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> Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use. Is there no

by Kiro 3y ago

> Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use. Is there no merit to this?

caranti 3y ago
There's absolutely merit to this. If Reddit can't fund itself, and goes under, all users loses a valuable community resource. That Reddit have decided to end free access to their APIs isn't itself an issue. The way they're doing it, and the significant departure from the decade and a half long de-facto agreement that a large body of the user base believe themselves to be party trading user generated content and user sourced moderation in exchange for platform access does seem to have missed the mark though. It doesn't take much creative thought to conceive of a scheme whereby the paid Reddit Gold includes API access, for example. Which should be a bit like a YouTube Premium or Spotify Premium kind of deal - direct contribution as alternative to advertising to achieve per user monetization. It's not even a stretch to partner with third party apps and let them collect the user payments as an alternative to requiring users to pay for the app and Reddit Gold separately. But the very short notice period and seemingly unpalatable pricing, together with some of the reported questionable comments and actions from Reddit, don't come across as reasonable from any rational perspective.
zmmmmm 3y ago
It implies that the bare costs of serving the API requests are the issue (subsidising means, it costs us more to provide you something than you pay us for it). Reddit wants to charge $0.24/1k API calls. That doesn't seem to be reasonable. To calibrate this, consider what is charged for API access by say, AWS for S3 API calls: $0.005/1k API calls. So they are two orders of magnitude higher than AWS. Obviously it's hard to compete on infrastructure cost with an actual cloud provider, but I still think two orders of magnitude should be enough that an entity the size of Reddit can offer a much more reasonable price than that. They could also optimise their API layer to better match the needs of 3rd party apps if the pure number of calls is the issue.

by Kiro 3y ago

> Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use. Is there no merit to this?

caranti 3y ago

There's absolutely merit to this. If Reddit can't fund itself, and goes under, all users loses a valuable community resource. That Reddit have decided to end free access to their APIs isn't itself an issue. The way they're doing it, and the significant departure from the decade and a half long de-facto agreement that a large body of the user base believe themselves to be party trading user generated content and user sourced moderation in exchange for platform access does seem to have missed the mark though. It doesn't take much creative thought to conceive of a scheme whereby the paid Reddit Gold includes API access, for example. Which should be a bit like a YouTube Premium or Spotify Premium kind of deal - direct contribution as alternative to advertising to achieve per user monetization. It's not even a stretch to partner with third party apps and let them collect the user payments as an alternative to requiring users to pay for the app and Reddit Gold separately. But the very short notice period and seemingly unpalatable pricing, together with some of the reported questionable comments and actions from Reddit, don't come across as reasonable from any rational perspective.

zmmmmm 3y ago

It implies that the bare costs of serving the API requests are the issue (subsidising means, it costs us more to provide you something than you pay us for it). Reddit wants to charge $0.24/1k API calls. That doesn't seem to be reasonable. To calibrate this, consider what is charged for API access by say, AWS for S3 API calls: $0.005/1k API calls. So they are two orders of magnitude higher than AWS. Obviously it's hard to compete on infrastructure cost with an actual cloud provider, but I still think two orders of magnitude should be enough that an entity the size of Reddit can offer a much more reasonable price than that. They could also optimise their API layer to better match the needs of 3rd party apps if the pure number of calls is the issue.