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Also the normal way to introduce pricing to free services is to make it initially super-cheap so the majority will find it reasonable. Then overtime increase p

by jarym 3y ago

Also the normal way to introduce pricing to free services is to make it initially super-cheap so the majority will find it reasonable. Then overtime increase prices as you get a better sense of value and market dynamics. Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart. It’s now some governments go with taxation before u-turning some years later when they’ve driven away or killed whatever it is they were hoping to tax.

mynameisvlad 3y ago
That’s assuming that you want people to use your API for third party apps. Reddit has made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in that, despite the things they say. In that sense, it makes perfect sense to jack up the price to a shocking level to force everyone to stop without outright banning them.
- revscat 3y ago
  I’m not so sure. I think Huffman saw all the hype around ChatGPT, and how they trained their model on Reddit comments, and had a fantasy about charging AI companies high rates for future API usage. Apollo, et. al., were an afterthought, if consideration was given to them at all.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    That's certainly fair, but you'd hope that out of the 2000 employees, at least some are in a position to evaluate decisions like that and explicitly calculate the PR risk of any decision. And they certainly should have taken it into account.
    - gknoy 3y ago
      Not only that, if they really didn't want to kill 3rd party apps, they've had a week to say, "oh no! We see exactly how this is going to kill third party apps, let's iterate to try to fix it so that we don't do that", instead of doubling down on a feud with them.
- btmiller 3y ago
  Yes. We all know it wasn’t in earnest, but this allows Reddit to say they tried.
paddw 3y ago
yeah, they failed to boil the frog properly on this one. if they wanted to go this fast would have been better to just shutdown the api all together on like a week notice.
joecot 3y ago
> Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart It's really dumb if the point is to keep all the third party applications that made your platform popular. It's much smarter if the point is to kill them all in favor of your first party app, that you are promising your VC investors will have tremendous growth leading up to an IPO, and you don't want your site to look like the bad guy by killing all the third party apps. They just handled it poorly. If the reddit app actually had the moderation tools they've been promising for years, I doubt the moderator outcry would be anywhere near this bad. And if you watch you'll notice, even during the blackout, reddit's messaging is all about the things you can still do besides use the third party apps. They're making the API still free for moderation bots. They're working with apps that provide accessibility tools for reddit. They're working with the services moderators use for moderation. They're appealing to the moderators. They've made no mentions of working with: Apollo, BaconReader, or RedditIsFun. The point was to kill the third party apps.
- skrtskrt 3y ago
  Ding ding ding The real reddit app doesn’t even have an option to block a particular ad account so when they serve you evangelical right wing ads all day you just have to swallow it.
  - nikole9696 3y ago
    The inability to block ads I personally find offensive is the #1 reason I'll use a browser with ad block over a native app. Reddit and Tumblr are my two biggest offenders that do not let me properly block particular ads - notably gambling and religion, but also those scam mobile games and other scammy nonsense. I get that they need to pay the bills, but I should have some level of control over what I see.
    - joecot 3y ago
      Which is the real reason that reddit is killing both the third party apps and the mobile site. Same reason that Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok make the mobile site as painful as possible. If you're using a website in a browser, the user has control. If you're using their app, the company has control.
caturopath 3y ago
It seems like they must have thought their best bet was driving out third-party apps altogether, and the best approach was to pull the band aid off as fast as possible
downWidOutaFite 3y ago
> some governments go with taxation before u-turning some years later when they’ve driven away or killed whatever it is they were hoping to tax. Examples or I don't believe that happens, maybe very rarely.
- jarym 3y ago
  You're free to choose what you believe, I'm not here to convince you. But one of the older examples is the 'window tax' https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/towns/tyne-and-wear-case-study/about-the-group/housing/window-tax/ https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transforming...
  - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    A tax from 1696 that was replaced 154 years later? Nothing was driven away or killed so it's not even a proper example.
    - jarym 3y ago
      You asked for an example. I provided one. The result of this policy was people were bricking up windows and it was eventually undone because it didn't work. So yes, 'windows' were 'killed' and consequently the expected tax revenue that was expected from them. I would counter that it is a valid example. A more recent example in the UK would be the pensions cap which had the unintended effect of sending people into early retirement because it became uneconomical to continue working. This impacted especially doctors in the NHS and contributed to a labour shortage. The government finally corrected the folly 2 months ago.
- andromeduck 3y ago
  Wealth taxee are the classic example. Plenty of countries have tried
  - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
wvenable 3y ago
The other thing is they don't have anything in place to support paying 3rd party developers. They don't have appropriate dashboards, they still don't provide complete APIs, they're making it more restrictive. If they're truly trying to run a paid API service then they have to actually support those customers (the apps) and they really weren't prepared to do that.
IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
This is how a normal company behaves. It is not how a pre-IPO company behaves Incentives.
cyanydeez 3y ago
Because the goal was to trap redditors into Reddit marketing loop.
babypuncher 3y ago
Some insist this is about making it so companies training LLMs aren't doing so with Reddit's data for free. But I call bullshit. People training new AI models are using the API right now because it's free and easy, but as soon as that changes they will go back to good old fashioned web scraping.
- civilitty 3y ago
  People training AI were already using CommonCrawl. There’s too many data sources to figure out each API. Everyone just downloads CC from AWS.

by jarym 3y ago

mynameisvlad 3y ago

That’s assuming that you want people to use your API for third party apps. Reddit has made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in that, despite the things they say. In that sense, it makes perfect sense to jack up the price to a shocking level to force everyone to stop without outright banning them.

revscat 3y ago
I’m not so sure. I think Huffman saw all the hype around ChatGPT, and how they trained their model on Reddit comments, and had a fantasy about charging AI companies high rates for future API usage. Apollo, et. al., were an afterthought, if consideration was given to them at all.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  That's certainly fair, but you'd hope that out of the 2000 employees, at least some are in a position to evaluate decisions like that and explicitly calculate the PR risk of any decision. And they certainly should have taken it into account.
  - gknoy 3y ago
    Not only that, if they really didn't want to kill 3rd party apps, they've had a week to say, "oh no! We see exactly how this is going to kill third party apps, let's iterate to try to fix it so that we don't do that", instead of doubling down on a feud with them.
btmiller 3y ago
Yes. We all know it wasn’t in earnest, but this allows Reddit to say they tried.

paddw 3y ago

yeah, they failed to boil the frog properly on this one. if they wanted to go this fast would have been better to just shutdown the api all together on like a week notice.

joecot 3y ago

> Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart It's really dumb if the point is to keep all the third party applications that made your platform popular. It's much smarter if the point is to kill them all in favor of your first party app, that you are promising your VC investors will have tremendous growth leading up to an IPO, and you don't want your site to look like the bad guy by killing all the third party apps. They just handled it poorly. If the reddit app actually had the moderation tools they've been promising for years, I doubt the moderator outcry would be anywhere near this bad. And if you watch you'll notice, even during the blackout, reddit's messaging is all about the things you can still do besides use the third party apps. They're making the API still free for moderation bots. They're working with apps that provide accessibility tools for reddit. They're working with the services moderators use for moderation. They're appealing to the moderators. They've made no mentions of working with: Apollo, BaconReader, or RedditIsFun. The point was to kill the third party apps.

skrtskrt 3y ago
Ding ding ding The real reddit app doesn’t even have an option to block a particular ad account so when they serve you evangelical right wing ads all day you just have to swallow it.
- nikole9696 3y ago
  The inability to block ads I personally find offensive is the #1 reason I'll use a browser with ad block over a native app. Reddit and Tumblr are my two biggest offenders that do not let me properly block particular ads - notably gambling and religion, but also those scam mobile games and other scammy nonsense. I get that they need to pay the bills, but I should have some level of control over what I see.
  - joecot 3y ago
    Which is the real reason that reddit is killing both the third party apps and the mobile site. Same reason that Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok make the mobile site as painful as possible. If you're using a website in a browser, the user has control. If you're using their app, the company has control.

caturopath 3y ago

It seems like they must have thought their best bet was driving out third-party apps altogether, and the best approach was to pull the band aid off as fast as possible

downWidOutaFite 3y ago

> some governments go with taxation before u-turning some years later when they’ve driven away or killed whatever it is they were hoping to tax. Examples or I don't believe that happens, maybe very rarely.

jarym 3y ago
You're free to choose what you believe, I'm not here to convince you. But one of the older examples is the 'window tax' https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/towns/tyne-and-wear-case-study/about-the-group/housing/window-tax/ https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transforming...
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  A tax from 1696 that was replaced 154 years later? Nothing was driven away or killed so it's not even a proper example.
  - jarym 3y ago
    You asked for an example. I provided one. The result of this policy was people were bricking up windows and it was eventually undone because it didn't work. So yes, 'windows' were 'killed' and consequently the expected tax revenue that was expected from them. I would counter that it is a valid example. A more recent example in the UK would be the pensions cap which had the unintended effect of sending people into early retirement because it became uneconomical to continue working. This impacted especially doctors in the NHS and contributed to a labour shortage. The government finally corrected the folly 2 months ago.
andromeduck 3y ago
Wealth taxee are the classic example. Plenty of countries have tried
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago

wvenable 3y ago

The other thing is they don't have anything in place to support paying 3rd party developers. They don't have appropriate dashboards, they still don't provide complete APIs, they're making it more restrictive. If they're truly trying to run a paid API service then they have to actually support those customers (the apps) and they really weren't prepared to do that.

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago

This is how a normal company behaves. It is not how a pre-IPO company behaves Incentives.

cyanydeez 3y ago

Because the goal was to trap redditors into Reddit marketing loop.

babypuncher 3y ago

Some insist this is about making it so companies training LLMs aren't doing so with Reddit's data for free. But I call bullshit. People training new AI models are using the API right now because it's free and easy, but as soon as that changes they will go back to good old fashioned web scraping.

civilitty 3y ago
People training AI were already using CommonCrawl. There’s too many data sources to figure out each API. Everyone just downloads CC from AWS.