Do You Think There Would Have Been a Large Protest if Steve Huffman Just Said We're Charging to Use the API to Increase Revenue?

Curt@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 139 points –

I've been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn't last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn't

To me, Reddit's sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I've never used.

If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I've only used Apollo so I can't speak to the other apps.

I can't blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn't make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They're going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO's are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That's how capitalism works.

In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can't stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn't have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn't been such an uproar. So I'm glad it went the way it did.

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If Reddit just charged the AI people for API access and left 3rd party apps alone I doubt anyone would have given a shit, but they had to go and two-birds-with-one-stone it. Then they insisted on digging their hole deeper by running their mouths and making the situation worse.

I suspect they have signed an exclusivity deal with some kind of third party to use the API. It could be for "AI" or it could be for more nefarious purposes.

Spez knows he can create 'traffic' of user comments and answers with AI. He also knows he can use AI to moderate subreddits. He doesn't care about the quality of the site, just the numbers that get him his payday. He'll burn it to the ground and cash-out, leaving a mess in his wake.

That's why it's important to go back thru our comment history and replace them with linguistic garbage. To ensure Reddit can't profit off our donations. I'm not in the business of subsidizing Reddit, after all.

"Plonked up behind the radio them ready the plastic manuscript who observe Jerry's can." Or whatever.

Maybe a script that uses ai generated content. If done at scale it will destroy their output due to inbreeding.

If I were implementing this nefarious Reddit I probably wouldn't have edits wipe out the original data. It's certainly not necessary to implement edits that way.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat on the reddit board for years and was briefly CEO for 8 days.

OpenAI is another dumpster fire waiting to happen, then.

Why else would they make access to OpenAI/ChatGPT/etc so cheap? So others can build businesses on the tech that get locked in before they jack up the price.

We've seen this rodeo plenty of times now.

They would have gone straight to scraping if they couldn't reach a deal. Sam Altman is on the board of reddit. He knows which way the wind blows there.

LLMs are already relying on web scraping and always have. They are getting data from the entire Internet, do people really think OpenAI is doing individual integrations with every single website throughout the Internet?! Are Google and Bing doing that, too?

It's complete FUD.

There may be some complexity with legality here though. Obviously Google and other search engines already have most of Reddit's content indexed, but there are some legal arguments as to whether they can use the content to create derivative works.

If Reddit opens up its API and specifically allows AI companies to use the content to create LLMs and other AI tools then from a legal point of view they may find this much more preferable to facing potential legal action further down the road.

Reddit could reach the same agreemen without an API, too.

do people really think OpenAI is doing individual integrations with every single website throughout the Internet?! Are Google and Bing doing that, too?

This is such a great point that I hadn't even considered. These API changes will have exactly zero effect on LLM's and similar services.

Since spez said that one objection was that other people were making money where reddit wasn't, one thing I'd have been okay with is if the API worked only for those who were reddit premium. (To be open, I was already paying for the lowest tier of premium.)

Although this is a reasonable solution, it's also reasonable to just let the apps charge a subscription and pay the API fees, which is what the app devs planned. The only issue is that Reddit set their API fees so high that the app devs can't possibly charge enough to make it profitable, certainly not in the time frame they were given.