, never mind better, experience.
    • Seattle3503 3y ago
      You could enforce per-usdr API limits rather than per-app limits as well.
  • 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
    can't they differentiate between api calls made by third party clients and AI training? this looks more malicious than ignorance or inefficiency. they want to mimic twitter by building off of community then claiming "costs". fuck reddit. No redditor wanted them to selfhost photos and videos, yet they replaced imgur with their own. Why?
    • duskwuff 3y ago
      > No redditor wanted them to selfhost photos and videos Honestly, this was probably one of the more reasonable features they've added. Having to upload images on an external site added a lot of friction for users, and put Imgur in an awkward spot as well when problematic content was removed from Reddit, but not from Imgur. Their video player still sucks, though. I'm not sure how they managed to make it so bad.
• willio58 3y ago
  Wow, that price is insane. To me, that's pretty clearly a shot at any competitor apps for Reddit. Purely anti-competitive behavior here, which to me is silly. Let other apps pop up to better serve your users. At the end of the day, they are still your users and you might learn things from the other apps. Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.
  • abletonlive 3y ago
    The idea that it's anti-competitive to do with your platform what you want is in my mind silly. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from building a reddit clone to compete against reddit besides your ability to attract their users. It comes off as extremely entitled to think that reddit should supply you with the data created by their platform to do what you want with it.
    • ohgodplsno 3y ago
      Reddit didn't create data. I did, you did, random users did. Why did it happen on Reddit? Because Reddit, at least for a while, seemed like it was a relatively open place where data wouldn't be stuck and made inaccessible without an account. Reddit exists _despite_ Reddit's incompetent management and tech teams, not thanks to them.
      • mdale 3y ago
        Eh. You can be more incompetent.
    • buildbot 3y ago
      Um, the users create the data, and consume it. Reddit provides a "marketplace" for that, and sells your data in exchange. Now, they want to rent-seek from the very people making it possible to create and consume that content easily. And it IMO, is anti-competitive - they are intentionally killing all existing competitors, vs. improving their own offering.
• grrrate 3y ago
  [dead]
• MengerSponge 3y ago
  I deleted the Twitter app a while ago, and if my only way to access Reddit is with their official app... I guess I'll be a little more productive this year.
  • WWLink 3y ago
    You'll still be able to access the website, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried killing that, too. If I were a profit-above-all bastard that was trying to squeeze my users for telemetry, I'd force them to use the mobile app exclusively to access my service.
    • MengerSponge 3y ago
      Hard pass
• Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 3y ago
  Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase their revenue, they're doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened. Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.
  • RhodesianHunter 3y ago
    Reddit has seemed rudderless for a long time. Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all. Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.
    • martin8412 3y ago
      A lot of subreddits blanket ban you if you've posted in other subreddits that the mods don't like.
      • RhodesianHunter 3y ago
        Reddit Admin itself will blanket ban accounts in entire sub-threads with no recourse or explanation. Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy, but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant? Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.
        • delfinom 3y ago
          >Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. Worse, they use browser fingerprinting AND IP.
• robbiet480 3y ago
  Reddit has posted their own announcements now https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda... and https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...
  • minimaxir 3y ago
    Apollo's developer also commented on that: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/jmd9e7v/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...
  • ccooffee 3y ago
    > Finally, to ensure that all regulatory requirements are met in the handling of mature content, we will be limiting access to sexually explicit content for third-party apps starting on July 5, 2023, except for moderation needs. Reddit really buried "no nsfw outside official reddit apps" (from the end of your first link). Didn't Tumblr do something similar and lose a significant fraction of its userbase and revenues?
    • rootusrootus 3y ago
      I can only assume Reddit wants to kill NSFW altogether. They require you to authenticate now if you want to see any of it (though of course they promise that somehow this will still be "anonymous"). Once they turn off old.reddit.com, I think that'll be the end of NSFW content on Reddit altogether. I assume they hope to attract more advertising money this way.
      • RandallBrown 3y ago
        They no longer require you to authenticate to see NSFW content. There's a big "I'm over 18" button below the login button. There was a few months where it was required, but it isn't anymore.
• srndsnd 3y ago
  I'm more surprised that reddit has maintained features like old.reddit.com and their API for this long. To me, this is textbook enshittification. Either die unprofitable or live long enough to see yourself rip features from TikTok.
  • shmde 3y ago
    old.reddit.com will be phased within 1 year. i.reddit.com went out this year and old.reddit.com will go out too, guaranteed.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • treeman79 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • nonrepeating 3y ago
    Let me take a moment to express gratitude that I have no idea what “DID,” “tradcath,” and “groyper” mean. Seems like I’ve made the right choice to eschew Twitter and Reddit.
    • Invictus0 3y ago
      Without googling, tradcath sounds like traditional catholic, similar to the term "tradcon" for traditional conservative.
    • None4U 3y ago
      "DID" stands for "dissociative identity disorder".
  • sosodev 3y ago
    This is such an absurd statement. I have to assume that you're trolling.
    • local_crmdgeon 3y ago
      Have you used Reddit or Twitter recently? They're basically open air insane asylums. You should spend 0% of your life talking about being a "Based Alpha Male." You absolutely should not use the same website as a "Based Alpha Male" influencer. I can come up with left wing equivalents if you're more into that?
      • d1str0 3y ago
        You’re comparing internet communities with real life institutions. You do realize there is a difference between real life and the internet?
• berkle4455 3y ago
  The data is all fully public and easily scraped from APIs (both reddit and twitter). Who is the audience for these paid plans? Is this for oauth enabled access on behalf of users?
  • dboreham 3y ago
    People who want to manage legal and interdiction risks?
  • minimaxir 3y ago
    In Reddit's case data scraping is soon to be against the Terms of Service (which is already the case for Twitter), which will earn you a Cease and Desist if you try to make a business off the data.
    • sebzim4500 3y ago
      Then don't sign in? See the LinkedIn legal precident, ToS only applies to scrapers if the scraper had to 'click' the agree button in order to sign up.
      • minimaxir 3y ago
        You're still going to get a Cease and Desist. You might have better odds in court with a precedent but you'll still be out legal fees.
        • berkle4455 3y ago
          So the AI companies secretly scraping the data and without producing a direct attribution or affiliation are precisely the ones unaffected by this, meanwhile devs trying to make complementary tooling (and thus fully public who they are and thus targets of C&D’s) are negatively impacted. What a lovely model.
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • deleted 3y ago
• moooo99 3y ago
  I like reddit, I really do. So it's sad to see them taking a page out of the twitter playbook and are taking active measures to destroy their thriving ecosystem. The official reddit app is an absolute nightmare and essentially unusable. Their "new" website also completely sucks and is even worse on mobile than it is on desktop. If this actually gets implemented as is, I'll definitely have a very productive rest of my year. I have no data to back this up, but I feel like with reddit, even more users only rely on third party clients than it was on twitter.
• jsnell 3y ago
  What's the granularity of a Reddit API call? Is e.g. loading a submission with all the comments, or loading the top 20 submissions to a subreddit a single request? Or do you actually end up doing tens of requests for what's effectively a single page load (one for the submission and a few comments, one for the each image, one for each additional batch of comments)? $0.24 for 1000 full page loads wouldn't actually sound insane (if you compare to typical CPMs of sites with ads), but it seems hard to believe that the average user is doing that 350 times / day.
• subpar 3y ago
  Come for the pricing info (50 million requests costs $12,000). Stay for the argument in the comments about whether or not HN users are deranged.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• sosodev 3y ago
  Keep in mind that Reddit has said they're going to stop serving NSFW content via API too. So if you enjoy that stuff you won't get it in Apollo even if you pay them.
  • rootusrootus 3y ago
    Reddit seems to want NSFW content gone altogether. At this point you can only see it anonymously if you go to old.reddit.com, if you go to the regular UI it requires you to authenticate before you can see any kind of questionable content.
    • kitsunesoba 3y ago
      > Reddit seems to want NSFW content gone altogether. Between this and trying to crowd out third party clients, one has to wonder if they're trying to position themselves to become the next Digg.
    • superfrank 3y ago
      I agree, but I find it funny that it seems to be backfiring. I've noticed a pretty large increase in the number of posts that are people getting maimed or killed on subs that show up on the front page. Subs like publicfeakout that used to be stuff like people yelling at each other in mall now regularly have gore voted to the top.
    • philipkglass 3y ago
      It looks like it's currently blocked on "new Reddit" only for mobile user agents. If I try opening https://www.reddit.com/r/boobs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/boobs/ in a desktop browser (or with a desktop agent on mobile) I get an option to just click on an "I'm over 18" button to see the content.
      • rootusrootus 3y ago
        Browse a little farther. Last time I found myself in that position, I could say I was over 18 and it let me go. For another click or too, then it interrupted again and insisted I sign in.
• ccooffee 3y ago
  > 50 million requests costs $12,000 I've never worked on a web platform like Reddit, nor with any per-request priced APIs. Reddit's charge of $0.00024 per request still looks like it is _significantly_ above what their own costs are. Wasn't Reddit's pay-for-API-access announcement originally phrased as a desire to claw back some of the value that LLMs have found in Reddit data? I don't understand how per-request API pricing actually accomplishes that. (I was vaguely anticipating Reddit's API pricing to have some sort of expensive "firehose" endpoint for OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc to pull from.) It looks like they're instead going to squeeze out all third-party apps instead. I don't think this bodes well for Reddit's future.
  • kenhwang 3y ago
    Their pricing likely includes the cost of potential ad revenue that an API call is displacing. There's no easy way to integrate ads into an API, so they just offload the advertising/monetization problem to whoever buys the content.
    • fastest963 3y ago
      Couldn't they just return ads from the API? Any apps that don't show them would have their API access revoked.
      • hombre_fatal 3y ago
        A verification pipeline for ad placement would be a whole new can of worms. I can only imagine the man hours that went into Google's Adsense bot, and it only had to verify websites rather than mobile apps.
      • danpalmer 3y ago
        The tricky bit with ads is that someone is paying for a user to see it, so if the user never scrolls to it, or perhaps scrolls past too fast, you probably need to know so you don't bill for it. If the user taps on it you definitely need to know that, regardless of whether the ad link is working, but you can't redirect and slow down the ad link. You need highly accurate data about user behaviour around the ads, and highly optimised display and linking. I've built a similar system, albeit not for ads, for recommendations, based on viewing items in a feed. With a simple model, across web and app, all developed in-house, it was still hard and required a lot of care to get good ML signals and signals that people really understood. Doing this across third party clients may be prohibitively difficult. I'd like to see attempts, but so far I've not seen any.
• egberts1 3y ago
  have you seen the latest Reddit app for iOS/macOS and its data privacy: there is zero privacy. This is why I am sticking with the web-based Old Reddit. Any further strangulation and it's "hasta la vista, Reddit".
  • Rebelgecko 3y ago
    Presumably that's why they've been making old reddit worse over time before they turn it off (kinda like i.reddit.com)
• jdminhbg 3y ago
  > Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month. I just don't understand why developers underprice their apps so much. You're talking about an app that people are constantly raving about, and that people use for multiple hours per day. Charge $5/month, that's half the price of Netflix or Disney+.
  • denimnerd42 3y ago
    well the problem with mobile apps is the alternatives are free. It's a bad business and why I didn't take my passion for mobile apps as a career.
    • sebzim4500 3y ago
      The reddit ones won't be though, unless they scrape instead of use the api. I doubt that's viable for a consumer app though, Reddit will probably break your app constantly.
      • denimnerd42 3y ago
        the official app isn't going to remain free?
        • sebzim4500 3y ago
          Ok but the official app is basically unusable. It's better to use the browser instead and ignore the annoying message telling you to use the app.
          • denimnerd42 3y ago
            agreed but that’s what your up against as an app developer. free and shit or good and not free. people will deal with shit sadly.
        • 3y ago
• GiorgioG 3y ago
  I won't be renewing my Reddit Premium. Clueless management doing what they do best. Edit: just to put my money with my mouth is, Reddit Premium sub cancelled.
• fluidcruft 3y ago
  There are a large portion of moderators who will quit if they cannot use RedditIsFun because the official app is complete crap for moderators. I really don't know why it has to be API use based anyway. We all log in to our individual accounts through the API. For clients they should be able to determine requests/account or let users pay for their own usage or something. They're in full batshit MBA mode.
  • stevenwliao 3y ago
    I rely on "nuke comment tree" from Apollo to kill flame trees. Modding is about to get a lot harder.
• debacle 3y ago
  I don't disagree with either party here. $12k for 50 million requests is not egregious, but $2.50 per user for something that is probably cheap/free to users is a non starter. Reddit has failed to adequately monetize their userbase, they've run into the same "politics and porn" issue that every social media platform has, and they've raised way, way too much money. The worst part? I couldn't tell you the last legitimate ad that I saw on reddit. Facebook shows semi-relevant ads, sometimes location based. Reddit ads are visual flotsam.
  • Aaronstotle 3y ago
    Personally, Facebook/Instagram show me really good ads, while Reddit-ads are always a complete miss.
    • chrisan 3y ago
      I might have too much privacy stuff enabled but Facebook could not be further from what I am interested in. I'm pretty sure FB thinks I'm a republican country hunter with a big beard who loves driving his huge truck to crossfit. Because of where I live possibly?
      • jccalhoun 3y ago
        I'll never forget a couple years ago when facebook showed me an add for asian american christians. If facebook doesn't know I'm not asian or christian then what does it know about me?
• e40 3y ago
  This means the end of a lot of my reddit use. Sure, I'll use it on my computer in a browser, but no more on my phone. This is probably a good thing, but I have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of some communities. And I pay for Apollo premium and just reupped. The app is a complete joy to use. The app developer is first rate. For how complex the app is, it is both easy to use and surprisingly bug free. (I know there are bugs, from the release notes for new versions, but I've never seen one.)
• tristanb 3y ago
  Reddits mobile app, and website are one of the worst UX experiences I've encountered on a UGC site. Terribly bad. I they should be working with people who can make products people want to use to consume their content, not killing them off with absurd pricing.
• saagarjha 3y ago
  Not to go all “I told you so” but I do recall Christian talking about how Reddit would never do anything like this and how much trust he had in their developer relations team now, oh, sometime earlier this year. Hope he took the suggestion to have a backup plan seriously…relying on the whims of a single company is a hard way to make your income. Doesn’t mean you can’t try it but it is fundamentally pretty risky.
  • SkyPuncher 3y ago
    I found this attitude from Christian really off-putting. Dude, you run an interface to another company’s core business. You cannot make any guarantees about what they may or may not do.
    • RoyGBivCap 3y ago
      I feel like it's the same thing with people who have a youtube channel. If you're in a situation where all of your income comes from a company, but you don't have an employer/employee contract with that company. It seems like such a precarious position to me.
      • lapcat 3y ago
        > but you don't have an employer/employee contract with that company. It seems like such a precarious position to me. Your employer can dump you at any time. If you hadn't noticed, there have been mass layoffs in many tech companies this year.
  • lapcat 3y ago
    Everything in life is risky. Show me the 100% reliable path to financial prosperity and happiness. You could get laid off tomorrow by your current employer. The stock market could crash, and any investments you made could amount to nothing.
    • saagarjha 3y ago
      Nope, you don’t understand. You make apps for macOS. I understand that there is risk there. I’m not one of those people who go around telling you it’s your fault when Apple pulls the plug on you, because you understand the risk you operate in and I think it’s fine for people to do this. Now, if you paraded around telling people you trust Apple and that they would never hurt you in any way, and that you had conversations with their management and they want you to succeed, now we have a problem.
• nightpool 3y ago
  $2.50 / month / user does not seem that insane when it's put into that sort of perspective, but certainly more than I think most of the current users of the app would be happy paying. Hopefully they can compromise somewhere around $5 / user / year which I think most users would happily pay for for a third party app.
• jabroni_salad 3y ago
  Maybe I am just too desktopbrained but it seems weird to charge the developer for requests sent by a User Agent, rather than.... the user. Are they gonna try to bill google chrome, too?
• rvz 3y ago
  Unsurprising as that was inevitable and Reddit needs to make money. Unless you can afford the high prices, don't build your whole business solely on someone else's API. Twitter made that clear and now so did Reddit. Like I said before in [0] "Either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase a high price for it." [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087219
• NelsonMinar 3y ago
  APIs should not be revenue generators! I don't mind companies charging for an API, either to cover the costs of service or to encourage efficient behavior. But Twitter and now Reddit seem more like they are rent seeking with their APIs and it's just not going to work out well. Particularly galling since they're effectively charging to access all this content that users generated for free. The other explanation is these charges are intended to kill third party uses of the API. I'm pretty sure that's what is mostly motivating Twitter (down to the weed joke price).
• superfrank 3y ago
  I don't know how many employees Apollo App has, but I wonder if a viable solution is just to build their own Reddit? I realize that's a massive task, but if the only other option is shut the company down, it might be worth exploring. They've already got the interface built and if you remove a lot of the bells and whistles, Reddit is a pretty simple app other than the scale at which they operate (which is obviously a massive challenge).
  • TechnicolorByte 3y ago
    Honestly not a bad idea. Apollo has such a dedicated fanbase that if you get them to adopt a new community, then the quality of posts will start out pretty high. So much of Reddit is crap anyway so drop in quantity from lack of network effect wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Focus on Apollo’s strengths: great UX and bring it to the web. Ofc the major issue is how to avoid enshittification. Having a good monetization strategy from the start is key. Hardest part besides attracting large user count is to attack some of Reddit’s failings: terrible arbitrary moderation. That’s the tricky part.
  • Tsiklon 3y ago
    I think Apollo is a “one man band”
• MaxikCZ 3y ago
  This will basically kill 3rd apps. I refuse to use their official client. Where are you guys moving on next?
• jquery 3y ago
  My long time reddit account got permabanned because I argued with the mod of a popular subreddit (I disagreed with him about the localization of a Japanese game, really trivial stuff). It was a veteran, seasoned account with lots of awards, karma, and "reddit coins" ($hundreds of dollars worth). The permaban message said I could use my other reddit accounts as long as I followed the rules on them. As soon as I tried using my other veteran Reddit accounts, *all* my accounts were immediately banned for "ban evasion". Poof. I tried to appeal but when you're permabanned you are limited to only using a small appeal form with 250 characters maximum. I tried to bypass this by linking to a google doc. Nobody visited my google doc and yet reddit said they "reviewed my appeal" and "will not be lifting the permaban". I'm not a troll, I never harassed anyone, used slurs, called for violence, etc. My only offense was arguing with a powercrazed mod (hated by most of his own subreddit), and my Reddit accounts are all wiped. When I try to create a new account, they get permabanned too after a day or so, so I gotta give reddit's "platform integrity" team some credit, merely using a VPN isn't sufficient. I just wish they'd treat customers who've given them hundreds of dollars the courtesy of a phone call or a human review. I really hate how some big tech companies feel they're totally above providing any level of customer support. Reddit isn't alone here. I can't even get refunded by my CC company because the coins were purchased over 6 months ago. At least I still have HN.
• 58x14 3y ago
  I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase. Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM clients. Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be developing its own first-party language model, and any other model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay these much higher rates. Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are losing.
  • amelius 3y ago
    Can't they pull the data from archive.org?
    • notacoward 3y ago
      That would be worse.
    • KuiN 3y ago
      Archive.org was knocked offline the other day due to some AI startup scraping it to death. It’s not a good thing.
      • moneywoes 3y ago
        Source, they don’t rate limit
• paddw 3y ago
  From a business perspective, it never made sense for Reddit to support free API access for third party apps for as long as they did. Now, they are effectively killing those apps. The thing "not based in reality" was expecting it to go on as long as it did.
  • minimaxir 3y ago
    Social networks are a two-sided marketplace. In the case of Twitter, power users who posted the best content almost exclusively use third-party apps for the extra features and usability they provide, and the ban on those amplified Twitter's quality issues. You have many people in this very submission saying they will quit Reddit if Apollo becomes defunct.
• londons_explore 3y ago
  I think reddit is being naive by charging per API request. Do that, and application developers will try to reduce them - for example, caching popular subreddits or posts (ie. "this is /r/technology as it looked when we last crawled 15 minutes ago"). If Christian added a cache layer on his own server he could easily make the finances work. But... Thats in nobodies interest - Users end up with stale content, Reddit looses users due to stale content and loses revenue due to Christian extending caching times to save money. Also, Christian will make uncachable requests, like for example voting, hard to do, which again hurts reddit as a platform.
  • fluidcruft 3y ago
    Does the API work that way now? The part on your own server used to only be for authentication and clients would then interact with reddit's servers directly. (Haven't done anything recently but used to maintain a moderation bot).
    • londons_explore 3y ago
      Currently clients talk direct to reddit's servers. But if reddit started billing for API requests, you can bet every appmaker would run a caching server to reduce the number of API requests. Or they'd do some kind of peer-to-peer caching between clients.
  • ksala_ 3y ago
    Either Reddit is happy about the caching as you cost them less, or they're not happy about it and they just block your app if you do that. Now, people could scrape the website or allow users to bring their own API keys, but then it becomes a cat and mouse game. And if you're trying to sell your app on any of the app stores, Reddit could likely get it taken down/take legal actions.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• SirMaster 3y ago
  They say that the free tier API for users will be 100 queries per minute. Why can't a third party app use each user's individual API queries for that user's app usage? Like you have the user OAuth with the app, and then the app uses that user's own user API access to query the API. 100 queries a minutes seems like it should be enough for most people.
  • jamie_ca 3y ago
    Because they're also taking this opportunity to change rate limiting from client_id+user_id to just client_id. To stay inside the free tier, you get 1000 requests spread over 10 minutes (their current spike-smoothing behaviour) across your entire user base.
    • SirMaster 3y ago
      I'm not that great at APIs. Is client_id something you have to register with reddit? So you can't, for example have a client_id per user? What if you as the app maker forced all your users who want to use your app to go register for their free personal client_id for their own personal API use, and then you have them give that client_id to the app along with their OAuth with they log in? I am just trying to understand why a third party app can't just be a "software shell" that individual users can use to access reddit through their own personal free API limits as if they were just some individual accessing reddit through the API.
      • wvenable 3y ago
        > Is client_id something you have to register with reddit? Yes.
      • JoshGlazebrook 3y ago
        client_id is effectively "apollo" in this context.
        • pb7 3y ago
          Yes, GP's question is why can't I go register "apollo_pb7" and give Apollo my secret token so it can make requests on my behalf?
• add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  Losing my free/ad-free client got me to delete a Twitter account (and habit) I'd had for 12 years, didn't really want anymore, but would likely not have ditched proactively. If the same thing happens with Reddit I'll be ecstatic.
• dirtyid 3y ago
  I find myself remoting to desktop chrome+userscript more and more to get any semblance of enjoyable experience in last few years.
• napoleoncomplex 3y ago
  It's clearly intended to weed out third party apps, same as Twitter. I have a pet theory that all the companies doing this are converging on the same long term plan - kill third party apps, have premium subscriptions (Facebook recently launched one too), and then give the users the choice - use the service for free, with forced opt-in into personalized marketing, sharing data with 3rd parties, or pay for premium. There's legal precedent already in Europe that this is fine by GDPR rules, as long as the price of the subscription is "reasonable". That way they get to preserve (or even improve) their ad targeting business, on the assumption that most users will just choose selling their data over a subscription. And if they go for a subscription, even better. In a sense, let the market decide the value of privacy. The first step in this would obviously be killing any third party alternatives that would be the first place of refuge when they make that move. In any case, a pet theory, but there's been a strange convergence by these big companies and the way they're changing their business models.
• glonq 3y ago
  Oh, that sucks. I don't use Apollo, but I imagine that this mean's I'll eventually lose RIF, which is an excellent mobile client.
• 8organicbits 3y ago
  Consuming an API is a tough business. Between Twitter arbitrarily blocking API access, and now both Twitter and Reddit now charging obscene rates. It's a death sentence for some really useful projects and reduces the total value of the ecosystem.
• alex_lav 3y ago
  Company that can’t make money desperately tries to gouge profit out of stuck users. There’s a playbook for this.
  • Ekaros 3y ago
    In the end users must be for the service in one way or an other. Either be it add impressions, subscriptions, selling imaginary stickers or charging a lot for using the API... Not sure why couldn't subscription cover the API use for the user.
  • conradfr 3y ago
    I'm amazed that one of the most visited website/app in the world with highly cacheable (free user generated) content can't be profitable (enough?).
• Eavolution 3y ago
  Another subscription. Great. The reddit client I use is brilliant (relay for reddit pro), not sure what they're doing about this but I'm not using the official client and I only use reddit on my phone. I'm really sick of subscriptions though, I'd rather just pay up front and not have another subscription
• tambourine_man 3y ago
  It worked great for Twitter, I’m sure it will be an incredible success for Reddit as well. </sarcasm> Hopefully one more nudge towards decentralized services and open standards.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• eatsyourtacos 3y ago
  Reddit is getting destroyed by tiktok for casual news/random videos etc. I was a huge reddit user over the years, but now I only go there for a handful of very specific subreddits. That's really it's only use anymore. It's great for that, but they are probably seeing massive decline in usage. And the moment they basically kill 3rd party reddit apps is the day I barely touch it again.
  • alfalfasprout 3y ago
    I can't really agree. The curation on reddit just far, far better outside of the super generic frontpage subreddits. Tik tok is 99% garbage content.
    • RoyGBivCap 3y ago
      [dead]
    • emodendroket 3y ago
      I think the problem is the garbage content is where the money is.
    • arbitrage 3y ago
      > Tik tok is 99% garbage content. You're likely not using TikTok effectively. I personally use it, and all my engagements with it are 100% relevant to my interests.
    • eatsyourtacos 3y ago
      But that's what I mean- for the few specific places to go, sure it's great. However I only need to go to something like an /r/nfl or /r/valheim for a few minutes each day to catch up on some specific news like that I want to see. For checking out completely random things, or funny things, or just to brwose around... that's where tiktok destroys them now. >Tiktok is 99% garbage content That's... a statement.
    • dabluecaboose 3y ago
      >The curation on reddit just far, far better outside of the super generic frontpage subreddits. Even smaller subreddits can be pretty terrible with bad mods. A lot of smaller hobby subreddits are basically treated as facebook groups, with people treating it as a group for people with an interest and not a focused discussion about that interest,
• Undrafted7 3y ago
  For what it’s worth, I literally just created my first HN account after seeing the Apollo dev’s post. Hope I don’t bring down y’all’s collective IQ by being here lol.
• bluescrn 3y ago
  Please Reddit, just let us use a web browser to access your web site. Users shouldn’t be forced so aggressively into using an ‘app’ - whether the official one or a 3rd-party app - when mobile web browsers are so very capable.
  • azemetre 3y ago
    Ever since learning the phrase "enshittification" [1] from Cory Doctorow it becomes more apparent when it happens around you. I wonder if there is a "fediverse" for something like forums? I can never get into mastodon because it's not like forums and conversations between people are quite hard if you don't follow them. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
    • 7v3x3n3sem9vv 3y ago
      check out Lemmy https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
      • nullindividual 3y ago
        Last I checked the main instance became a haven for US domestic terrorists and like-minded ilk.
        • sudosysgen 3y ago
          Perhaps, however the tech works. The point of the fediverse is you can choose who to federate with.
        • jrflowers 3y ago
          [flagged]
    • proto_lambda 3y ago
      Something like that could probably be built on top of the matrix protocol, I'm not aware of anything concrete though.
• Undrafted7 3y ago
  [dead]
• tpmx 3y ago
  It's business. While I do hate reddit with the passion of a thousand burning suns I acknowledge their right to set their API prices however they wish. They are not a monopolist by any stretch of the word.
  • brookst 3y ago
    Sure, but nobody suggested otherwise.
  • MrStonedOne 3y ago
    [dead]
• andrewinardeer 3y ago
  My understanding is that LLMs use Reddit comments as training data. These LLMs are often well funded and Reddit is using this to their advantage. Suddenly, a decade or so of this kind of data has turned to gold and damned if a company soon to travel down an IPO pathway is passing this cash cow up.
• sverona 3y ago
  Nobody mention that their RSS feeds still work...
  • aquova 3y ago
    While I use RSS for many things, I find Reddit's RSS feeds rather useless due to the large volume of posts, even on moderately small subreddits. If there is some way to limit it to just the top posts of the day I would consider using it, but AFAIK it's all or nothing.
    • skrause 3y ago
      You can subscribe to the "top" page of the last week, on average this feed will only have 3-4 new entries per day. Example RSS feed: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/top/.rss?sort=top&t=week https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/top/.rss?sort=top&t=week
  • tech234a 3y ago
    Changes go into effect July 1.
• finger 3y ago
  Was the API free to use before this?
• Zetice 3y ago
  I blocked the reddit.com domain from all of my devices a few weeks ago, because until recently I didn't feel like I could keep my finger on the pulse of "The Internet" without Reddit. That's no longer the case. Google's "For You" gets me my niche subject-specific content, Google News/Memeorandum (and its sibling sites)/Apple News gives me the mainstream media perspectives, HN (and maybe Bluesky occasionally) my urge to discuss and engage with others, and YouTube Shorts (I refuse to install TikTok) helps me understand Internet culture. I don't think any one company came for Reddit on their own, but what they've left Reddit with as a differentiator are the communities. Unfortunately, those end up existing as little fiefdoms for the moderators who run them, and if that's all you're going to offer, you're not going to be able to justify that $10-$15bn (probably lower now) valuation to investors.
  • doix 3y ago
    > but what they've left Reddit with as a differentiator are the communities. Yeah, I pretty much only use reddit for a few game communities, unfortunately with this change I suspect more and more people will move to discord. It's pretty annoying, but I suspect I'll have to eventually cave and join them when they finally kill old.reddit.com.
    • idiotsecant 3y ago
      ugh, discord is basically IRC. There's a reason we don't use IRC for everything. I hate that it's replacing everything.
      • 411111111111111 3y ago
        No? It's more like a BB with inbuild live voicechat, streaming etc. IRC itself doesn't provide a shared history, threading etc. You could get there with alternative clients and bots (at least if all participants use the same), but calling that IRC is a stretch
        • idiotsecant 3y ago
• Banbeck 3y ago
  The day I can't use Apollo to browse Reddit is the day I ditch it entirely. It's mostly just a toilet scroller for me anyways.
• malikNF 3y ago
  Every few years we rediscover centralization even if they start off as open-source community driven yada yada and the eventually lead to walled gardens. I love reddit but recently they are starting to make it harder to use their services. Eventually its going to turn in to a cesspool just like facebook. Something new is gonna come open to all we promise its always free and then repeat.
• Banbeck 3y ago
  Well, looks like this is the end of any social media use for me. Reddit was already hanging by a thread for me. Not being able to use Apollo for this will be the last nail in the coffin.
  • BlackjackCF 3y ago
    Same. I only find Reddit tolerable because of Apollo. The official Reddit app pales in comparison. I hope they can come to some sort of agreement or find a way to acquihire the Apollo developer (though that might kill the app with crappy features as well).
    • galangalalgol 3y ago
      I've always just used the web, is there some reason to use an app for it? I liked it as a place to look for people talking about things I might want to buy. I'm sure it is full of fake comments, but the ones that make verifiable claims for or against are useful.
      • alpaca128 3y ago
        > is there some reason to use an app for it? Yes, the obstructive popup when you visit reddit on a mobile browser to force you into installing the app. Other than that only if you want to do more than read.
        • cmh89 3y ago
          It makes me laugh that reddit's mobile site will let you view NSFW content but wont let you go to the contents of a NSFW post without downloading the app or signing in. Reddits main function as a porn facilitator will really hamper its desire to make lots of money as a publicly-traded business.
          • bongobingo1 3y ago
            My understanding is they're actively working to minimise NSFW communities in lede to the IPO.
• racl101 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm out. I'm not using Reddit on its own app nor the browser. The app is huge and clunky. The browser is turtle slow. Neither gives me the granularity that Apollo gives me. The swipe controls are slick and so are the filters. If I can't consume it with Apollo then it ain't worth it to me. And I already paid for the app. I refuse to pay more for something that is not a necessity. Apollo would have to become a subscription to be sustainable and in a time where everybody wants to make a subscription out of everything I, on the other hand, am in a shut down everything that is not essential mode. This is not essential. Neither is Netflix. Neither is Disney Plus. I'm looking for more to cut. And while, i can currently afford all this, that might not always be the case and I'm sick of subscriptions that just are just leeching out of our $$$ our bank accounts month to month and that eventually add up. Also, I've been considering cutting back on toxic social media and maybe this is just the right push I need. Oh well. Had a good run. *shrugs*
  • activiation 3y ago
    Old.reddit.com isn't too bad
    • busymom0 3y ago
      I suspect that will also go away soon.
    • spurgu 3y ago
      Yeah. Can nowadays also be toggled in the settings so you don't have to setup any redirect extension. Which makes me hopeful that it might not be going away but I'm not holding my breath. Without old Reddit (and third-party apps on mobile) I'd stop using Reddit completely, I have zero doubts about that.
      • Klonoar 3y ago
        You still want a redirect extension since that forces it even if you're in, say, an incognito tab. The settings piece will only work if you're signed in.
• ftth_finland 3y ago
  As soon as Reddit kills RSS feeds it is dead to me.
• pkulak 3y ago
  I've been very happy with Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/ https://tapbots.com/ivory/ Every few months I kick a couple bucks to my homeserver (which is currently running a pretty large surplus or I'd do more) and that's the end of it.
  • bmarquez 3y ago
    Ivory is for Mastodon. Lemmy is the Fediverse replacement for Reddit. The only iOS app for Lemmy is Remmel which is dead and no longer available on the App Store.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• pcurve 3y ago
  I have no idea what the actual cost incurred by Reddit is, but they're asking for $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. (basically fetching content) Does anyone have a ballpark?
  • dgacmu 3y ago
    Ballpark: depends how you want to depreciate servers but under a penny. They're not charging for cost; they're charging ad revenue replacement for users using apps. It's pretty clear in the way the Apollo costs would be about $2.50 per month, which isn't that far from the $7/mo for reddit premium.
• neilv 3y ago
  For individual users (not voracious LLM and data mining and surveillance), is there any reason an app can't just be a "specialized Web browser", scraping subreddit memberships/posts/comments just-in-time, as a user browses interactively, with that access pattern and pacing? Or a plugin of improvements for a general-purpose Web browser? (It could even preserve ads.) The reason for such an app would be that a lot of people like parts of Reddit community content, but much fewer people like many of the UI attempts that Reddit has made of the years (for desktop, mobile Web, and apps).
  • nickthegreek 3y ago
    Reddit's Terms of Service.
• kup0 3y ago
  Another day, another service driven to madness by the poison of advertising
• imchillyb 3y ago
  No Apollo, no reddit. The entertainment isn't that entertaining.
• rickreynoldssf 3y ago
  Reddit Permabanned me (13 year old 450k karma account) after I went after crypto scammers, calling out the scam with details etc. I got tons of coins or whatever gifted to me and even more thanks and way to go from users. Evidently reddit considered it harassment (of the plain as day scammers) and won't budge after an appeal. So, f reddit.
  • arbitrage 3y ago
    A hit dog hollers, that's for sure. You likely pissed off an admin who was heavily leveraged in the crypto markets, or actively scamming users. Seems like reddit's old reputation of being capricious and spiteful is still apt. Charming.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    The appeals aren't monitored by humans in a meaningful way. You expect some human to look into it for 10 minutes, see that your comments aren't abusive and that there is some merit... But they have someone once or twice a week look at a list of 200 appeals at a time, dismiss all 200 after glancing at the subject line of all of them together for 15 seconds, and then move on to the next page. There is nothing they want from a 13 year old account. You're a liability. You still use old.reddit.com, they want to get rid of that without backlash. You want 2007's reddit back where you could have amazingly intelligent discussions on just about anything with dozens of other people who are essentially anonymous to you. They want to be Facebook, with ijits clicking on tiktok videos. It's quite possibly they're just banning old accounts so they can re-invent themselves as a spammy Facebook/Instagram/whatever clone. You're in the way. It'd be a mistake to assume that they're pro-bitcoin-scammer, when mostly they're just generically evil and want what you liked about Reddit to be long dead.
  • mschuster91 3y ago
    You can always file a lawsuit. In Germany, it's even easier, a C&D court order is enough here to make most of the social networks reconsider.
    • adastra22 3y ago
• jlmorton 3y ago
  Here's a much more informative post [1] from Apollo developer Christian on Reddit last month, along with an older post [2] with some additional info. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_few_calls_with_reddit_today_about_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
  • rjh29 3y ago
    I'm confused as your first link is the same link as this HN post - unless mods have changed it.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • Arcuru 3y ago
      A few threads have been merged into this one, so some of the comments were on submissions that linked elsewhere.
    • jdwithit 3y ago
      Mods merged 2 or 3 posts into this one, there were several dupes
    • jlmorton 3y ago
      Yeah, the post was originally a link to Daring Fireball [1]. [1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/05/31/reddit-apollo-api-pricing https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/05/31/reddit-apollo-a...
• s1k3s 3y ago
  Reading the comments in their announcement thread[0] reminds me of the "I'm leaving to Canada" from the Trump era. I'm sure they did the math and I'm sure Reddit will be just fine. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
  • alpaca128 3y ago
    Switching to a new trendy online platform is very, very different from migrating to another country and all that comes with it. It takes a few minutes at most. Imagine where Meta would be now if it hadn't just bought up all competition from WhatsApp to Instagram.
    • s1k3s 3y ago
      Of course it is, yet people still stormed social media claiming they'd do it.
• xavdid 3y ago
  I got nervous that the API changes would be the end of Apollo, and thus largely the end of my Reddit use. So, I made a way to export all of my post and comment data into a searchable SQLite archive: https://github.com/xavdid/reddit-user-to-sqlite/ https://github.com/xavdid/reddit-user-to-sqlite/ It can pull your recent activity from the API, but also has support for pulling data from a GDPR archive (a feature I'm very proud of).
• Zemtomo 3y ago
  Using reddit only for porn. So I'm quite happy if they destroy themselves. I spend too much time on it anyway
• schoolornot 3y ago
  Seems odd to only charge developers. Make API use part of Gold and call it a day.
  • Terretta 3y ago
    Daring Fireball framing is unfortunate: "Apollo is making API calls"... No, users who want a usable Reddit are making API calls.
• bink 3y ago
  Reddit has a long history of making truly brain-dead decisions and following them up with something slightly more reasonable. I can only hope this is another case.
• mvdtnz 3y ago
  An average Apollo user is causing 344 API requests per day? That's a lot! I wonder if Apollo should prioritise reducing that number. I'd bet anything there is a lot of low hanging fruit to be had with aggressive caching and general tidying up.
  • leovander 3y ago
    Infinite doom scrolling, clicking into threads, load more comments, replying/making comments, etc. It adds up.
  • askafriend 3y ago
    Apollo users are also probably more likely to be Reddit power users. Think about it - who would go out of their way to download a un-official app?
    • mvdtnz 3y ago
      I've downloaded an unofficial app and I'm by no means a power user. I just don't like the official app.
  • Klonoar 3y ago
    Selig isn't exactly new to this rodeo, I would honestly wager there's no low-hanging fruit in this regard. Edit: and certainly nowhere near enough to offset that kind of price increase.
  • ohgodplsno 3y ago
    That is exactly a Reddit admins response, and I can't even begin to process how irresponsible, unprofessional and downright moronic of a take that is. Other apps are around that ballpark, and that's every before considering that Apollo users tend to be heavily power users. Over 7000 moderators of 20k+ users subs for starters, means a lot of requests.
    • mvdtnz 3y ago
      Sorry if you think this take is "moronic" but I've gone through the exercise of cutting back usage on chatty APIs several times and it's real, meaningful work that makes a difference. I'm not a reddit admin. Please try to engage in good faith on this website. I'd suggest reading the "In Comments" section of the hacker news guidelines if you're unsure. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• robotburrito 3y ago
  Sites like reddit and discord will have trouble surviving eventually I think. The communities that rely on it may as well just host their own alternative at this point. It will allow them to have more control. However, I do admit that maybe doing such a thing is a bit much for many non technical communities.
• RoyGBivCap 3y ago
  Reddit is a sexist, racist, free speech bait & switching website owned by the second richest family on the planet. The sooner it's gone, the better.
  • jrflowers 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • NineStarPoint 3y ago
    The Newhouse family are certainly multibillionaires, but they don’t even crack top 10 richest from what I can tell.
• tumult 3y ago
  Reddit is a website. Just make normal browser requests. You don't have to use their "sanctioned" "API."
  • ohgodplsno 3y ago
    Unfortunately, that turns your app from "load consistent data" to "parse HTML that could change daily and try to keep up with a perpetually moving shit pie". Not the greatest of experience, both for devs and users.
    • tumult 3y ago
      In theory, maybe. In practice, I've not found that to be the case.
• dcchambers 3y ago
  If the primary complaint from Reddit is that they are losing revenue (no ad impressions/lack of user data and metrics gathering) why don't they just keep the API free/affordable but require developers to show ads and send usage metrics back to reddit? I feel like it's incredibly short sighted for these companies to limit their APIs.
  • kgwxd 3y ago
    Doesn’t thins kind of do that while putting all the work and risk on to the third parties? Apollo will either find revenue to support the cost, or someone else will, or no one will and then Reddit can maybe lower the price.
• I_am_tiberius 3y ago
  Seriously, does anyone think it won't be different with APIs from other vendors... like ChatGPT?
  • teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    Right now GPT-4 is the clear front-runner. But it could easily be the case that in a few months there will be someone else in the lead. And Claude/Bard are already catching up. What I'm saying is that LLMs are more of a commodity than Reddit is. If one locks out 3rd party developers then another can become the favorite.
  • nomel 3y ago
    It’s already different. You have to pay for GPT API usage.
• digdigdag 3y ago
  Disappointing. Sad to see such a wonderful app likely meet its end. This is to be expected when you pin your existence on the good graces of a for-profit company. Reddit wants IPO. Badly. They want to show potential investors that they're solvent. To this end, as Google did nearly two decades ago, they will monetize every inch of their user base and application -- that includes access to their data. But Reddit is on thin ice -- as MySpace, Digg, del.icio.us all found out and as Twitter is finding out. Why? Reddit doesn't have any asset of intrinsic value. Reddit don't have sought after intellectual property. Reddit doesn't produce any goods. Reddit's value is the community and the data they bring. When they antagonize the community, they are antagonizing what is keeping the lights on for them.
  • jiscariot 3y ago
    I think there is also value to the general online/web community, in keeping the reddit community on reddit.
    • ninkendo 3y ago
      Reddit is too big for there to be a “Reddit community”… any other online community (like HN) is probably already full of people who also frequent Reddit.
  • sunflowerfly 3y ago
    And that community voluntarily performs most of the moderation for free. I believe they would have to start paying moderators if the cost to use the platform rises substantially. It would no longer feel like a community and instead feel like working for free for a big corporation. Twitter was barely profitable when Musk bought it partially because of the cost of thousands of moderators.
• moomoo11 3y ago
  Reddit sucks
• lastangryman 3y ago
  That API pricing, for what is mostly static content, is just insane. I've created pricing models for write heavy APIs that come out at a fraction of that, while still maintaining a margin. If that's a genuinely "fair" price then Reddit have some serious technical debt. It feels like this is intentionally overpriced to discourage any serious use.
  • killingtime74 3y ago
    I see your point but mostly pricing is not based on cost, it's what the market will bear. Could be way above cost or way below
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• consumer451 3y ago
  Can someone give me a couple reasons why it does not make sense to buy Apollo out, and make it the default iOS app? It is currently maintained by one excellent developer, is featured by the Apple App Store for design... what's the downside?
  • SnorkelTan 3y ago
    Why spend millions when you can just shut off their api access?
  • teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    The downside is the developer has pride and cares about building a good product. Not about whatever insanity the Reddit "leadership" wants done to their platform.
  • ohgodplsno 3y ago
    Sunk costs. They've worked really hard on making sure their official app is an actual piece of garbage. I am truly impressed at the amount of work it takes to make something that is that bad. People being paid for the existence of that app make me feel good in that no matter how bad I can get, no matter how senile and incompetent I'll become, there'll be a job for me somewhere. Paid absurdly well, too.
  • Terretta 3y ago
    I'm having trouble remembering right now but I think that's how they got a prior app. Or maybe Twitter. Or Gmail getting an iOS app with amazing search... These firms hirebuy (like acquihire but more money) a single dev with an amazing tool, and not long after the tool is terrible and the dev is out of there.
    • dabluecaboose 3y ago
      Alien Blue. I was a user back when I had an iPhone and it was wonderful.
      • 3y ago
• nh23423fefe 3y ago
  if rif stops working, ill stop using reddit. their UI sucks
• symlinkk 3y ago
  How much did this guy make from people buying Apollo though? Probably millions right?
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  Seems to me like they priced the API to cash in on the LLM training data gold rush, and as a side-effect it makes third-party user apps infeasible. Oops.
  • hendersoon 3y ago
    They priced the API for LLM training and killing third-party apps is just a great bonus. If they wanted to retain third-party apps while protecting their revenue stream they could have simply created a new free API including all the ads. They deliberately chose to kill these apps.
    • phendrenad2 3y ago
      I think Hanlon's Razor applies here.
    • dontreact 3y ago
      Why wouldn’t people then just scrape using the free API?
      • nawgz 3y ago
        Most users are not technical Most technical users are still happy to use a GUI over writing their own scraper / visualizer
      • bluefirebrand 3y ago
        You can throttle APIs so they are still useful for a human browsing content, but essentially worthless for scraping meaningful amounts of data. You can also detect accounts that are displaying scraping behavior and block them.
        • dontreact 3y ago
          An LLM only has to download text once. You could easily coordinate a scrape across various IPs and accounts over the course of a couple of months and it would be really hard to detect. Especially if you target alternate GUI api based versions of the site.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  Time to pivot man
• mongol 3y ago
  Something like this at first feels like bad news, but may later turn out to be good. If something hooks me off Reddit and I use my time better, it is a net positive, for me. Unfortunately, Reddit has good parts to which I don't know alternatives. For example, right now I am studying for a certification and there is a subreddit for that. I recently bought an e-bike and there was a subreddit for that. It is useful.
  • witchesindublin 3y ago
    The positives that the majority of people seem to bring up about Reddit could be replicated with the pre-reddit forum culture that had the UX of a pre-forum threaded chat. In fact one would argue that the internet was more diverse during the pre-reddit forum era, and that reddit has capitalised on the growing number of internet users instead. Virtually all of the other aspects of Reddit have been increasingly detested (major subreddits) or are being replaced by other services such as TikTok.
    • mongol 3y ago
      I agree, it could be replicated, but is it? I feel that there are much fewer independent forums than there used to. And if instead the conversation steps into Facebook, then I am not following.
• FollowingTheDao 3y ago
  Why are capitalists always so surprised when capitalism capitalizes on other capitalists?
• zeekaran 3y ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• rattus 3y ago
  weirdly seems driven by AI training data IP, which if the case, I don't even get the argument.
• detrist 3y ago
  Why not charge the user instead for the “privilege” of using a third-party app?
• danijelb 3y ago
  The web went in the wrong direction when we abandoned the initial concepts of user agents, which was that the browser has the ultimate choice of what to render and how. That concept, transferred to today's world of apps would simply mean that any client like Apollo is essentially a browser locked on Reddit's website, parsing HTML (which has the role of an API) and rendering the content in a native interface. As long as the user can access the HTML for free, they should be able to use any application (a browser or a special app) and render the content however they wish. Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly, but with the recent resurgence of server-side rendering we may soon be able to get rendered HTML with one HTTP request. And then the only hurdles will be legal.
  • leros 3y ago
    Seems like you could still a meta UI that drives the underlying SPA in a hidden browser but it would be a pain. Maybe a framework for that will be built one day
    • bearjaws 3y ago
      Seems like we're always missing a fusion of: 1. SPA that you can run on your phone or desktop 2. Centralized User Management, need some way to block known bad actors 3. Signing posts / comments 4. Distribution of posts and comments over DHT? 5. Hosting images, videos and lengthy text posts on torrents 6. A whack ton of content moderation software to somehow make decentralized moderation work. 7. Image recognition for gore / CP that inevitably will get spammed This would enable people to help host the subreddits they are subscribed to, but murder battery life on mobile unfortunately.
  • numpad0 3y ago
    App Store. It’s the App Store and iPhone that killed the web.
  • DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    > Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly It works the other way: with today's SPAs the API (that powers the frontend) is exposed for us to use directly, without going through the HTML - just use your browser's devtools to inspect the network/fetch/XHR requests and build your own client. ----- On an related-but-unrelated note: I don't know why so many website companies aren't allowing users to pay to use their own client: it's win-win-win: the service operator gets new revenue to make-up for the lack of ads in third-party clients, it doesn't cost the operator anything (because their web-services and APIs are already going to be well-documented, right?), and makes the user/consumer-base happy because they can use a specialized client. Where would Twitter be today if we could continue to use Tweetbot and other clients with our own single-user API-key or so?
• rybosworld 3y ago
  I definitely see Reddit going the way of Yahoo! A slow spiral into irrelevance because of lots of small bad decisions. At one point, Reddit felt like a lone champion of free speech and conversation in a sea of buzzfeeds. I think they've moderated the website into ruin. They've put a lot of energy into silencing certain kinds of voices/opinions while promoting others. What's left is a very liberal echo chamber. All of the seemingly worst ideas from the left are stated as fact and voicing a dissenting opinion can quite literally get you banned. r/antiwork and r/latestagecapitalism are the most egregious examples of this that I can think of. But the attitudes held there have leaked into 99% of the other subreddits to some degree. For the record, I lean left. But it really sucks to no longer have a town hall where both sides of the aisle can discuss things as adults. If there's one takeaway, I think it's some flavor of: Don't overmoderate/show favoritism. You can't have yin without yang, or salt without pepper. What made Reddit awesome was the discourse. Maybe they never realized that this was the secret sauce. That is, the clashing of ideas. And so they didn't cultivate that. Today, outside of a handful of niche/hobby subreddits, it no longer has anything close to educated discussions.
  • witchesindublin 3y ago
    There's also a much more noticeable problem of Reddit being too US-centric. The moderation is the cause, but I think it's also symbolic of US political culture that fails to take into account that politics can work differently across cultural lines. In a way the website has become more racist than the pre-Trump-election moderation Reddit.
  • nocoiner 3y ago
    This is really well stated. Sometimes out of morbid curiosity, I’ll read one of the /r/all posts on a topic where I know the discussion is going to be reductive and generally uninformed (the example that comes immediately to mind is anything involving the energy industry - there’s not much to find beyond “hurrr durr Exxon bad thorium good”), and every single time it’s the same type of self-satisfied navel-gazing commentary totally untethered from the real world. I still read it most days (through Apollo) but when/if this kicks in, that’s the end of it for me.
• scarface_74 3y ago
  I don’t see the issue. Apollo should charge a subscription fee that equals (cost of “reasonable API access + desired profit)/.70 and cap the number of request per user so it remains profitable. Users should understand and I would gladly pay for Apollo per month.
  • BudaDude 3y ago
    This only works in countries where $5-10 is not much. Also this does not account for power users who can easily rack up enough API calls to put Christian in the red.
    • scarface_74 3y ago
      > Also this does not account for power users who can easily rack up enough API calls to put Christian in the red. “… and cap the number of request per user so it remains profitable.”
  • hraedon 3y ago
    The current subscription price is $1.50 a month or $10 a year, so presuming the same profit the cost would have to jump to a bit more than $5 a month or $53 a year. Apollo also had a lifetime tier that would have to go away, because it was priced without knowing that future costs would be so much higher. This also entails getting rid of the free tier and imposing usage limits on the remaining subscribers since a few people could easily blow out the average and drive up costs. There are definitely people willing to pay those costs (I count myself as one of them, as well), but the lack of apps like Apollo being successful at that price point probably means that it is not a sustainable business.
    • scarface_74 3y ago
      > Apollo also had a lifetime tier that would have to go away, because it was priced without knowing that future costs would be so much higher. A “lifetime” purchase for any app is always a bad idea and is a Ponzi scheme. Mobile apps always require maintenance and updates. Now of course I understand that he could have never predicted such a price increase.
• dopamean 3y ago
  If Apollo stops working on my phone I'll basically stop being a reddit user.
• swozey 3y ago
  Has anyone stopped using old.reddit.com that uses it and LIKEs using new reddit? I don't know what it is but when I get popped over to new reddit it's absolutely jarring. It looks ridiculous on my 49" monitor because it's middle aligned and horribly padded horizontally. Also it doesn't seem to be doing it right now, or maybe it only does it on mobile but that thing where they only show you a couple of comments then have a DIFFERENT post/comment section right under it drives me crazy. Maybe I'm just a luddite unwilling to learn new things.
  • pb7 3y ago
    No, it's actually one of the worst sites on the internet that actually has active users. This is the work of the bottom 10% of the industry. Most of the company is clueless.
• elbigbad 3y ago
  I found Apollo to be fairly shady. I paid for the app and they “lost” my account or something so suddenly I could no longer use the pro features. Pretty lame, no amount of support could help, so I used the app for a while as a free user because I didn’t want to pay twice. One day they pushed like 50 modals over the course of a day to “upgrade to pro” and eventually moved to a monthly subscription service, which suddenly made me realize why they “couldn’t find” my previous account. Love the features, but feels shady to me still. The API pricing thing does suck, but at this point I’m not willing to throw any money at them.
• IAmGraydon 3y ago
  Without a doubt, this is another step in Reddit's demise. It will really go into freefall when they go public later this year, after which I'm certain you'll start seeing more intrusive monetization. The window just opened for someone to develop the replacement. It will rip itself apart over the next few years and all 52 million users will be looking for a new home. Reddit's product is authenticity. Monetization is the antithesis of authenticity. The two cannot coexist, as they're about to find out.
  • mjr00 3y ago
    > It will really go into freefall when they go public later this year, after which I'm certain you'll start seeing more intrusive monetization. Yep, and with more intrusive monetization comes stricter content controls. Once Reddit bans NSFW content -- which is "when" not "if" at this point -- it's going to lose its relevance as a platform.
    • yreg 3y ago
      What's up with the markets disliking NSFW content? I thought sex sells… I would rather invest in reddit with NSFW content allowed than in reddit with NSFW content banned.
      • jasonladuke0311 3y ago
        No company wants to see a screenshot of their ad above someone being buttfucked while dressed up as some anime character
        • yreg 3y ago
          I don't see why though. I would gladly advertise there, the people who watch that content wouldn't think less of my brand. Even then, why not just turn the banners off on NSFW posts?
  • theturtletalks 3y ago
    Apollo needs to go open-source and pivot into a feeder app that connects to Reddit, Twitter, Substack, RSS feeds, etc. Allow users to connect their keys and pay the API themselves. Think of that as the subscription. The Apollo UI is killer and can make other social apps better. Once the new app is being used by power users paying for their own usage, Apollo builds a Reddit alternative. It will fit into the feeder app just like the rest.
• api_or_ipa 3y ago
  The reality is that Apollo doesn't serve intrusive ads, and thus, every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue. Unfortunately, reddit is in that late stage monetization step where they need to prove they are capable of big revenue to justify a high IPO share price. One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg. So far, reddit has been very careful raising the temperature so as to not scare the frog before it's dead.
  • m-p-3 3y ago
    in my opinion, a good middle ground would be to make third-party apps only usable if you're subscribed to Reddit Premium. That way you don't give the data freely, you could make each API keys provided to the user with limits that won't impact normal navigation but would cripple automated data capture, and you'd solve the issue where third-party apps aren't fed ads by sustaining the platform through subscription.
    • ceejayoz 3y ago
      I remain shocked this wasn't Musk's approach with Twitter; make API access part of Twitter Blue.
      • tracker1 3y ago
        Considering Twitter Blue isn't ad-free, not that surprised. I'd rather have ad-free paid option than what I get currently with Blue.
        • babypuncher 3y ago
          What even is the point of Blue? We already know that the "verification" it provides is functionally worthless. These days it seems like anyone with a blue checkmark is just asking to get made fun of.
          • bmarquez 3y ago
• altairprime 3y ago
  I'm looking forward to this outcome. Reddit and Apollo both need to get paid, on a recurring basis, for their recurring services that require recurring maintenance and updates. Reddit gets paid either through ad revenue displayed to non-paying visitors to the website, or through API calls for access to their dataset. Apps that enable user access via the API will need to pass along this charge to their users. Apollo must become a paid-subscriptions-only app, as Reddit now charges for usage. This is fine. Apollo needs to constantly be updated to keep up with Reddit API changes over time anyways, so neither 'free' nor 'one-time purchase' are acceptable ways to provide a continuous living wage for keeping up with reddit API (and mobile OS) updates. There's a third (paid) option, which is that Apollo sells the app to Brave or Firefox, where it's integrated into a paid "Reader Mode" subscription — because a team of developers will need recurring revenue for living wages in order to maintain the website rendering overlay and overcome Reddit's attempts to block or break it, and will need a team of lawyers to defend against the eventual lawsuit Reddit will bring against them (even if they'll lose due to the LinkedIn precedent from a few months ago — but, I am not their lawyer, this is not legal advice). There are no good free outcomes that are not advertising-supported, and the API is incompatible with advertising, which is why so many people use it. I'm glad to see that Reddit has realized this, and I'm glad they are still offering the free ad-supported website rather than a paywall. I hope that Apollo is willing to charge me for their app, and isn't demoralized by their users complaining about this. We'll see.
  • CharlesW 3y ago
    > There are no good free outcomes that are not advertising-supported, and the API is incompatible with advertising… I'm curious why you'd think that. If anything, an API access agreement allows Reddit to compel Apollo to meet advertising requirements.
    • altairprime 3y ago
      If you or anyone can identify a free outcome for users that I haven’t considered, that pays the bills at both Reddit and Apollo, then please do share it! Reddit did not choose to compel ad display in their agreement update. I expect this is because it conflicts with getting paid by search engines and AI training corporations.
• miki123211 3y ago
  This feels like it's all priced for AI companies, TBH. This per-request pricing makes a LOT more sense if you assume that one particular piece of content will only be requested once in your company's history, saved on a server somewhere and used for training forever. You're not paying for a request being processed, you're not even paying to offset any advertising cost, you're essentially paying for the ability to use the requested piece of content forever. Maybe that's what Apollo should do, set up a huge cache layer and proxy all requests for the public data through there? I feel like the power law would apply here, so 80% of the requests would be for 20% of the content. Considering how popular the most popular subreddits are, I wouldn't be surprised if the balance was something like 99-to-1. Cache misses would still need to be fetched from the API itself, but that should drive costs down massively. If the ToS allow this, the cache layer could even be shared across apps from different developers (developers supporting both iOS and Android might have an advantage here), making the costs even lower.
  • paragraft 3y ago
    I feel like the better pricing strategy would be something similar to what the geospatial API platforms like Google Maps do, with their explicit no-caching or time-limited-caching clauses. E.g. you're actually prohibited from retaining results from say a geocode beyond 30 days IIRC. Amazon made this explicit with their Geospatial API pricing ( https://aws.amazon.com/location/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/location/pricing/ - "Places" tab) - where the pricing for being able to store a result is 8x higher.
    • miki123211 3y ago
      This really doesn't work in the context of AI training though. Sure, it would make reuse between models a lot harder, perhaps, but the general idea still holds, once a model is trained, the model is for forever.
  • gsk22 3y ago
    Would you use a client where the most popular threads are constantly out of date due to caching? I certainly wouldn't.
• kaszanka 3y ago
  I wonder if the official smartphone app uses the same API as the one exposed and documented for third-party apps. It's my understanding that it does not because the unofficial app I use (reddit is fun) lacks some features, so just borrowing the official app's key and putting it in RiF is out, but surely it would be possible to adapt a FOSS app like Slide to quack like the Blessed Official App and let the arms race begin, no?
  • Shakahs 3y ago
    Yeah, API arms race is definitely the next step. I’ll put up with reduced functionality or just stop using Reddit on mobile. Worst case scenario is just web scraping Reddit and serving up to 3rd party clients as read only.
• TechBro8615 3y ago
  Apollo is such a quality app that I had to delete it because it was so addicting. Good riddance to Reddit. The only sad part is there is no clear successor ready to take its place for the minority of subreddits that host real communities and serve as a useful distribution point for information. Personally I think the developers of the top Reddit apps should get together and develop their own backend that clones the Reddit API endpoints but hosts the content on federated instances. Just cut out Reddit corporate - what value are they providing when the bulk of content creators are using third party apps to browse and create content?
• seniorThrowaway 3y ago
  A good reminder that Reddit is not actually usenet, or even the individual forum sites that it ultimately killed off. It's a massive surveillance capitalism corporation that ultimately only serves its owners.
• weystrom 3y ago
  What we need is a resurgence of specialty forums, but there's no good modern forum engine around, at least I'm not aware of one.
• winrid 3y ago
  I guess I'm charging too little. 50m GET requests would only be $500 with fastcomments lol
• lxchase 3y ago
  Late to the party and this may get buried, but wanted to add a contextual POV. I'm an Apollo user, and I am also someone who was Reddit's earliest enterprise advertisers. As in, the campaigns I've green lit are perhaps still in their advertising media decks as case studies. Reddit for the past few years have been changing the UX to benefit their revenue streams. Visit any reddit thread on a mobile browser, and get a nag to download the official app. Their app is less likely to be blocked by ad blockers, has advertising SDKs, and can link advertising parameters. I believe certain threads need you to login. It is also in their best interest to find opportunities for you to login to again link browse behavior. Forgot to mention, the app also allows a logged in state to persist easier than browser. TL;DR All of Reddit's UX decisions have been to grow their revenue stream. Do they have the right to do so? Of course. Does it suck for this audience in particular, probably. In my opinion, they will lose their early adopters and perhaps some power users. Is that a risk they are taking? Clearly.
• wnevets 3y ago
  If Reddit wants to Digg itself, so be it. If I can't use my favorite 3rd party app my usage will drop like a rock. Its current usefulness probably means my usage won't disappear completely like twitter but it will be severely reduced. I can't imagine I'm the only reddit user who feels this way.
• flenserboy 3y ago
  All part of the process of TVifying the internet. It is considered dangerous for people to be able to communicate, to speak their minds about products and politicians, and the power of commercial interests combined with government is speeding this degradation along.
• ok_dad 3y ago
  I stopped using Reddit last week when they shadowbanned me for, I assume because you cannot know for sure, saying something related to gun violence in America and my local area in a political subreddit. I only ever commented about sim-racing at any other point in that account's life, and so perhaps it was shadowbanned for posting my own YouTube videos that were not monitized and had like a dozen views? I don't know, and I don't care, my mental health has never been better than the past week! tl;dr: I quit Reddit because I didn't want to make yet another account, and my life is better for it. Edit: Also, I've been trying not to come into HN political and pop-culture threads too much, but am failing at that. Maybe today is the day I start just hitting the technical threads!
• kioleanu 3y ago
  I'll be using Teddit until they decide to cut RSS feeds too and then maybe I'll be able to cut out this black hole from my life. It's eaten so many hours of my life...
• SpaceManNabs 3y ago
  RIF (android) / apollo (iphone) are the only reasons reddit is usable on mobile since the official apps and new web view are absolutely terrible lol. If reddit kills the viewing experience, i can finally get off that site. The reddit api is also essential because reddit offers so little functionality. I have used my own bots before to search my own comments and delete my own content en masse.
  • secabeen 3y ago
    Sadly, the RIF team has been silent on this issue for a long time. I would be very interested to hear what their plans are in the transparent way the Apollo developer has been.
    • Arcorann 3y ago
      RIF dev just posted an official update on the changes: https://old.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_dev_here_reddits_api_changes_will_likely_kill/ https://old.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_de... As the URL suggests, at this pricing RIF will simply die.
      • secabeen 3y ago
        Finally, thanks!
  • pugworthy 3y ago
    I use the standard app - no complaints. I guess it's all in the eye (or opinion) of the holder.
• time0ut 3y ago
  Over 90% of my reddit usage is through Apollo. Sounds like I’ll have to find another way to kill a few minutes while I am eating lunch or waiting on a bus.
• Eji1700 3y ago
  Everyone saying their pricing is absurd had better get ready for the new wave of API pricing. Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze" where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half the customer base. Twitter was one of the first to give access to cheap mass data, and now they're one of the first to charge through the nose for that. The move is going to be that if you're not enterprise level you're not getting this data anymore, and I doubt it stops with reddit.
  • the_snooze 3y ago
    >I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
    • tornato7 3y ago
      In economics they call this rent seeking[1] > Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. You can see Reddit as a landlord, owning the land (or website) that the value grows on. They don't contribute value themselves, instead they make money by charging rent to everyone who wishes to grow value on their land. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
      • hinkley 3y ago
        > by charging rent to everyone who wishes to grow value on their land. That goes beyond rent-seeking into feudalism. Rent seeking is running an application as a service that could just be a tool you pay once for, and instead have to pay for monthly. Charging people rent for access to a commons in which they provide all of the value is digital serfdom.
• asoneth 3y ago
  Many people are pointing out that they're going to lose a huge number of users over this, but that seems to be the point of the "cutting" phase of bulking and cutting. (By bulking and cutting I mean eating a calorie surplus to gain muscle and fat followed by a calorie deficit to reduce fat while hanging on to as much muscle as possible.) Reddit, Netflix, YouTube... they bulked their user base by subsidizing products. Now they're in the cutting phase and raising prices, restricting features, and/or increasing ads. They know they're going to end up with a significantly smaller user base, but if the cutting manages to maintain a large enough number of profitable users (muscle) while shedding unprofitable users (fat) then the business will end up in better shape. Alternately one can keep calories stable and slowly increase muscle without gaining fat, but that's much slower and harder than a bulk/cut cycle, and most people and public companies don't have that kind of patience.
  • Kibae 3y ago
    Reddit relies on user-generated content so cutting the "unprofitable" users makes the product less useful for the "profitable" users. This could lead to some initially profitable users into leaving the site and as a result make it less useful for the remaining users. This could lead to a negative spiral until Reddit is left with a fraction of its' user base.
    • SamuelAdams 3y ago
      A lot of user generated content is recycled though. Take a look at the top twitter subs /r/whitepeopletwitter etc. notice the dates on the screenshots of tweets. Notice how they are 3-6 months old or longer. Then notice how many posts in /rAskReddit are recycled from 6-12 months ago. It’s gross, but honestly I kind of respect it. Reddit has recreated modern day TV for mobile phones. And it works because people can’t be bothered to retain what they’re consuming, so waiting 6 weeks for the news cycle to restart makes it all feel like a whole new thing.
    • nicce 3y ago
      Youtube also relies on the user-generated content to be fair. However, the difference is that you might get paid from that.
• bigthymer 3y ago
  He should seriously consider starting his own Reddit alternative. He has a sea of enthusiastic supporters that potentially have enough critical mass to get it started. Unlike attempts to create Reddit alternatives in the past, this group isn't full of racists and others who were kicked off the site for engaging in reprehensible topics.
  • paulcole 3y ago
    His group is instead full of people who don’t want to pay for things and who don’t like ads. Good luck bootstrapping the next Reddit with that.
    • buildbot 3y ago
      Counterpoint - most of that group paid him money for Apollo…
      • jedberg 3y ago
        They paid him money to access something that they could access in another way for free because it was just that good.
    • w-m 3y ago
      I don’t think that is necessarily true. There’s two payed tiers of the app, and they seem to sell at least well enough to support the development of the app.
    • spiderice 3y ago
      What makes you think people who use Apollo don't want to pay for things? I literally pay for Apollo
      • throwaway472919 3y ago
        Also all iOS users, who are more valuable, and probably harder to use bots/easier to permaban (compared to Android or web). On the other side, Apple will kill your app, maybe without warning, if you don't moderate strongly enough for their liking.
• Eumenes 3y ago
  Hopefully this accelerates the death of reddit ... I think once they nuke the Google SEO fu they have on questions (they'll screw it up, like Quora did), get rid of NSFW content and kill old.reddit, they're done. That should reduce traffic by a good chunk, and less eyes on their site, less ad money. Ironic, because they think these changes will increase ad money.
• rickreynoldssf 3y ago
  Scrape the website, take up more of their bandwidth. Remind them of why the original engineers created the API in the first place!
• quacked 3y ago
  Someone else in this thread mentioned the "boiling frog" effect. Personally, I'll keep using Reddit until they remove support for old.reddit.com. Then this frog is out of the pot!
  • davesmylie 3y ago
    I feel much the same way. Looking at one of the subs I run though - old.reddit.com accounts for 5% of total traffic. Whilst 5% is not nothing, it's also not really all that much. I doubt they'd notice much impact even if half of the old.reddit.com users left.
    • quacked 3y ago
      Wow, I wonder if the 95% of reddit users for your sub that use the new format are net new to the site, or if there actually are a lot of old-reddit users that happily converted to the new UI. Don't get me wrong, the old UI was awful, but it was much more information-dense, so I prefer it. I think it's unlikely that anyone that's not already a turbo-nerd would come as a completely new Reddit user, compare the two, and pick the old UI.
• digitalsushi 3y ago
  A party is the people experiencing it. The free red plastic cups of beer and ranch dip and chips are ancillary. Redditors are now perking their ears for the next person to yell "next party at my house!"
  • post_break 3y ago
    This is exactly what I'm doing. I was there for the digg migration, and this feels just like it.
• ubermonkey 3y ago
  That's probably the end of me using Reddit on mobile, then.
• a13o 3y ago
  These prices are being set by an industry-wide bottleneck around online human verification. The cost just shot up because of LLMs. This is only a temporary reprieve for Reddit, Twitter, et.al. The LLMs are going to start simulating user agents and work around this. Well-intentioned alternative user agents like Apollo are collateral damage. The root fix is a solution to online human verification. All these web products are just trying to hang a "Humans Only" sign on the door.
• danpalmer 3y ago
  Why have no platforms launched an ad supported API? I realise that it's ripe for mis-use as clients could always just not display ads, and analytics would be hard as even if the client isn't actively malicious, it may fail to display an ad that it records as visible which is effectively ad-fraud. Nevertheless I feel like there are unexplored options here, including SDKs rather than web APIs, select partnerships, and maybe more. I would imagine if it could be done it would work well for Twitter, Reddit, and potentially even Facebook and Instagram. I guess it probably comes down to it being a hard problem with little perceived benefit over owning the customer interface, but the backlash to these things always feels significant (in my bubble at least), and I'd be surprised if these companies didn't feel it was an unqualified positive change.
  • robryan 3y ago
    There is a middle ground where they only audit the ads on the big clients. If you are say a top 10 Reddit client by usage it is going to be hard to get away with not showing the ads.
    • danpalmer 3y ago
      Great point. Also there's a range of auditing – from code level audits or the inclusion of first-party analytics, to spot checks, to self certification. I've undergone audits for "Sign in with Facebook" usage in the past on a small app (~50k FB auth'd users), and it was enough of a spot-check that they probably catch egregious mis-use with not a lot of effort.
• slushh 3y ago
  He will get a better deal. If he has to shut down, he can turn Apollo into a lemmy.ml client and migrate a huge part of his 500,000 power users. Reddit cannot risk that lemmy.ml becomes mainstream.
  • dimgl 3y ago
    Please stop trying to make lemmy.ml happen. There is so much spam for this website, and it's marginally better.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• thepasswordis 3y ago
  Just a reminder that power delete suite exists, but will probably be killed off eventually as well: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite This is a tool to purge your reddit comments. It first edits them to something else, then deletes them. Reddit admins have claimed that this is a true delete, as opposed to setting a delete flag.
• simonswords82 3y ago
  The irony of the sheer number of awards people are giving each other on that post, which if I am not mistaken, is just lining Reddit's pockets.
• yreg 3y ago
  I think the devs of Apollo, RIF and the other major 3rd party clients should spin up an alternative reddit backend. They can let their users chose whether they want to connect to reddit proper (and purchase API tokens) or to the new custom one. I imagine that with the userbase these apps have they could succeed and perhaps do some less greedy/intrusive monetization.
• lolinder 3y ago
  > So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. ... With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue. This is 20x higher than what each user currently brings Reddit in revenue, but I'm betting that Reddit is going to be cranking up the monetization hard in the next few months. Reddit Premium is currently $5.99/mo, so the bean counters probably see $2.50/mo for API access for a competing app as long overdue rent. I'd be very surprised if we didn't also see a big push to drive up the ad revenue on free accounts (more pushes to get on the app, ad-blocker-blockers, etc.)
  • kenhwang 3y ago
    I suspect API users are the much more valuable users to Reddit, the users that generate or moderate content, can afford to pay for apps, or tend to be ad adverse. Those are valuable to Reddit or advertisers.
• rjh29 3y ago
  I blocked reddit for a week. I was much more productive and I'm having a hard time thinking of what I missed out on. I told myself it was full of interesting discussions but I basically forgot all of it the second I had closed the tab.
  • AA-BA-94-2A-56 3y ago
    This is what it comes down to. I've spent too much time in the last 10 years on Reddit, and I have absolutely no issue with dropping it.
• gaudat 3y ago
  I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language. About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market. Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and stealing ad revenue. Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs launched its own forum reusing the client's name. It exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular message board among the youth. The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to it. I hope to see Apollo go down this route. Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard as reddit going to paid awards and memberships. One more thought: Keep the Apollo UI or whatever thing the users are most familiar with. Most of them do not care if it is fediverse or open source or backed by web-scale k8s, they only want it to just work (tm) good enough to post things on it. Eat the lunch you prepared yourself.
  • SSLy 3y ago
    was it taptalk?
    • m-p-3 3y ago
      It is (or was) a kind of proprietary addon that forum admins could install which would act as an API that let a the Tapatalk client interacts with the server. It mostly showed up at a time when web forums weren't responsive or a mobile UI and phones weren't as powerful as today and struggled to render complex webpages.
  • sockaddr 3y ago
    Yup. I'd join Apollo if it was substantially similar. They could not possibly make a worse UI than the current "new" reddit web UI so the bar is pretty low.
    • popcalc 3y ago
      You could always co-opt Dread ;)
• codetrotter 3y ago
  I saw the original thread on Reddit and I don’t get what the problem is really. Make Apollo a paid-only app. Change the price for Apollo to $10 per month. That’s still a drop in the bucket for anyone that cares enough to really want Apollo in the first place.
• theRealMe 3y ago
  Maybe it’s just because I don’t know the Reddit API, but doesn’t caching semi-solve the problem? At Applo’s scale at least? I HAVE to assume there is quite a bit of overlap in Apollo’s mentioned 7 billion Reddit api requests last month…
• tacker2000 3y ago
  Someone should invest in Apollo, build a reddit clone and just let the app run on that. Screw the “actual” reddit. The Apollo app has a huge install base anyway. Problem is only, how long will this all take?
  • wvenable 3y ago
    A lot of time, money, and effort. It is fairly infeasible. And even if you build it, it will start out empty.
  • clmckinley 3y ago
    Yes, get some limited funding to build out the infrastructure. We can build a platform that is better for the users and that will get them all to come. We will make it modern and very easy for third parties to help build on top of it this will increase value and uptake. We will need to pay for servers and dev time so maybe we can allow our users to donate to upkeep. Maybe call it new service platinum. Unfortunately, most people don't pay so maybe we can have a limited number of non-intrusive ads on the site. Well now people with equity want some money back so we need to figure out how to make some more money. These third party apps aren't showing our ads, so lots of our power users use these third party apps and lots of companies are leveraging our service to make lots of money. The obvious answer is to get some money back from the api users. I shall call this site reddit.
• stainablesteel 3y ago
  on the bright side, it looks like it will be cheaper to make your own platform there's plenty of areas you can improve upon functionally for a modern forum
• bagels 3y ago
  Link to some discussion without context. Apparently this is about Apollo which is some alternative Reddit app. https://apolloapp.io/ https://apolloapp.io/
• TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
  It would be really interesting to hear what the founders think about the current state of Reddit, given that we know they're HN users as well.
  • BudaDude 3y ago
    https://media.tenor.com/80zMDyE85hAAAAAC/money-crying.gif https://media.tenor.com/80zMDyE85hAAAAAC/money-crying.gif
• chillfox 3y ago
  Can’t really say I would continue to use and post on reddit without Apollo. Their own mobile experience is absolutely garbage, even when paying for premium.
• web3-is-a-scam 3y ago
  Transparent attempt at shutting down clients that don’t show their ads. When Apollo stops working, I stop using Reddit. Their official app is garbage. Their website is garbage. Good riddance probably, I spend way too much time on it anyway. I even use the iOS Apollo app on my Mac because I like it so much, even if the experience isn’t perfect it’s still loads better than the official one.
• UberFly 3y ago
  Lots of 3rd party Reddit apps are going down as well. RIF is a great android app for example. It is Reddit for me and I'm not going to install the official app. I'll go away rather than be stuffed in their Clockwork Orange media chair.
• webnrrd2k 3y ago
  So... Everyone is moving back to Slashdot?
• cloudking 3y ago
  They should just acquire it.
• throwaway106382 3y ago
  [dead]
• aSockPuppeteer 3y ago
  Off to Teddit or? https://teddit.net/about https://teddit.net/about Or self host your own. https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit
  • thatfunkymunki 3y ago
    I kind of wonder if it is possible for an app like Apollo or RIF to use Teddit API as a backend instead of reddit, then the user becomes responsible for funding the API access of their teddit server.
• fencepost 3y ago
  I'm surprised they didn't take the approach of "API access for paid accounts only, and with limits to restrict LLM scraping". If they'd added that to Premium, plus a lower-tier "API" pricing at $1-2/month they'd likely have cleaned up. I'm curious what percentage of Reddit Premium subscribers are also users of third-party apps - seems to me that if you're a power user you're more likely to be in both camps. Also moderators - apparently lots of mods do so through the apps instead of the website, so there may be plenty of subs that have issues as well.
  • dmix 3y ago
    Reddit is trying to IPO so they are looking for every possible way to make money.
• parhamn 3y ago
  Im genuinely curious, how much value should reddit be extracting per user via third-party-clients for their services given they can't serve them ads and what not themselves? Facebook's ARPU is $58.77 in the US/Canada so $5/month. According to them, Apollo's Pro clients would earn reddit $2.50/month. Is the right number $1? I imagine that would still kill Apollo. It seems like the problem more generally is that third-party clients cannot extract the same value from users that first-party clients can. Has anyone tried to solve this differently? What if Reddit gave you a libAds to add in your application where you build and control the other 90% of the interface and do a profit sharing system with them.
• cantsingh 3y ago
  This is where Apollo builds their own reddit clone, implements reddit's API, and starts their own competing social network. Use the ~$5/month to pay for server costs, or run an ad supported variant.
• abe-101 3y ago
  Funny how Reddit allows this post to be on the front page
• Havoc 3y ago
  Seems like a straight attempt to kill 3rd party apps. Just like their ever more aggressive attempts to force browser users to use their app. Ever since new reddit it's all be user hostile steaming garbage. But they have the user base and their content so the value and network effects are there even with shit UX.
• durandal1 3y ago
  I don't understand the outrage at all. So he is saying that the average user will cost him $2.50 in API fees/month. Since Apollo users are probably significantly more active than the average reddit user I can only assume that the same user is worth significantly in add revenue per month to Reddit. Apollo could easily be a $5/month app as a premium experience and make money.
  • tyingq 3y ago
    You have assume both that leap, and also that killing off the free version doesn't stagnate and eventually kill the paid one. Those existing paid users probably started as free users. The API is also not his only cost. For example, he doesn't actually get $5/month, but something like 70% of it...$3.50.
  • thanzex 3y ago
    Ah, yes! Of course! How couldn't anyone think of just increasing the price, no, double it and make it a subscription just to be sure we're making tons of money! Surely people will flock to our app now, a 60$/Y subscription to browse a social media platform where people tell each other off and meme. This isn't the problem, if you're willing to just shed 95+% of you userbase, then sure, make everyone pay and have a first seat view of your app slowly dying.
    • durandal1 3y ago
      Reddit has to make money in order to exist, and Apollo is undercutting them by providing an ad-free experience for less money than Reddit would be making from ads. You don't see the problem?
      • thanzex 3y ago
        The problem is that many, many 3P app users are some of the most active and engaged on the platform. For example, mods of literally thousand of the top subreddits use 3P apps for moderation. Any new user would just use the official client, but the fact that so many alternative ones exist and so many people use them is telling of the unusable state of their app. I use reddit every day, only because I don't use the official app, because of that it's become my go-to site to look for things, even on a computer. If I lose access to my 3P client, which is tens of times faster, not clunky, customized to my liking, has all the shit sub filtering set-up and is generally a joy to use ( mind you, it has ads too) I will simply not bother anymore. So, people that use 3P apps usually engage more because otherwise they wouldn't bother, this change is going to royally piss off every single one of them. In the short term maybe some users are going to switch, but in the long run I think the platform is going to lose lots of people that actually engage in the community.
• lazycouchpotato 3y ago
  I use Sync Pro on Android and Apollo on iPad. I'm expected to pay twice? This is so stupid.
• RoyGBivCap 3y ago
  Reddit is a sexist, racist, free speech bait & switching website owned by Newhouse family: https://www.tharawat-magazine.com/fbl/newhouse-family/ https://www.tharawat-magazine.com/fbl/newhouse-family/ The sooner it's gone, the better.
• AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  This is directly related to going public and is completely predictable what will happen next. Investors want to get paid for the last 15 years of waiting… and they want as big of a paycheck as possible and nothing matters but that. All the free labor mods did? I’m sure the board and investors all agreed that moderator labor can’t legally demand anything, meaning they don’t matter. So, I expect Reddit, one of the best forums on the internet, will deteriorate after all the trust gets squeezed out via increasingly intrusive ads shutting down of the (old.) subdomain, an increase in user profiling and user acquisition. Sad but it was good while it lasted
  • RoyGBivCap 3y ago
    What? Reddit has been privately owned since 2006: https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/condenast-acquires-reddit--b9ab8dbe https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/condenast-acquires-re... And it's been a shitshow since they pulled their free speech bait & switch in 2015, so good riddance.
    • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      Reddit is going public this year and needs to pump revenue numbers up while they are preparing the filing so that the equity holders get a good multiple from the underwriter. After that, the activist investors which will certainly look for more margins will demand reddit reduce services and increase revenue irrespective of what that does to the services, so long as the relative cost/benefit is beneficial to quarterly returns.
• smittywerben 3y ago
  I shredded all of my comments before I left.
• nerdix 3y ago
  This is basically a long con. The free and open access to an API was a selling point for reddit and they benefited greatly from it -- especially in the early days of the smart phone revolution before they had an official mobile client. The presence of many, high quality third party reddit mobile applications helped them ward off would be mobile first competitors.
• replwoacause 3y ago
  If Christian, the Apollo dev, started his own community I’d move to it and stop using Reddit in an instant. Even if it’s just me there talking to sock puppet accounts.
• gnulinux 3y ago
  Question, is there a reddit data archive we can legally download before this API pricing goes in effect? I really wouldn't wanna lose all the data in reddit when inevitable reddit becomes obscure unknown internet history. It has tons of (imho) extremely important information.
  • Willish42 3y ago
    I was curious about this too, and would expect this to be somewhere like kaggle. There's some good results in https://www.kaggle.com/search?q=reddit+date%3A90+datasetSize%3Alarge https://www.kaggle.com/search?q=reddit+date%3A90+datasetSize..., e.g. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/noahpersaud/reddit-submissions-july-2021-to-oct-2022 https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/noahpersaud/reddit-submissio..., but nothing larger / more holistic or that includes comments AFAICT.
• avazhi 3y ago
  Reddit sure is trying its been to be Digg v2.
• thatsnotmepls 3y ago
  What prevents people (and Apollo) from simply using the same open APIs the the official reddit site/app? The requests would be all made from a client, so how would they even know it's not their client? Is it illegal? Because I can make any reddit request with a curl, no? Please educate me.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• herunan 3y ago
  Unless Reddit rectifies, that sounds like the end of Apollo. I feel like old.reddit.com is next in the chopping board. Perhaps we need to go back to the browser and reskin the heck out of Reddit.
• bgro 3y ago
  Ah yes, the site that refers to its users as "Daily Active Shitheads," and promotes vigilante armchair detectives to ignore the FBI and accuse random innocent civilians of being world class terrorists.
• Willish42 3y ago
  Probably a dumb question, but wouldn't Reddit be very easy to scrape instead of using an API at these prices? I assume the various LLMs' datasets are based on web scraping similar to Google for content that doesn't have a public API. Also, it seems to me that Reddit could gain some goodwill here by supporting the flagship competing client apps with a lower rate while still charging a higher price for those trying to leverage its data for ML, similar to how Google provides much of the funding for Mozilla despite being a competing browser.
  • bojo 3y ago
    Not if you want standard user features like login, profile, commenting, posting, etc.
• mgaunard 3y ago
  Simply use different IPs on the free tier, what's the need to pay anything at all?
• snwfog 3y ago
  I am the sole developer of https://rdddeck.com https://rdddeck.com; I have not receive any mails; where can I find more information regarding what will be rate-limited starting July 1st?
  • ihateolives 3y ago
    Here's an official update https://reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale/ https://reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_e...
  • nils-herzig 3y ago
    Uh that's nice, I hope you can keep it running :)
• typeofhuman 3y ago
  RIF is Fun is also going away because of this. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_dev_here_reddits_api_changes_will_likely_kill/?sort=confidence https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_de... It's the only reason I use reddit and I will definitely not use the site anymore if this app goes away. Probably a good thing...
  • nichos 3y ago
    This is soley how i access reddit now. I closed my account a few years ago (time sink and don't agree with their censorship), but it's nice to hop on occasionally as a lurker. Oh well, like you said, probably better.
  • emptyfile 3y ago
    [dead]
• zmmmmm 3y ago
  It just seems like willful vandalism at this point, what is happening to Reddit.
• minhazm 3y ago
  The reddit UI has gotten so hostile that I stopped using reddit a few years ago. Third party apps are nice and all, but I think a site that's so hostile to its users isn't worth me wasting my time on. I have several friends who are active reddit users but exclusively use third party apps, if those apps stop working I'm confident they'll just stop using reddit all together too. I remember when Digg.com launched v4 and everyone hated it so much that they planned a "quit Digg day" and then collectively moved to Reddit. Maybe some day reddit users will do the same thing and move to something else.
• astrea 3y ago
  Stupid question, but: Why do client apps need to use a separate API? Is it due to some terms and conditions? Why would an Android Reddit app need any difference calls than, say, a web browser?
• bkishan 3y ago
  $12k for 50M requests, wow. It seems Reddit has taken the twitter way out. If they just wanted to ban third party apps, they should have the balls to do it rather than pull all this stuff.
• nikau 3y ago
  So who is going to write the first library to screen scrape into the api format....
• timbre1234 3y ago
  Sigh. I really liked reddit, too. :(
• photonbeam 3y ago
  So whats the next reddit replacement
  • plastic_bag 3y ago
    Lemmy? One of the devs of Lemmy posted this on Christian's thread on Reddit. https://r.nf/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/jmdf0b6 https://r.nf/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_re...
    • jwilk 3y ago
      Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 (>1000 comments)
      • plastic_bag 3y ago
        Thank you.
    • xigoi 3y ago
      Last time I checked Lemmy, it was just full of communist propaganda.
      • mariusor 3y ago
        Which instance did you check? There's more than one as far as I know.
        • xigoi 3y ago
          The official instance https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/ as well as its apparently favorite other instance Lemmygrad.
          • cassianoleal 3y ago
            lemmy.ml seems more tech-related than anything. Lemmygrad is a server for Marxists. They say so on the topmost post when you open the website (https://lemmygrad.ml/post/668436 https://lemmygrad.ml/post/668436).
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ygouzerh 3y ago
  I think companies don't understand that APIs are not only a way to make money, but a way as well to control bot and scrapper. If Reddit APIs are too pricey, some people will run crazy expensive GET on entire pages to retrieve the content dynamically, and this will cost them more money than by letting clients use well designed APIs.
• rektide 3y ago
  What a sad sad sad state of the internet. The Cluetrain Manifesto/Intertwingularity ideals of a connected world are being hosed by shitty bullshit greedy capitalism. Possibility is closing up shop & ending. Sad days.
• rektide 3y ago
  Sites should publish their data with Signed Http Exchange (sxg) data. So other sites can share the raw data among themselves freely. This current cruel control over all user data is amoral. It has no effect on bad people, & only hurts those trying to do right & to improve situations. If sites want to make money, it should be for doing more than being the site of record for user content. SXG is a viable path forward to let the internet be authentically better connected.
• throw2022110401 3y ago
  You'd think that the Digg-fiasco was burned into Reddit's corporate DNA but I guess even the most important lessons are forgotten with time.
• nnain 3y ago
  Alternatively (and I know many folks won't like this idea), Reddit can offer to buy out Apollo and the other 2-3 top iOS and Android apps with a generous Discounted Cash Flow market value; These Apps have put a lot of effort in development over the years and they have helped make Reddit better and more accessible.
• wand3r 3y ago
  I have seen a lot of "wow, Reddit is over" comments here and on reddit. There will absolutely not be any meaningful exodus from Reddit. Unfortunately, we as a society are pretty bad at organizing and of course prone to overestimating outrage. In any event, this is clearly absurd pricing. Its tough to tell if this is deliberate to simply kill appollo and cater to a usecase that makes them some money at the same time, or simply a dumb idea. Finally, I really don't want to sound like a shill for big companies like OpenAI/Google etc, but where do companies like Quora and Reddit get off selling their APIs at big numbers? Like screen scraping is legal and this data was contributed directly by users. In reddits case, literally the entire idea, community, subreddit and moderation are all handled by unpaid users. I get that capitalism exists, but its kind of fucking bullshit they think they can sell this. Like everything, if the price is out of whack, I hope people spin up scrapers and build their own API
  • OccamsMirror 3y ago
    Personally, if Apollo goes, I will stop visiting Reddit. Especially if old.reddit.com goes too, which is likely. To be honest, I'll be happy to cut Reddit out of my digital habits. There's a few things I'll miss but HN, Slashdot and e-books will easily replace that gap.
    • cdelsolar 3y ago
      Wtf is Apollo
      • procinct 3y ago
        A Reddit client. It’s what the headline of TFA is referring to.
    • haswell 3y ago
      I’m in the same boat. I’ve been on Reddit since the early days, and I think the thing that keeps me going back is habit more than enjoyment these days. Comment threads for any even moderately larger sub have turned into cesspools of sniping ad hominem attacks and every form of fallacious argument under the sun. And that same mindset is slowly creeping into the smaller niches that are the primary reasons I go there. This growing ooze invariably puts me in a worse state of mind, and I tried deleting the Apollo app just a few days ago to see how it impacts my mental health. This API nonsense will easily make this a permanent experiment at this point. It’s sad, but seemingly inevitable.
• nunobrito 3y ago
  Another reason why Nostr is the future.
• r_singh 3y ago
  How can companies not be liable for data that they are now “selling access to”? I mean I could never get my head around how they could circumvent liabilities by simply saying oh this is user generated content but still copyright it and now sell it? Seems like the greatest scam social networks have been able to pull off. Also if this data is public, what stops people from scraping it?
• dacryn 3y ago
  Is it so unreasonable to charge 12k for 50mln requests? I don't know. Is it so unreasonable to charge 20m/year to a super popular iOS app? I don't know. Does apollo make money from this? Do they take advertisement income? But I imagine, if you are the most popular app, on the most popular mobile platform, of a very popular site like Reddit, there has to be a lot of money floating around no? They definitely have income, and definitely have expenses (development isn't free). Curious to actually see the balance of these. But if reddit want people to use their own app, I don't see why they would support Apollo for free. I also don't know that the actual cost towards reddit would be. A reasonable price is probably somehwere between 0 and 12k.
  • Fnoord 3y ago
    That's not how the deal works though. The deal with WWW is as follows: You provide a website on the server. The client downloads it and decides how to render it. An API is going to be more efficient than HTML plus all the bells and whistles. But if you don't provide a reasonable API we go back to the stone age of HTML clients which parse and scrape. It is going to be more nuisance for client and server. Load is more intense and it requires more bandwidth at the cost of user engagement. And you'll get barely more advertising income. The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates.
    • alwayslikethis 3y ago
      We are at this inflection point where it is becoming practical to defeat any captcha services and extract information by screenshots with the help of AI. It is going to be a losing battle for the gatekeepers, as coming up with all the defenses and serving it is going to cost them more than keeping the API open. I hope they lose everything so future platform controllers won't repeat this mistake.
    • pohuing 3y ago
      > The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates. This feels the most fair to me honestly. Using RiF subverts reddit income by not showing ads. So just let me the user pay a bit to use third party apps. Considering how much time I spend on it a couple bucks should be reasonable.
• DiscourseFan 3y ago
  Someone in the thread where the OP linked directly to the Reddit post[0] suggested that perhaps Apollo would just create its own Reddit-like website under the name Apollo, republish it on the app store and then all the users would flock to the new social-media app instead of Reddit. The whole thing is really Reddit's fault: instead of offering to buy-out Apollo and make it official, they are relying on their ultra-shitty interface that nobody wants to use and hoping they can make an extra buck on the few third-party apps that will remain. I'm not sure what they expect...we've all seen it happen with social-media, it starts out all open and free, and then investors get involved and soon enough people have already moved on to the next open and free alternative. 4chan is the only exception to this rule. But if 4chan somehow got transformed into a for-profit service, then things have already gotten very bad. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083#36144800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083#36144800
  • alwayslikethis 3y ago
    The interface is "shitty" for users, not for Reddit. Reddit just wants ads and the inability for users to filter out stuff they don't want to see, such as ads or moderation, in order to market themselves to the highest bidder that needs to spread propaganda. Having any user control of the content distribution is harmful to this goal, and must be destroyed. In general, all for-profit social media or similar operations will have the same fate. The term for this is "enshittification". While HN is owned by a company, it isn't being used as a profit generating service, even though it technically has some job ads, so it is (so far) immune from this. We must find a solution to sustain non-profit user-generated content operations to continue enjoying the benefits of an open online community. Forums went of fashion as they required too much technical expertise to operate and to a lesser extent to use, so they got displaced by reddits and discords, both of these are distinctly worse from a data sovereignty and user freedom perspective. In the age of smartphones, density of information (esp. text) seems to be frowned upon. I'm not sure what's the solution is. "Making your own platform" doesn't work because people's time is limited, and they inevitably gravitate toward the biggest platforms, taking all the attention and mindshare with them. Is federation the answer? Perhaps, as it seems to bring down the operation costs to a reasonable level, but it seems to pose other problems with content curation, which is a hard problem.
• darreninthenet 3y ago
  We had a great "forum" solution back in the day - Usenet. You picked the server you joined but the benefit of this over something like Lemmy is that you don't get the split community/discoverability issues that impact the average user as everyone was reading and posting to the same newsgroups but from their chosen NNTP server. Let's have something like NNTP implemented in ActivityPub (is this possible? I'm not familiar enough...) where the news servers are decentralised and users pick whatever one they want but the newsgroups themselves are the same across all the servers.
• geysersam 3y ago
  It's weird they're working so hard to ruin the platform.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• suddenclarity 3y ago
  7 billion requests last month with the average user making 344 requests per day. Crazy numbers. Is there no way to optimise and cache some of this?
  • AndrewDucker 3y ago
    What kind of thing are you thinking of caching? Because when I visit a page I expect to see the latest posts, with their current scoring.
    • suddenclarity 3y ago
      I don't know how Apollo works and that's why I lifted it more as an open question. But my HN client cache the frontpage when you go through the articles so you have to manually press a button to refresh it once you want to see something new. Does the latest scoring from this minute actually matter? Similarly, there's little need to automatically refresh the comments if you go away from a thread and click back within one minute. Maybe you can implement another method for dealing with upvotes/downvotes so they don't require API requests. It just seems crazy that the average person uses multiple hundreds of API requests per day.
      • pseg134 3y ago
        Do you know what Reddit is or what kinda of site it is? People post content and send and receive messages. How would that be cached? I don’t think the average person uses multiple hundred per day, that is skewed by the highest power users (moderators performing thousands of actions.)
        • suddenclarity 3y ago
          People lurk. For every sent message I'm sure you have a significant factor of more cacheable pages fetched. If they have a few people using the app as a moderation tool and managing thousands of requests, maybe deal with that separately.
• kitsune_ 3y ago
  Good bye reddit.
• kcvv 3y ago
  Does anyone know if other Apps (like BaconReader for Android) have similar volumes and so have similar pricing issues ? There are a good number of options on Android for reddit clients - though I would assume the user base is more fragmented across multiple clients and would not have the volumes of Apollo..
  • theshrike79 3y ago
    Reddit Is Fun developer has received a similar ultimatum: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_dev_here_reddits_api_changes_will_likely_kill https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_de...
• Razengan 3y ago
  It's high time for Reddit to be buried. With the clout it already has, Apollo could probably start its own social media platform. Reddit, like Twitter, does not seem to understand what Facebook and Instagram already know: For many people, the APP -IS- the platform.
• sschueller 3y ago
  I guess these clients just need to scrape the websites and make post request via website with fake user agents etc. It's a lot of work but for a small fraction of 20m a year you can hire a team who only work on that. Didn't Digg primarily die from a redesign? Why has the web become so forgiving these days? People don't seem to give a shit anymore. "Oh OK, I'll use the official reddit app filled with ads, OK I will watch your 30 second pre-roll. OK I will give you may data for free". /s
  • anonred 3y ago
    Good luck releasing a client like that on the App Store.
    • sschueller 3y ago
      On what grounds is Apple or Google going to block it? You're using the website wrong?
      • iggldiggl 3y ago
        Re Google, possibly through this, as per https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9888379 https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... ? "We don’t allow apps that interfere with […] or access in an unauthorized manner […] other […] servers, networks, application programming interfaces (APIs), or services, including but not limited to other apps on the device, any Google service, or an authorized carrier’s network." "Examples of common violations: […] Apps that access or use a service or API in a manner that violates its terms of service."
        • sschueller 3y ago
          Doesn't matter, those policies won't mean much as soon as the EU forces Apple and Google to allow 3rd party app stores. I would also argue that accessing a website is not an API or an undocumented feature but a public entity. Who decides how a browser is supposed to display a website? It's up to the browser maker not some app store review process. That is why we have moz- CSS and apple meta tags.
• jh3 3y ago
  First time hearing about this client. I primarily use the Reddit iOS app, which seems fine. What's better about Apollo?
  • anonred 3y ago
    Very interested about this too. It’s missing important features from the official app like chats and live threads.
    • kitsunesoba 3y ago
      I don’t think I’ve ever had a legitimate use for Reddit chat… the only time I’ve ever been messaged is by spambots and any redditor I care to message is also on some other platform that does messaging better.
      • anonred 3y ago
        I buy/sell physical goods on several large subreddits and I’ve found that chats are the fastest way to get a response and close a deal. The old private message system is clunky by comparison.
  • tommit 3y ago
    I'm gonna go ahead and say everything. It's faster, no ads, beautifully designed so that it really shines on iOS, you can customize it to no end, ... the list goes on. Check it out on the AppStore if you like (or wait and see how this all turns out beforehand).
    • kitsunesoba 3y ago
      A big thing for me is no mystery meat algorithmic feeds… just the subreddits you’ve subscribed to or /all or /popular if you want to look at those. The official Reddit app is bad about doing things like showing you posts from washing machine subreddits because you looked at a post about washing machines once months ago while doing purchase research and it’s really annoying.
• deafpolygon 3y ago
  Did it actually result in a bill, or is that just a click-baity title? > Selig estimates it would cost $20 million a year to keep Apollo running. No, not a bill. Arstechnica is getting worse every year with these type of titles.
  • Remmy 3y ago
    Apollo had 30 billion requests last month. It's not clickbait. It's math.
    • deafpolygon 3y ago
      I'm sorry- was there a bill for $20M?
• projektfu 3y ago
  I primarily use the regular web interface. That's because I barely use Reddit anymore after using it a ton before. More and more, I found that things that shouldn't be nsfw were marked so, the interesting people have mostly already left, and the site optimizes for "engagement" like everything else, meaning it's full of catchy junk. I joke that if this guy (pointing at myself) is doing your thing, it's probably jumped the shark. What does it mean when this guy has already grown tired of your platform?
• SirMaster 3y ago
  Third party Reddit apps should just start letting users bring their own API credentials as each user gets access to a free tier of API access of 100 queries a minute which is plenty.
• true_religion 3y ago
  Apollo has about 1.5 million active users. To put this another way you would write Reddit API to cost users about €1 per month.
• bitsoda 3y ago
  Building your business on the back of somebody else's API is always gonna be a risky endeavor. Luckily, Apollo is a great client with loyal users, so hopefully Christian can spin off his own backend forum and build from there. Reddit's been making some dubious moves (crypto avatar-things, hostile dark patterns steering mobile web users to their app, more ads, etc) that I wouldn't be surprised if more and more users went looking for an alternative with a similar flavor.
• isaluki 3y ago
  Is Reddit about to drive themselves off a cliff? I feel like all these large tech players are trying to support alternative movements
• brokenmachine 3y ago
  He should work together and join up with all the other alternative reddit apps and create their own backend api that they all pay for pro rata according to how much data they use.