Relay for Reddit API Subscription Fees

Reddit@lemmy.world – 87 points – 1 years ago

One of the remaining 3rd party Reddit apps (Relay) has begun discussing what it would be charging for subscription fees. Imo, they actually seem somewhat reasonable. The weird thing is that every upvote or downvote is an API call so you can rack up a huge number of API calls from voting.

Also, while the costs might be reasonable now, there's nothing preventing Reddit from jacking up prices again.

Edit: Also, there wouldn't be any NSFW content with the app.

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This is what I believe too. With interest rates rising, companies have been under a great deal of pressure to show profitability, and especially with Reddit aiming for an IPO, it seemed (superficially at least) a great idea to badger their userbase into adopting their mobile app, where they could be monetized to a much larger extent.

So of course they made the conditions of using their new API incredibly onerous.

The whole point was to discourage developers from using it. And then by cherrypicking a handful of select 3rd-party developers to offer more amenable terms to on the downlow, they can show that they were just being reasonable good guys, and doing their best to work with everyone, and that it must be the developers at fault if they decided to walk away and abandon their users.

So yeah, they've managed to get their app center stage, and the only minor tradeoffs have been:

Launching/boosting a fleet of competitors (lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/tildes/etc)
Driving their very talented 3rd-party app devs into making apps for said competitors
Creating a massive breach of trust between Reddit Inc and its unpaid volunteer mods
Squandering any remaining goodwill Reddit once had in the tech community
Driving away folks who enjoy using 3rd-party apps
Ruining the image of the CEO
Negatively affecting the overall community to the point where it's both a more hostile and unpleasant site, and simultaneously less moderated.

I only use Lemmy because RIF stopped working.

I'm not an activist and do not tend to act when my bubble isn't affected. When I heard all the commotion I thought "damn! I liked RIF. Welp, let's download the new Reddit app. C'est lá vie."

I proceeded to download it and... IT ASKED ME FOR LOGIN CREDENTIALS 🤡!!!!!!

On that moment I gave up. One of my favorite things about Reddit was the pseudonym aspect of the site. I could see a post about some topic, create an specific pseudonym just to reply that post and preserve my identity and my main online aliases. I'm not against demanding information for accounts that post on the site and even taking measures to limit the number of aliases a single person can have. But demand login to lurk!? Fuck that! Complete greed. Absolutely barbaric!

Same reason I never made an account on Instagram. Not interested in that cesspool.