Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark

0485@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 274 points –
Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark
uk.pcmag.com
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They really should have just found out what the 3rd party apps -COULD PAY-. If it covered the cost of their usage and there was some profit on the top, it would at least bring in some money. Based on what I read by the Apollo dev, there was back and forth communication about pricing for a while until he broke the news.

It astounds me that they chose to cut them off entirely by offering impossible pricing. Isn't some money better than no money?

Others have speculated that the API pricing model is built around customers who want to use the data for AI training, not customers who want to build apps for public use. The $20M price tag is what they're hoping a mega corp will pay for data access and don't care about anyone who can't afford that much. Some money is better than no money, but for a lot of people the "chance" at BIG money is better than some money lol

If this is the case, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just separate into tiers, where mass data usage to feed into a language model is priced differently than people legitimately using and contributing content to the site.

This is what happens when a bunch of MBAs are detached from the product they're working on.

they still have a lot to gain by killing the 3rd party apps and forcing the remaining users to the platform that will benefit their valuation the most. the pricing is to court the big whales to sell data to and the forcing people to use the native app is to improve the quality of the data they want to sell.

Precisely. Investors like apps because users cannot change their user experience, disable telemetry, block ads easily, and so on. They receive push notifications which drive engagement and allow easier tracking across accounts.