4 ms·

Do they really think it's reasonable? I presumed it was meant to kill off third party clients.

by gs17 3y ago

redmerchant2 3y ago
I’m just following Christian’s good faith interpretation. But it’s absolutely clear it was done to kill 3P clients. It’s hilarious that certain bots would be exempt and free from the price hike. Spez called out the Haikubot by name. Look those bots are cute. But it has to query every single sub and every single comment every few minutes to work. If Reddit truly cares about waste and inefficiency those would be the first to go. The value vs cost calculus is negative.
- George83728 3y ago
  Those bots also shit up the S/N and generally disrupt conversations with useless replies nobody asked for. They're a big part of the reason I stopped using reddit. Related: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748...
  - petersellers 3y ago
    Even more egregious are those stupid "RemindMe!" bots which in a very ham-fisted way create noise for everyone except the one person triggering the bot (ironically, a 3rd party app would be way better suited at implementing this specific feature)
    - PoorlyNamed 3y ago
      Apollo implemented this as a feature last year in fact.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      People have wanted schedulers and the ability to subscribe fr updates posts for years. Thankfully, RES has had that for almost a decade now. Don't think Reddit even acknowledged that feature request, compared to others they said "we're working on it" some 7 years ago. Closest they got is how the subscriber plan lets you highlight new comments in a post (something RES also had, but reddit made them remove it), but you still can't notify yourself to when new comments occur. Just another example of not considering the user. Pretty sure filtering subreddits from r/all was the last user-centric feature they made. And that was more made out of spite of the political shitshow that was 2016/7 as opposed to thinking about the users.
  - bagels 3y ago
    Has Time Cube vibes.
    - tkanarsky 3y ago
      From the great "welcome to my meme page" on FB.
      - bagels 3y ago
        Thank you, I'd never seen this genre of... absurdity before.
  - castlecrasher2 3y ago
    Agreed. The only good bot is the one that attempts to identify comment-stealing bots farming karma.
- latortuga 3y ago
  I don't think this is inconsistent at all. Bots don't look at or click on ads. Bots don't engage or create community. Bots don't buy awards. Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people.
  - willis936 3y ago
    It is inconsistent because spez has repeatedly said that 3P apps, Apollo in particular, are inefficient with their API usage which is preventing reddit from becoming profitable. It is their (thinly veiled) lie to justify the pricing because they think shutting down 3P apps and being caught lying at the same time is a better PR move than just shutting down 3P apps.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people. bot querying also doesn't make them any revenue, yet it is a common source of strain on the community. I imagine it also makes spam detection that much trickier. While there are some amazing bots (and ofc, automod) there are so many bots out there just to make noise. And reddit is already pretty noisy as is.
  - realusername 3y ago
    To my knowledge, ads and buying awards were never available from the API anyways so it's not like Reddit can use that as a valid argument
- harrelchris 3y ago
  It's either meant to kill 3rd party apps, or it's an impressive failure by Steve Huffman to create another revenue stream for Reddit.
ajmurmann 3y ago
Makes me wonder why even bother in that case to introduce phony pricing.
- gs17 3y ago
  IMO, it tries to shift the blame a little. Pretend the price is reasonable and the developers who shut down the apps instead of paying are who took your app away, not the company. Killing them outright would make the blame very clearly on Reddit's side. The other benefit is if anyone does decide to pay, it's profitable.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    They probably also didn't anticipate quite this extreme of a blowback. The response to killing 3rd party apps outright would have likely been the same as this, but when they did their calculations they probably expected the response to this to be less extreme and opted for the "safer" choice.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Except that doesn't work if every single third party app shuts down, which as far as I know is the case. That's why I roll my eyes and gag in disgust a little when I hear Reddit management and their apologists somehow try to blame Christian for not negotiating in good faith. Even if that were true (which, to be clear, I don't believe it actually is, the opposite in fact), it just means that some other developer would step up if the pricing let them continue. The fact that every other app also shut down just proves that was the entire goal of these API pricing changes in the first place.
ljm 3y ago
Even that makes little sense. Reddit has survived on volunteer moderation and their use of third party tools to manage the workload. If Reddit doesn’t want to cover the cost of that infrastructure then they’re going to incur the extra cost of hiring moderators. I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API (and thus third party clients) and since these companies see ads as a money printing scheme they’re happy to sacrifice whatever they can for it.
- curun1r 3y ago
  > I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API Even that doesn’t make sense. They could’ve just told app developers a) we’re going to start co-mingling ads in API responses and b) that failure to render those ads according to our guidelines will result in banning your client id. Users would still be free to purchase a premium account to avoid ads. Everyone would find that reasonable and there would’ve been no revolt. They could’ve even imposed per-user API quotas to avoid the kind of data harvesting that was being done to train LLMs. And they could’ve even threatened Christian with a ban if he didn’t improve the caching in his app, since that’s another criticism they’ve lobbed his way. All that is targeted at making 3P app users contributing members of a profitable platform. But they did none of that and, instead, quoted him an FU price that will force him to shut down.
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    This would have been plenty fair in my opinion, and may have even gotten me to buy Reddit premium. Instead I'm just walking away from the platform and my own small community of 15,000 readers that I've spent 7 years building.
    - ljm 3y ago
      I'm not sure even that Reddit has a genuine value prop beyond being a new walled garden to gather data and serve ads. But it might be too big to truly fail, now, because newer generations of internet users have only experienced the feudal internet. Once upon a time this was all served by RSS, forums, and niche websites. Reddit converted those communities to subreddits, Facebook took another slice of those. Discord and Slack portioned away other groups as did Tumblr and each one has attempted to establish a moat not just to keep competitors away, but to keep their users inside.
potatolicious 3y ago
I agree with this take - this seems pretextual rather than a good-faith attempt to charge for API access. Because history rhymes I suspect Reddit's leadership was heavily inspired by Twitter's killing of third-party clients, which actually ended up working out for Twitter. IMO Huffman's behavior in this entire saga has been extremely wanting, to the degree where one has to wonder about his suitability to lead the company. And to be clear - I'm actually someone who is sympathetic to Reddit's position, where a lot of the platform's value generation isn't being captured by them and the company is unprofitable. I'm a very long-time Reddit user but I'm generally pretty meh about the various tempests-in-a-teapot psychodramas that emerge from there, and I remain generally cool to the popular uprising rhetoric - but Huffman's behavior is pretty egregious. And this is why I don't really see this resolving peaceably - Huffman at this point seems personally aggrieved by Selig and one has to wonder if he's behaving in a capacity that maximizes the interests of his company vs. descending into a petty personal feud. I may be grossly misinterpreting him here - but based on his disastrous AMA and his haughty proclamations it's not an unreasonable perception. More importantly, as a company that is 100% reliant on mass volunteer labor to even exist, the fact that this perception has been projected, reinforced, and not usefully countered in any way suggests disqualifying leadership inability.
- tornato7 3y ago
  No matter how you look at it, Reddit leadership massively screwed this up. When half your site goes offline for two days and the entire front page is calling for the CEO's head, it's obvious that they have lost touch. And since they aren't reversing course on this, you can assume even more user-hostile changes are coming in the near future.
  - proamdev123 3y ago
    Agreed. And it’s actually 90% of the site offline at this point. And many subreddits have said they’ll be private indefinitely, not just 2 days.
    - OGWhales 3y ago
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
Isn't the whole point of this to charge AI companies harvesting reddit data? I thought 3rd party apps are collateral.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  I see this theory a lot and I'm not so sure. The Reddit API makes things easier, but with this new pricing it makes way more sense for AI companies to go back to scraping. But at the end of the day, AI companies aren't Reddit's users. Redditors don't have any reason to care about that, we have nothing to gain from Reddit charging AI companies for API access. So Reddit structing their response to AI in a way that completely dicks over so many users is never going to go over well. And it doesn't help that their CEO is acting like a petulant manchild the entire time.

Do they really think it's reasonable? I presumed it was meant to kill off third party clients.

by gs17 3y ago

Do they really think it's reasonable? I presumed it was meant to kill off third party clients.

I’m just following Christian’s good faith interpretation. But it’s absolutely clear it was done to kill 3P clients. It’s hilarious that certain bots would be exempt and free from the price hike. Spez called out the Haikubot by name. Look those bots are cute. But it has to query every single sub and every single comment every few minutes to work. If Reddit truly cares about waste and inefficiency those would be the first to go. The value vs cost calculus is negative.

George83728 3y ago
Those bots also shit up the S/N and generally disrupt conversations with useless replies nobody asked for. They're a big part of the reason I stopped using reddit. Related: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748...
- petersellers 3y ago
  Even more egregious are those stupid "RemindMe!" bots which in a very ham-fisted way create noise for everyone except the one person triggering the bot (ironically, a 3rd party app would be way better suited at implementing this specific feature)
  - PoorlyNamed 3y ago
    Apollo implemented this as a feature last year in fact.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    People have wanted schedulers and the ability to subscribe fr updates posts for years. Thankfully, RES has had that for almost a decade now. Don't think Reddit even acknowledged that feature request, compared to others they said "we're working on it" some 7 years ago. Closest they got is how the subscriber plan lets you highlight new comments in a post (something RES also had, but reddit made them remove it), but you still can't notify yourself to when new comments occur. Just another example of not considering the user. Pretty sure filtering subreddits from r/all was the last user-centric feature they made. And that was more made out of spite of the political shitshow that was 2016/7 as opposed to thinking about the users.
- bagels 3y ago
  Has Time Cube vibes.
  - tkanarsky 3y ago
    From the great "welcome to my meme page" on FB.
    - bagels 3y ago
      Thank you, I'd never seen this genre of... absurdity before.
- castlecrasher2 3y ago
  Agreed. The only good bot is the one that attempts to identify comment-stealing bots farming karma.
latortuga 3y ago
I don't think this is inconsistent at all. Bots don't look at or click on ads. Bots don't engage or create community. Bots don't buy awards. Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people.
- willis936 3y ago
  It is inconsistent because spez has repeatedly said that 3P apps, Apollo in particular, are inefficient with their API usage which is preventing reddit from becoming profitable. It is their (thinly veiled) lie to justify the pricing because they think shutting down 3P apps and being caught lying at the same time is a better PR move than just shutting down 3P apps.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people. bot querying also doesn't make them any revenue, yet it is a common source of strain on the community. I imagine it also makes spam detection that much trickier. While there are some amazing bots (and ofc, automod) there are so many bots out there just to make noise. And reddit is already pretty noisy as is.
- realusername 3y ago
  To my knowledge, ads and buying awards were never available from the API anyways so it's not like Reddit can use that as a valid argument
harrelchris 3y ago
It's either meant to kill 3rd party apps, or it's an impressive failure by Steve Huffman to create another revenue stream for Reddit.

ajmurmann 3y ago

Makes me wonder why even bother in that case to introduce phony pricing.

gs17 3y ago
IMO, it tries to shift the blame a little. Pretend the price is reasonable and the developers who shut down the apps instead of paying are who took your app away, not the company. Killing them outright would make the blame very clearly on Reddit's side. The other benefit is if anyone does decide to pay, it's profitable.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  They probably also didn't anticipate quite this extreme of a blowback. The response to killing 3rd party apps outright would have likely been the same as this, but when they did their calculations they probably expected the response to this to be less extreme and opted for the "safer" choice.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Except that doesn't work if every single third party app shuts down, which as far as I know is the case. That's why I roll my eyes and gag in disgust a little when I hear Reddit management and their apologists somehow try to blame Christian for not negotiating in good faith. Even if that were true (which, to be clear, I don't believe it actually is, the opposite in fact), it just means that some other developer would step up if the pricing let them continue. The fact that every other app also shut down just proves that was the entire goal of these API pricing changes in the first place.

ljm 3y ago

Even that makes little sense. Reddit has survived on volunteer moderation and their use of third party tools to manage the workload. If Reddit doesn’t want to cover the cost of that infrastructure then they’re going to incur the extra cost of hiring moderators. I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API (and thus third party clients) and since these companies see ads as a money printing scheme they’re happy to sacrifice whatever they can for it.

curun1r 3y ago
> I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API Even that doesn’t make sense. They could’ve just told app developers a) we’re going to start co-mingling ads in API responses and b) that failure to render those ads according to our guidelines will result in banning your client id. Users would still be free to purchase a premium account to avoid ads. Everyone would find that reasonable and there would’ve been no revolt. They could’ve even imposed per-user API quotas to avoid the kind of data harvesting that was being done to train LLMs. And they could’ve even threatened Christian with a ban if he didn’t improve the caching in his app, since that’s another criticism they’ve lobbed his way. All that is targeted at making 3P app users contributing members of a profitable platform. But they did none of that and, instead, quoted him an FU price that will force him to shut down.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  This would have been plenty fair in my opinion, and may have even gotten me to buy Reddit premium. Instead I'm just walking away from the platform and my own small community of 15,000 readers that I've spent 7 years building.
  - ljm 3y ago
    I'm not sure even that Reddit has a genuine value prop beyond being a new walled garden to gather data and serve ads. But it might be too big to truly fail, now, because newer generations of internet users have only experienced the feudal internet. Once upon a time this was all served by RSS, forums, and niche websites. Reddit converted those communities to subreddits, Facebook took another slice of those. Discord and Slack portioned away other groups as did Tumblr and each one has attempted to establish a moat not just to keep competitors away, but to keep their users inside.

potatolicious 3y ago

I agree with this take - this seems pretextual rather than a good-faith attempt to charge for API access. Because history rhymes I suspect Reddit's leadership was heavily inspired by Twitter's killing of third-party clients, which actually ended up working out for Twitter. IMO Huffman's behavior in this entire saga has been extremely wanting, to the degree where one has to wonder about his suitability to lead the company. And to be clear - I'm actually someone who is sympathetic to Reddit's position, where a lot of the platform's value generation isn't being captured by them and the company is unprofitable. I'm a very long-time Reddit user but I'm generally pretty meh about the various tempests-in-a-teapot psychodramas that emerge from there, and I remain generally cool to the popular uprising rhetoric - but Huffman's behavior is pretty egregious. And this is why I don't really see this resolving peaceably - Huffman at this point seems personally aggrieved by Selig and one has to wonder if he's behaving in a capacity that maximizes the interests of his company vs. descending into a petty personal feud. I may be grossly misinterpreting him here - but based on his disastrous AMA and his haughty proclamations it's not an unreasonable perception. More importantly, as a company that is 100% reliant on mass volunteer labor to even exist, the fact that this perception has been projected, reinforced, and not usefully countered in any way suggests disqualifying leadership inability.

tornato7 3y ago
No matter how you look at it, Reddit leadership massively screwed this up. When half your site goes offline for two days and the entire front page is calling for the CEO's head, it's obvious that they have lost touch. And since they aren't reversing course on this, you can assume even more user-hostile changes are coming in the near future.
- proamdev123 3y ago
  Agreed. And it’s actually 90% of the site offline at this point. And many subreddits have said they’ll be private indefinitely, not just 2 days.
  - OGWhales 3y ago

abdullahkhalids 3y ago

Isn't the whole point of this to charge AI companies harvesting reddit data? I thought 3rd party apps are collateral.

babypuncher 3y ago
I see this theory a lot and I'm not so sure. The Reddit API makes things easier, but with this new pricing it makes way more sense for AI companies to go back to scraping. But at the end of the day, AI companies aren't Reddit's users. Redditors don't have any reason to care about that, we have nothing to gain from Reddit charging AI companies for API access. So Reddit structing their response to AI in a way that completely dicks over so many users is never going to go over well. And it doesn't help that their CEO is acting like a petulant manchild the entire time.