8 ms·

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 a

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.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      The business’s servers, bandwidth, and employees are “commons” now?
      - hinkley 3y ago
        The land the nobility or the roman catholic church owned were the 'commons' then. A server with nothing on it is like a field of weeds. It's just taking up space.
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        I agree on land being the “commons”. If a server with nothing on it is just taking up space, then the users will have no problem spinning their own up and replacing Reddit or whatever.
        MagnumOpus 3y ago
        That's the point, the server is commodity, hacker news or voat or dozens of others can provide the same platform. The community and the eyeballs are what is valuable, and Reddit holds them captive not due to any incremental value they provide, but due to network effects. Lots of people or companies would immediately replace Reddit if the quality of the server or UX or UI was what mattered -- but cannot because the audience is captive. Killing the apps represents a unique "digg moment" of pissing off users enough to bother migrating.
        jodrellblank 3y ago
        A field of weeds is home to insects, pollinators, small wildlife, CO2 removing/oxygen producing plants, it can be a nice place to look at, to make a path and walk through, weeds can be beneficial[1] to the soil, or edible or medicinal[2]. A server with nothing on it is worse than taking up space, it's an investment of energy and CO2 release to make it and ship it around the world, and if it's powered on then it's taking electricity probably from fossil fuels and turning it into waste heat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_weed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_weed [2] https://gardenerspath.com/plants/herbs/edible-medicinal-weeds/ https://gardenerspath.com/plants/herbs/edible-medicinal-weed...
mdgrech23 3y ago
If you make more money it's hardly BS. There are supply and demand graphs and you can reasonably calculate how many customers you lose/gain from a price increase/decrease.
- jeffalyanak 3y ago
  It can be rational and still be BS.
  - warkdarrior 3y ago
    It's only BS because you have to pay more.
    - jeffalyanak 3y ago
      Yes, exactly. It's only BS because you have to pay more, I don't think they made any other changes.
- 9991 3y ago
  reddit's users are creating the content for the other users, so a drop in users means less or worse content. Doubt you could model easily with a demand chart.
- brookst 3y ago
  Those graphs rely on knowing the price elasticity of demand, which is easy to get for commodities like wheat and next to impossible to get for differentiated products, at least without testing various prices on statistically identical cohorts, which is technically difficult and a PR nightmare.
  - eru 3y ago
    The short run elasticity might also be very different from the longer run elasticity. Eg consumer put up with the increased price for a while, but will switch away over time.
philistine 3y ago
I don't disagree that it's one point of view, but I hardly believe both examples do not have a simpler explanation: both companies no longer want APIs for third-party clients. Elon wanted to turn it completely off and was probably convinced to ban the accounts of all the third-party clients and to try and harass the world's many weather services to pay 42,000$ a month. Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo. He's always been fairly transparent about his money flow, so it's exceedingly easy for Reddit to price him out and put the fear of god into any developer interested in a Reddit client.
- afterburner 3y ago
  > Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo. Do you mean at least one? Because there are many "credible" ones, unless I misunderstand what you mean by credible.
  - tnel77 3y ago
    Credible likely means “good and successful” in this context
    - mtizim 3y ago
      By this definition, there's still multiple credible reddit clients - relay, baconreader, rif.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - spurgu 3y ago
        Boost also.
      - SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
        I'm surprised how infrequently I see Relay mentioned considering how slick it is
      - 3y ago
halJordan 3y ago
If you go into that thread there are people begging Selig to charge them 4x what Apollo Ultra costs. And they're begging him to charge it to everyone all the time. This can't just be laid on the feet of faceless bean counters or old men in the executive suite.
- brookst 3y ago
  Good point. We must lay this at the feet of people who want the product and are willing to pay for it.
- Shekelphile 3y ago
  [flagged]
- pbmonster 3y ago
  40% of reddit posts are marked NSFW. All those won't be able to be accessed from the API. And those NSFW posts are far from just porn. It's frequently news (especially related to war), the "vice" subreddits (cigars, guns), mental health subreddits, ect. Also, 4x of Apollo Ultra is probably not enough. After the Appstore takes its cut and the dev pays himself, you're not left with enough money to pay for the API access of the power users you're now inevitably left with. Powerusers, who, again, can't access 40% of posts on your app.
  - OGWhales 3y ago
    I’m not sure how this will be handled, considering there is only one kind of NSFW tag, but the reddit admins said that only sexually explicit content will be inaccessible from the API.
  - saltminer 3y ago
    > And those NSFW posts are far from just porn. It's frequently news (especially related to war), the "vice" subreddits (cigars, guns), mental health subreddits, ect. And for the longest time, many subs based their flairs around the NSFW tag combined with some CSS hacks, especially for subs based around TV shows wanting to add spoiler warnings. Some subs never bothered to update to the new system and still use this.
imiric 3y ago
Good. It's about time for more people to move on to better platforms. Twitter is a cesspool, and Reddit has some good communities that will be better served from a platform that's not ruled by a greedy corporation that couldn't care less about its users.
- tnel77 3y ago
  What are these better platforms? Genuinely curious.
  - e12e 3y ago
    Seems like a golden moment to astroturf in a successor with both reddit and twitter sabotaging themselves?
    - zouhair 3y ago
      tildes.net comes to mind
      - c23gooey 3y ago
        have you got invites?
        bananamerica 3y ago
        I don't have any invites left, but you can get one easily on /r/tildes.
      - moffkalast 3y ago
        > Tildes is currently in invite-only alpha, and you must be invited to be able to register. Copying the Google+ model, nice. We all saw how very well that went.
        bananamerica 3y ago
zouhair 3y ago
I don't use LH on mobile because there is no decent app. When Reddit 3rd party apps stop working I'll just stop using Reddit on mobile. Also on Desktop, only old reddit makes it worth my time. The moment old reddit is turned off Reddit is over for me.
hnick 3y ago
I thought Google Maps was the first? There was a big hoo-ha about that a while ago.
vhdI27 3y ago
or maybe we are past the excess of a 0% interest rate environment and people are now expected to pay for shit.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  That sounds like a reasonable factor on all of this.
  - vczf 3y ago
    Lock API access for apps behind reddit gold and now your power users are happy. You wouldn't even need to hold their hand when they set it up. I'd be willing to pay for reddit to some degree. Because this isn't what they did, I suspect third-party apps are just collateral damage in a policy aimed at gating access to reddit content: from LLM developers, AI researchers, and anybody who can derive value from it.
NovaDudely 3y ago
A slight various on Microsoft's EEE. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Embrace the users. Extend the functions to get them locked in. Exploit them for everything you can get!
jethro_tell 3y ago
This kinda assumes that people won't leave in mass. Digg migration took like 60 days. I think especially in a forum where people tend to be semi anon. This isn't staking out a facebook name and keeping up with highschool friends. I know a few user names by sight on reddit but I really don't care if I hear from them again and I don't expect they care about me. Makes leaving to anywhere that can put together a decent UGC interface pretty simple. It just feels like other than content, which reddit doesn't actually post, there's not much in the way of network affect.
- _fat_santa 3y ago
  I feel like Reddit sees their userbase as two types of users: casual users that browse /r/pics or something like that on the official app / web and power users that are subbed to niche subreddits, use 3rd party apps and likely still use the old.* subdomain. For the longest time Reddit was predominantly the latter group of power users but in recent years Reddit has had a mass influx of the former casual group of users. I think the bet that Reddit is making is that the latter group is much smaller than the former and cutting off API access won't make a significant difference. But if they are wrong, this could well be the end of Reddit, going just like Digg went. It will likely still exist, but as a shell of it's former self.
  - OGWhales 3y ago
    I wonder how pissing off the power users, which produce most of the content, is going to turn out. There is a similar issue with moderators, who heavily rely on third party tools to moderate their subs. I can’t imagine this killing reddit, not at all, but I think the power users and moderators are important to what makes reddit reddit and that without them the quality will decline quite a lot.
SergeAx 3y ago
But it doesn't make a lot of sense: people will just start to scrape sites again. APIs was there to make the process less painful for servers and control who scraping what and how fast.
rsynnott 3y ago
The thing is, though, that the value of these APIs is largely driven by the userbase, and the most valuable users tend to use third-party clients. Now, I'm not surprised to see _Twitter_ doing this, because it's just one of a laundry-list of ideas that Naughty Old Mr Car has to make Twitter worse; it really barely registers. But _Reddit_, I would have thought, would be a lot more conservative in the "massive dangerous change" department, particularly after what happened to Digg (and more generally the history of internet forums). I'd expect that there's a huge danger for them here that the big third party apps will simply endorse a Reddit clone.
PestoDiRucola 3y ago
Good thing web scraping is a thing.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
Eh, I think this goes in line with Netflix's recent hardline changes. Everyone references their Tweet from years ago of like "love is sharing passwords" and bitching about how Netflix has changed & become greedy. But those people are thinking big enough; Netflix has changed this way because back then, they didn't really have any competition in the space. And now _everyone_ has to have their own fucking streaming platform, so of course Netflix is gonna change policy. I'm not defending Netflix here, but what I am saying is that people are doing the shortsighted animal thing and bitching about Netflix. Really they should be bitching about all streaming companies and requesting that our democratic governments enact policies that force companies and corporations to be consumer friendly. All of them. Tax the rich. All of them.

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.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    The business’s servers, bandwidth, and employees are “commons” now?
    - hinkley 3y ago
      The land the nobility or the roman catholic church owned were the 'commons' then. A server with nothing on it is like a field of weeds. It's just taking up space.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        I agree on land being the “commons”. If a server with nothing on it is just taking up space, then the users will have no problem spinning their own up and replacing Reddit or whatever.
        MagnumOpus 3y ago
        That's the point, the server is commodity, hacker news or voat or dozens of others can provide the same platform. The community and the eyeballs are what is valuable, and Reddit holds them captive not due to any incremental value they provide, but due to network effects. Lots of people or companies would immediately replace Reddit if the quality of the server or UX or UI was what mattered -- but cannot because the audience is captive. Killing the apps represents a unique "digg moment" of pissing off users enough to bother migrating.
      - jodrellblank 3y ago
        A field of weeds is home to insects, pollinators, small wildlife, CO2 removing/oxygen producing plants, it can be a nice place to look at, to make a path and walk through, weeds can be beneficial[1] to the soil, or edible or medicinal[2]. A server with nothing on it is worse than taking up space, it's an investment of energy and CO2 release to make it and ship it around the world, and if it's powered on then it's taking electricity probably from fossil fuels and turning it into waste heat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_weed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_weed [2] https://gardenerspath.com/plants/herbs/edible-medicinal-weeds/ https://gardenerspath.com/plants/herbs/edible-medicinal-weed...

mdgrech23 3y ago

If you make more money it's hardly BS. There are supply and demand graphs and you can reasonably calculate how many customers you lose/gain from a price increase/decrease.

jeffalyanak 3y ago
It can be rational and still be BS.
- warkdarrior 3y ago
  It's only BS because you have to pay more.
  - jeffalyanak 3y ago
    Yes, exactly. It's only BS because you have to pay more, I don't think they made any other changes.
9991 3y ago
reddit's users are creating the content for the other users, so a drop in users means less or worse content. Doubt you could model easily with a demand chart.
brookst 3y ago
Those graphs rely on knowing the price elasticity of demand, which is easy to get for commodities like wheat and next to impossible to get for differentiated products, at least without testing various prices on statistically identical cohorts, which is technically difficult and a PR nightmare.
- eru 3y ago
  The short run elasticity might also be very different from the longer run elasticity. Eg consumer put up with the increased price for a while, but will switch away over time.

philistine 3y ago

I don't disagree that it's one point of view, but I hardly believe both examples do not have a simpler explanation: both companies no longer want APIs for third-party clients. Elon wanted to turn it completely off and was probably convinced to ban the accounts of all the third-party clients and to try and harass the world's many weather services to pay 42,000$ a month. Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo. He's always been fairly transparent about his money flow, so it's exceedingly easy for Reddit to price him out and put the fear of god into any developer interested in a Reddit client.

afterburner 3y ago
> Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo. Do you mean at least one? Because there are many "credible" ones, unless I misunderstand what you mean by credible.
- tnel77 3y ago
  Credible likely means “good and successful” in this context
  - mtizim 3y ago
    By this definition, there's still multiple credible reddit clients - relay, baconreader, rif.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - spurgu 3y ago
      Boost also.
    - SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
      I'm surprised how infrequently I see Relay mentioned considering how slick it is
    - 3y ago

halJordan 3y ago

If you go into that thread there are people begging Selig to charge them 4x what Apollo Ultra costs. And they're begging him to charge it to everyone all the time. This can't just be laid on the feet of faceless bean counters or old men in the executive suite.

brookst 3y ago
Good point. We must lay this at the feet of people who want the product and are willing to pay for it.
Shekelphile 3y ago
[flagged]
pbmonster 3y ago
40% of reddit posts are marked NSFW. All those won't be able to be accessed from the API. And those NSFW posts are far from just porn. It's frequently news (especially related to war), the "vice" subreddits (cigars, guns), mental health subreddits, ect. Also, 4x of Apollo Ultra is probably not enough. After the Appstore takes its cut and the dev pays himself, you're not left with enough money to pay for the API access of the power users you're now inevitably left with. Powerusers, who, again, can't access 40% of posts on your app.
- OGWhales 3y ago
  I’m not sure how this will be handled, considering there is only one kind of NSFW tag, but the reddit admins said that only sexually explicit content will be inaccessible from the API.
- saltminer 3y ago
  > And those NSFW posts are far from just porn. It's frequently news (especially related to war), the "vice" subreddits (cigars, guns), mental health subreddits, ect. And for the longest time, many subs based their flairs around the NSFW tag combined with some CSS hacks, especially for subs based around TV shows wanting to add spoiler warnings. Some subs never bothered to update to the new system and still use this.

imiric 3y ago

Good. It's about time for more people to move on to better platforms. Twitter is a cesspool, and Reddit has some good communities that will be better served from a platform that's not ruled by a greedy corporation that couldn't care less about its users.

tnel77 3y ago
What are these better platforms? Genuinely curious.
- e12e 3y ago
  Seems like a golden moment to astroturf in a successor with both reddit and twitter sabotaging themselves?
  - zouhair 3y ago
    tildes.net comes to mind
    - c23gooey 3y ago
      have you got invites?
      - bananamerica 3y ago
        I don't have any invites left, but you can get one easily on /r/tildes.
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      > Tildes is currently in invite-only alpha, and you must be invited to be able to register. Copying the Google+ model, nice. We all saw how very well that went.
      - bananamerica 3y ago

zouhair 3y ago

I don't use LH on mobile because there is no decent app. When Reddit 3rd party apps stop working I'll just stop using Reddit on mobile. Also on Desktop, only old reddit makes it worth my time. The moment old reddit is turned off Reddit is over for me.

hnick 3y ago

I thought Google Maps was the first? There was a big hoo-ha about that a while ago.

vhdI27 3y ago

or maybe we are past the excess of a 0% interest rate environment and people are now expected to pay for shit.

NovaDudely 3y ago
That sounds like a reasonable factor on all of this.
- vczf 3y ago
  Lock API access for apps behind reddit gold and now your power users are happy. You wouldn't even need to hold their hand when they set it up. I'd be willing to pay for reddit to some degree. Because this isn't what they did, I suspect third-party apps are just collateral damage in a policy aimed at gating access to reddit content: from LLM developers, AI researchers, and anybody who can derive value from it.

NovaDudely 3y ago

A slight various on Microsoft's EEE. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Embrace the users. Extend the functions to get them locked in. Exploit them for everything you can get!

jethro_tell 3y ago

This kinda assumes that people won't leave in mass. Digg migration took like 60 days. I think especially in a forum where people tend to be semi anon. This isn't staking out a facebook name and keeping up with highschool friends. I know a few user names by sight on reddit but I really don't care if I hear from them again and I don't expect they care about me. Makes leaving to anywhere that can put together a decent UGC interface pretty simple. It just feels like other than content, which reddit doesn't actually post, there's not much in the way of network affect.

_fat_santa 3y ago
I feel like Reddit sees their userbase as two types of users: casual users that browse /r/pics or something like that on the official app / web and power users that are subbed to niche subreddits, use 3rd party apps and likely still use the old.* subdomain. For the longest time Reddit was predominantly the latter group of power users but in recent years Reddit has had a mass influx of the former casual group of users. I think the bet that Reddit is making is that the latter group is much smaller than the former and cutting off API access won't make a significant difference. But if they are wrong, this could well be the end of Reddit, going just like Digg went. It will likely still exist, but as a shell of it's former self.
- OGWhales 3y ago
  I wonder how pissing off the power users, which produce most of the content, is going to turn out. There is a similar issue with moderators, who heavily rely on third party tools to moderate their subs. I can’t imagine this killing reddit, not at all, but I think the power users and moderators are important to what makes reddit reddit and that without them the quality will decline quite a lot.

SergeAx 3y ago

But it doesn't make a lot of sense: people will just start to scrape sites again. APIs was there to make the process less painful for servers and control who scraping what and how fast.

rsynnott 3y ago

The thing is, though, that the value of these APIs is largely driven by the userbase, and the most valuable users tend to use third-party clients. Now, I'm not surprised to see _Twitter_ doing this, because it's just one of a laundry-list of ideas that Naughty Old Mr Car has to make Twitter worse; it really barely registers. But _Reddit_, I would have thought, would be a lot more conservative in the "massive dangerous change" department, particularly after what happened to Digg (and more generally the history of internet forums). I'd expect that there's a huge danger for them here that the big third party apps will simply endorse a Reddit clone.

PestoDiRucola 3y ago

Good thing web scraping is a thing.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

Eh, I think this goes in line with Netflix's recent hardline changes. Everyone references their Tweet from years ago of like "love is sharing passwords" and bitching about how Netflix has changed & become greedy. But those people are thinking big enough; Netflix has changed this way because back then, they didn't really have any competition in the space. And now _everyone_ has to have their own fucking streaming platform, so of course Netflix is gonna change policy. I'm not defending Netflix here, but what I am saying is that people are doing the shortsighted animal thing and bitching about Netflix. Really they should be bitching about all streaming companies and requesting that our democratic governments enact policies that force companies and corporations to be consumer friendly. All of them. Tax the rich. All of them.