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I don't really understand why it had to be this way. It's so easy to think of other ways this could have been handled. Even just announcing the same change with
by extr 3y ago
I don't really understand why it had to be this way. It's so easy to think of other ways this could have been handled. Even just announcing the same change with 6 months of lead time rather than 1 month would have gone over better. Or boil the frog and gradually introduce API restrictions. It's as if the CEO is purposefully being as belligerent as possible to rile people up.
- CommitSyn 3y agoOr they're broke and reddit is soon to be bankrupt. But even so, if they had just said that, the outcome would be so much different. Because as of now it seems like they're fucking people over for the sake of fucking them over.
- lokar 3y agoNeither the cost of allowing these apps or the revenue the charge would produce could possibly matter.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoI'm not so sure - I assume the hyper-valuable users are actually generally using 3rd party apps, so forcing them back on the platform could raise their CPI enough to look good at an IPO rather than terrible.
- lokar 3y agoThey have to be much less than 1%, I don’t t see how the math works. Views (and ad clicks) are what matter, not posts and comments. They only need the posts and comments to have something to stick an ad next to.
- smileysteve 3y agoBut the api doesn't deliver ads and the clients don't pay Reddit.
- lokar 3y agoBut they don’t cost much. Getting the activity scaled ad rev from these users won’t make them profitable.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoCost is a red herring here - the real metric is opportunity cost. These are users who spend a lot of time on reddit and give up a ton of data, so they can almost certainly get a much better CPI from these users, and give them a ton of ads.
- actionablefiber 3y agoIt is a gamble. I am a Reddit power user in part because of the superb unobtrusive experience of old.reddit and Apollo. If you shove it full of ads, it’s no longer the experience I got addicted to. At that point I’d rather leave.
- nullc 3y agoOpen AI already showed that you can train an LLM on the stuff reddit's already got and produce a site with as much traffic as reddit gets... so what are the users needed for? I say this in jest, but only partially... lots of subreddits have noticed influexes of AI bots recently. Maybe spammers testing the water, or maybe you were just the product that was just helping train its replacement.
- rgavuliak 3y agoIn online games and newspaper paywalls you have on average 1-3 % valuable users. Even if Apollo made up less than 1%, those are probably the valuable ones so it could be a good chunk of those.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago[flagged]
- judge2020 3y agoAn influx of capital would be easier by making everyone pay $10/mo to access the API via third-party clients. Would still be unpopular but would mean people could still have the experience they want to see from reddit. but that's the issue - Reddit's been focusing on other forms of content only in the native Reddit app, like TikTok-esque live streams and promoted posts from subs you aren't subscribed to.
- a2tech 3y agoThey have a $4/month product ALL ready that removes ads and gives you more features. Making that a requirement to use the API is by FAR the simplest and most profitable option. Its also more profit then they're proposing to get from their API charges
- bwat49 3y agoYeah I find it baffling that they didn't just do this
- dasil003 3y agoMost likely it's about control, not financials.
- wing-_-nuts 3y agoI found it interesting that spez admitted in his call with the apollo dev that the actual hosting cost for the api calls were pennies compared to the 'opportunity cost' of not having users use the official app. He basically admitted that harvesting data via the app and selling it to advertisers was reddit's bread and butter now.
- lenerdenator 3y agoPeople have to realize, from a standpoint of "how do I make all of the money?", this is the only way these sites can survive in a world of reasonably-high interest rates. There are only so many people who would be willing to pay $x for a Reddit subscription. Would the quality of content and discussion go up? Absolutely, but that's not what Huffman and his VC backers care about. They care about _scale_, and if you can collect the information of every person who goes so far as to even click on a Reddit post that's a result in a Google search, you can have near-infinite scale. At that point, the question isn't "how do I get Joe Schmoe to pay for a Reddit subscription?", it's "How many ads can I cram into every GET request made to Reddit and maximize the price advertisers are willing to pay to be in that GET request?"
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago[flagged]
- 8note 3y agoIf they're broke, this doesn't help, since instead of paying, everyone they expect to pay is shutting down
- bshipp 3y agoIf they're broke than they should have first stopped self-hosting videos and images. I can't believe their API call cost is more excessive than their video and image hosting costs.
- morkalork 3y agoI wonder how much impact their shit-tastic video player has on bandwidth costs. On one hand, when it freezes and refuses to play, it saves money. On the other hand, constantly restarting videos to try to get them to play probably costs some since it doesn't appear to be caching properly either. The net cost could go either way.
- n1c 3y agoThere's a subtlety that seems to be getting skipped over quite frequently. It's not "the cost of the API call". It's "the opportunity cost of that user not coming to our main website".
- bshipp 3y agoI agree, but if we are incorporating the opportunity cost of free-riding 3rd-party users than Reddit also needs to incorporate the opportunity cost of losing thousands of unpaid moderators who keep the site running. I can't imagine the math will be favorable.
- perrohunter 3y agoHow is charging for an API which costs them money "fucking people over"?
- lenerdenator 3y agoTo me, there's a way that business relationships are carried out; you can deliver bad news to industry partners in a professional manner. If Huffman had called up guys like Christian Selig a while back and been like "Listen, it's been great, I love the apps you guys make, but business is business and I want to see more revenue, and to do that I'm going to charge more for the API and probably eventually shut it down, let's work on a timetable to sunset things.", he's not nearly the jerk he is today. No one's under the illusion that Reddit or Conde Nast are charities; they have revenue targets to make. What makes this fucking people over is the negotiating over API price and implementation timetable that was clearly in bad faith and meant to shut down these applications within the timespan of a quarter. Imagine being told that your way of making a living (which these apps are for their developers) is going away in a month. Sure, these devs are the cream of the crop, but that's still a major life disruption, and you don't do that to the people who helped make your website what it is today.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoGiving 30 days notice for people using the API to adjust their entire revenue model. 4 months after saying "hey don't worry we're not going to charge for the API this year". This isn't just about an API becoming paid. It's clear they want to phase out 3rd party apps without saying it out loud.
- nightshadetrie 3y agoI think they’re panicking after being devalued to 6b with hopes of IPOing.
- Terr_ 3y ago> It's so easy to think of other ways this could have been handled. Well, assuming Reddit executives were telling the truth about their goals/needs, which I don't think they are. They claim the purpose was some kind of emergency band-aid to stop the service from hemorrhaging cash from evil large-scale data-sucking AI developers without compensation... But in that case, they could have simply introduced it as a fresh terms-of-service restriction, with some payment-tier to come later that permits that use of the data.
- jprete 3y agoI don't think Reddit was telling the truth either. But AI developers/companies seem to almost universally believe they have fair-use rights to train their models on any data they can get their hands on, and a sufficiently expensive API at least forces them to do engineering work to get all the data. So at the time I believed Reddit's reasoning.
- q1w2 3y agoDon't underestimate the power of ego. It causes irrational behaviors.
- mkull 3y ago100% ceo ego driving poor, unsophisticated, and non strategic decisions. This could have been handled so much better. Evidence that he is not the right leader to be ceo
- AmericanOP 3y agoA little crazy to me that Discord can create an attractive subscription tier while Reddit flounders. Well, maybe not so surprising with their product team.
- JCharante 3y agoDifferent products. Discord is about socializing. Reddit is an anti social social network. Only weirdos would pay to dress up their Snoovatar.
- AdamJacobMuller 3y agoYou go the twitter way. Just cap all existing API keys to roughly the number of users they currently have. Everyone who is currently using RIF or Apollo or $whatever can continue to use it. They can't add any new users. Super simple, nobody is losing anything, nobody is having anything taken away. All new users would be fed into the app. Eventually the 3rd party apps would have died off. It would have been a slow, painful and QUIET death.
- pellucidar 3y agoTwitter capped the third party apps ages ago, but they wouldn’t die. It was still a LOUD death when Musk finally cut them off.
- jupp0r 3y agoOr just invest in building mobile apps that people love to use more than the alternatives.
- Sophistifunk 3y agoThey're running out of cash, investors want their money back, and their answer it seems is to turn reddit into onlyfans, which requires they wrest-back control of all the NSFW parts of it.
- jrm4 3y agoI don't understand why the users aren't just leaving? Surely the software/infrastructure can't be that hard to replicate, especially on a "subreddit" level? Why don't a few big mods just go this route and tell everyone else?
- RhodesianHunter 3y agoIt seems like quite a few are judging by online comments alone. I'd love to get a hold of the real numbers.
- wing-_-nuts 3y agoWhat gets me is if all the third party apps had banded together and said 'july 1st, we all pivoting to support a new platform', that would have been enough of a network effect to effectively cold start the network effect on whatever they targeted. It would have been dig all over again, and this time reddit would have been in the dust bin.
- waboremo 3y agoThe coordination required for such would be quite intense. Also fragile, as the third party apps would quickly abandon any roadmap agreed upon if Reddit changed its mind. Maybe it can happen now among the apps that have put their foot down about a complete end, but certainly loses a lot of momentum from those who might have already uninstalled them.
- jesushax 3y agoIsn't this basically how Reddit got popular, when everyone was mad about Digg's UI update so they wanted an alternative?
- avaloneon 3y agoThis is something I've been investigating. If one had a gateway that spoke Reddit's API, the apps wouldn't even really have to pivot, just change the API base URL. And in theory not even that. As long as the traffic can be redirected to a different server it should still work. In practice, however, at least Apollo has some server-side components so it wouldn't be totally plug-and-play without developer support. Sadly, I'm not sure how to get in touch with the developers/users who may be interested. (I've also heard that someone's working on a Reddit/Lemmy gateway, but I don't know who they are or how far they've gotten.)
- wolverine876 3y ago> It's as if the CEO is purposefully being as belligerent as possible to rile people up. The CEO is following the new leadership playbook, which you should recognize by now, as it's used by Musk, crypto leaders, Zuckerberg, and many more inside and outside of tech. * Fundamentally it's just following the social (media) trend: Demonstrate brazen, over-the-top arrogance, disregard for consequences, and no empathy. I'm sure people recognize that pattern. * Applied to CEO roles, it means publicly demonstrating contempt toward groups of people who are (individually) weaker than you, including employees, customers, protestors, etc. And it means disregard for consequences, such as Musk's actions when bidding $40 billion for Twitter, and afterward; or much of what has happened in crypto. It demonstrates your power, demonstrates their powerlessness (if they capitulate), and makes you look like you have extreme confidence and little empathy - which is very trendy now, of course. Disregard for consequences works until they occur. It's basic con-person tactics, the most obvious bad sales techniques. * When challenged, act more aggressively or with more contempt. Double down. * Play the victim and characterize those who oppose you as violent threats - which again shows disinterest and contempt for them and their arguments. One remarkable place you can see it is some US Supreme Court justices - it's such a powerful trend in 'leadership' that these people with untouchable lifetime positions even do it. (In case you missed it, Reddit's CEO used this technique.) These 'leaders' protray themselves as brilliant, innovative, and highly capable, and people assume they must be - after all, they run these big companies. They are just corrupt and swept up in the latest fashion. Power corrupts, no surprise. The sad part is that I see many on the other side of these issues actually believe this crap - they believe they are powerless and unilaterally disarm, as if the leaders are using the Force when they say, 'you have no power' - 'Oh, I guess I have no power' and they despair. (And then they tell everyone else the same.) At the cost of a little faith in demoracy (write large - the power of individuals working together), they hold all the power. Our ancestors who in the same way built much of the freedom and society we have now, must be amazed. We just give it all away. The worst of our society haven't given it away - look at Bud Light. Reddit should be toast, or at least the CEO. People just wake up and act.
- strunz 3y agoWithout getting too political... Musk is just following President Trump's playbook. Everything you said describes the same way he behaves.
- dakial1 3y agoOr give a waiver for the current main apps...
- lost_tourist 3y agoI suspect that spez really looks up to Elon Musk as an idol and decided to bury his head in the sand and go the way of twitter.
- remote_phone 3y agoBecause they want to IPO as soon as possible, so showing a bump of revenue from API shows the promise of more revenues for investors. Remember they took a 41% cut in valuation recently. IPO is going to be challenging so they want to show as many different streams of revenue as possible.
- CMay 3y agoMy guess is that 3rd party apps have reached a user threshold where they pose a potential future risk of pulling the rug out from under Reddit enough to give some non-negligible traction to an alternative. After all, once you've got the app installed, the back end server can be replaced with something else and you can find ways to streamline new user account creation where needed especially if they are paying customers, even offering to reserve existing Reddit usernames on other platforms. If a Reddit IPO is coming, then this could simply be a form of de-risking. It's a double edged blade, because higher quality 3rd party apps may increase the platform's value while you're on their good side, but rub 3rd party app developers the wrong way and they might start getting clever ideas. A short notification period may reduce the chance of clever ideas reaching manifestation.
- hn2017 3y ago[dead]