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?
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.
The thing that I've seen pretty consistently from both RIF and Apollo devs is that they're not disputing the fact that reddit needs to start making a profit. Nobody's (seriously) complaining about what was free becoming not free.
The fact is, if this was purely about money, they'd be willing to negotiate on price. The price they're asking is ~70x more than imgur, which hosts images WAAAAAY heavier to host than text, and links etc.
If it was solely about showing ads, they could have given 3PAs access to reddit ads via the api, and enforced showing them.
There are several ways this could have worked for everyone.
Reddit wanted to kill 3PAs. That's the only logical conclusion here. Hell, if they'd come out and said THAT, as well as fixing the problems with their own app first, I might even have been able see their side of it. I would still be pissed, but it'd be more understandable than this very blatant Twitter-esque death-by-pricing thing they're trying to do.
The reports were that the amount they are asking 3PAs to pay is 29× the revenue that they would make from a user in advertising. Astonishing.
But I agree. If they had started this out simply by saying "no more 3PAs except for approved accessibility-focused apps", the protest would never have been able to get the steam it did. That statement would have cut the legs out of the accessibility-focused concerns (even though it doesn't actually adequately address VI users' needs). It would have removed the possibility for the huge drama that happened with their awful communication with and lies to 3PA devs. It would have completely mitigated bot devs' concerns. And it would have made the NSFW issues completely moot. With those issues addressed, there would have been nothing for the protests to really hook on to in quite the same way.
The apollo dev got a very discounted price for the imgur api. Still, general imgur prices are about 3-4 times cheaper than the amount reddit is asking for now. That is if you stay in your quota. Exceeding the imgur quota costs about $1 per 1000 read requests, though. The value talked about for reddit is a flat rate of $.24/1000 or ~$1/3000 requests, no discounted plans are known to me.
That still holds true, though.
I haven't heard anyone say that they're upset because Reddit needed money. Actually I've heard more understanding people, they wanted Reddit to stay alive and were willing to possibly say yes to subscriptions/ad based content.
But spez completely shit the bed on the entire thing. Giving them the crazy high prices, the incredibly short deadline, hiding the pricing for those 2 months, then trying to blame it on AI, and just everything. Yes, if they had a level headed leader at the front of their corporation I could very well see myself preparing to pay a couple bucks a month to Reddit to get a good experience, they could get their "Residual Income".
Instead he had to go all megalomaniac and demand everyone bend to his will - and I left permanently.
I used to pay for a reddit gold to support the site because Ai (naively) beloved it was a worthwhile investment in a website that connected disparate, niche communities and served as a repository of knowledge.
Don't I look like an idiot now. Fuck u/spez
Once my reddit gold ran out from buying Alien Blue, I've been paying for it ever since, since I wanted the site to succeed, and I never saw any of the ads. It felt like the right thing to do, but once all this shit with spez being a total dick went down, I cancelled my autopay, so it won't renew again.
Take that money and contribute it to a worthwhile cause on this instance. :)
Yup, same. Paid for premium to avoid ads. Have now canceled and poking around Lemmy and Mastedon to fill the niche.
We all did.
Take that money and contribute it to a worthwhile cause on this instance. :)
Yep. The headline could have been “Reddit to start charging for Premium if users want to use third party apps” and it would’ve been and gone in a day or two.
Instead, Huffman’s ego stepped in and he gave media cycle red meat with how he’s handled this. The story now is how aggressive, dishonest, and incompetent he looks. I think there’s a lot yet left to be written about a tech company that relies entirely on the health of its community treating members of that community so poorly and so openly attributing that to $$$.
well shoot. this sums it up so well, there's nothing to add.
Exactly. I was planning to just migrate to their official app after July 1. I mean yes the app may be an ad filled shitty experience but such can be said as well for Facebook and Instagram. Companies need money and I am perfectly fine with that.
It's Huffman's AMA that made me actively seeking Reddit alternatives. It was that bad.
The other side of it for me was I didn’t want to deal with the inevitable increase in data collection that Reddit signaled it would be doing to increase ad revenue
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.
In fact, the editing log itself can be used as more data.
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.
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.
The ai people aren’t using api
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.
The protest is not about the fact that they are charging for it. The protest is about the fact of how much they are charging for it. When compared to imgur the rates are absolutely insane.
I keep seeing this incorrectly reported and it drives me crazy. No developer is upset about Reddit charging for the API access. What they are upset about is the fact that Reddit has jacked the price of that API access up so high that no third party apps could ever afford to use it.
At this point of time though, it has grown to be less about that though, and how disrespectful Spaz is treating everyone. Even if he reversed his decision, who can trust the guy now?
He's made it clear that even if you spent the last 10 years working on promoting your community making it successful, that he'll happily ban your account and hijack your community, for a silent takeover. There are some serious shadow government vibes happening.
Given the way Spaz lied about the Apollo developer, even if API access was only $1 per month I wouldn't pay anymore (because I don't feel Spaz should have the money)
I understand that, but framing it as "reddit users are mad because reddit wants to charge for API access" paints reddit users as entitled, when what is actually happening is "reddit users are mad because reddit decided to charge for API access with only 30 days notice and set the prices so high that third party app developers would have to pay potentially millions of dollars per year in order to access it".
There is a massive difference between those two statements. One makes reddit users look like a bunch of entitled assholes, and the other frames the situation correctly and truthfully.
I agree in many ways.. Good or bad phrasing though, I think mostly everyone is on the same page. I also love the fact here that its easy to avoid toxic admins or communities, so we're no longer controlled by whatever makes reddit profit (and admins can do what's right instead)
The controversy started when their API fees were astronomically high as to constructively end all 3rd party apps.
I think the real anger started when Steve Huffman lied about the Apollo developer and the dev started posting the recordings to prove that Huffman was lying through his teeth.
After that, Huffman stepped onto multiple rakes as he does a poor job of crisis management. They don’t know where the value from their product comes from.
I used reddit 10x as much as Netflix, if not more. So I'd have been more than happy to pay the same price for all eternity to access the api.
Hell they could have given out individual api keys tied to usernames so that regardless of the app, you'd be fed input from the free tier (with ads & rate limiting) or pro tier (unlimited and no ads). That would also help to curb malicious bots and reduce the number of alts in the game.
But no, they chose the nuclear option and are now choking on the fallout. And Huffman's erratic and hostile response further down the line really sealed the coffin for me.
I think there's a lot they could have done better. They could have injected ads into the API feeds directly so they could still get revenue and make it part of the terms that a client can't remove them, and offer a paid version of the API that doesn't have ads. That could work with the clients who could then continue to offer a free ad supported version or a subscription that removes them with Reddit getting a cut. I would have been totally understanding of that and reddit could have gotten a ton of subscription revenue by leveraging the existing distribution channels.
They're a company, they have to pay the bills, I get that, but they went over the line with their deception, greed, and hunger for power. This wasn't just about making money, it's also about control. This was all just an underhanded move to kill 3rd party apps without outright banning them. They want total control so they can continue to make ui decisions that make then more money at the expense of the user experience with their users not having an alternative client to go to. They clearly don't have any respect for their users so why would I use them?
While essentially killing off 3rd party apps is disappointing, I could’ve understood and been willing to switch to the official app and maybe even pay monthly for no ads and more features.
What made me leave is how poorly Huffman and the company treated the developers, moderators, and users.
For developers:
For moderators:
For users:
Also, even besides Huffman showing his true colors as being a total asshole, it just makes Reddit’s poor leadership SO evident. How do you become such a popular site with free content and free moderators, and still can’t make money? How do you manage to turn a great Reddit third-party app into a buggy mess of an official app? Why are you constantly prioritizing what you think users want instead of just listening to them? And now you essentially just told all of us: “fuck you, I own you and your content, and I am entitled to to make money off of you.”
If I put on my tinfoil hat, I think Reddit might have a long-term plan here.
Hike up the API price to a point where 3P apps like Apollo will have to shut down, making them worthless, after so much was invested in them
Get users upset with the lack of features on the official app
Make the 3P app developers look like bad guys
Wait a month or so
Publicly offer to buy a popular, and now worthless, 3P app ^for way too little money^, in order to use the features for the official app
Point out that the 3P dev is a monster if they don't sell, since it would help users so much, and Reddit is a Community, after all
They couldnt do this because apollo dev already offered to sell apollo for 10m, half the cost it would have costed them for continued api usage.
The precedent is already there to buy one and reddit missed it.
Didn't they buy alien blue before that?
It was the most popular, before Apollo even existed I think.
They bought that, turned it to shit despite it starting from a beloved, yet now unrecognizable mess. Even if they bought Apollo, RIF, Relay, Sync and Baconreader tomorrow, their goal with the site conflicts with what people enjoy about using it and anything they do will be shittier and shittier.
People would always flock to another community focused app as long as that's a possibility, so they decided to nuke the whole concept.
If you are to believe that Reddit is setting the API pricing as high as proposed to eliminate 3rd party apps, rather than to recoup costs of allowing their existence (which I wouldn't put it past them to lie like that to make it sound more palletteable), then it's reasonable to believe Apollo's existence doesn't cost them 20M$. In fact I'd be surprised if it even costs them the 10M$ figure because Reddit's reaction implies a number that high must be extortion.
Large corporations regularly buy up small firms to get their product. You may be less tin foil hatty than you think on that one.
they hurt themselves here though because Apollo's dev gave them the buyout option and they said he was trying to extort them. I doubt any of the app developers would be too keen on this now without covering their ass to pretty extreme extents
From a game theory of greedy agents point of view, what is the number value of a worthless app? As in, if Reddit offered to buy Apollo for $1 right now, what greedy reason would there be to refuse?
“How can I trust you to even give me the $1 if you resort to slandering my character?”
And to pile on top, Reddit has been around since 2005. Why is there a SUDDEN and sloppy push towards profitability? It's like someone clued them in just recently that an IPO means you'll have to publicly show profit/loss. The way they've gone about it suddenly and sloppily doesn't scream long term plan, but instead a crash change.
Excellently said! Can I nominate you to represent me in the fediverse?
Like others have said, there are multiple factors at play:
Now, if Reddit had been honest and transparent throughout the entire process and just killed off the APIs without charging for it and gave the straightforward explanation, I think people would be sad as they are emotionally invested in their apps, and there would be some people who would go for good. But a lot more people would come back to Reddit - let alone seek alternatives like Lemmy, KBin, Tildes, etc.
What has happened is that the CEO has tried to make apps "the villain" and reddit the "poor little company" - sort of like DARVO but for 3rd party apps, so they could paint their official Reddit as the "wholesome" one.
Except the reddit community is large and pretty smart - technically and legally too. Receipts were kept, the CEO was exposed for his blatant lies, and then he has become incredibly unhinged and angry that things haven't gone his way, giving incredibly aggressive interviews. And the Reddit community notices, because whenever Reddit is in the news, it's very rarely for a good reason. The CEO was shown to be wearning no clothes after all.
I've seen Reddit go through drama, but never quite like this. It's quite incredible and astonishing how one person could fuck up a transition this badly. Spez has repeated that the Automod is going to be killed, but given the blatant lies that came before, it's no wonder why folks aren't trusting him on his word. He's made his bed, he has to lie in it.
Reddit isn't an ad company, reddit is a sock puppet company. They are selling the ability to control the narrative.
They seem to have failed miserably at controlling it
Or did they🧐
For me it wasn’t about the money, I pay for plenty of things in order to escape ads. The CEO all but came out and said that they don’t care about anything except money… That’s just business and I understand it, I don’t like it, but I understand it.
The issue I saw was Reddit made no attempt to understand the situation third party app devs were in, or to honestly work with the devs to find an equitable solution. That much has been clear before the CEO began to gaslight both the devs and the users about it.
All the drama and pisspoor management by spez aside, ultimately the way I used reddit is through RiF. To me, that's reddit. I can't stand their official app and their official website is horrendous.
They forced my app to close down so I guess that's that.
I stopped using RiF and consequently reddit in protest. I held out hope this was a shitty negotiation tactic by Reddit and they'd eventually back off somewhat. But they've tripled down on it.
This forced me to reevaluate my relationship with the platform and I decided to check out Lemmy kbin and mastodon. I also checked out some old forums I frequented before reddit took over.
I reinstalled a newsreader and set up RSS feeds for my favorite things.
Basically, I'm realizing I don't need reddit as much as I thought I did. I actually have enjoyed the fediverse,beehaw in particular, more. I never used Twitter but mastodon has really great content and engagement as well.
I'm not saying I'd never go back to Reddit. I probably would if RiF somehow survived, but reddits lost its luster for me and I don't trust it anymore. So why waste time actively participating there so I can have the rug pulled from under me again?
Reddit may not see a mass exodus like Digg or Myspace, but it's been poisoned and over time the rot will set in and it will fester. This will be the moment people point to as the turning point.
I am almost a mirror-image of you regarding Reddit, except to me Reddit was Apollo rather than RIF. I too have cancelled Reddit Premium, which I paid to support a platform I used a lot. LIke you I am trying out the fediverse via lemmy, kbin, and mastadon; and, like you, I am enjoying mastodon and using it much more than I ever used Twitter. Finally, like you, I have gone back to RSS feeds and old forums I used before my Reddit habit overshadowed them. And other people I know are doing the same, albeit they tend to be the more techy inclined.
What this is really about and people are just starting to realize is: the interests of the shareholders and CEO who want to get rich is not compatible with a volunteer created, volunteer run, and volunteer modded site. People aren't eager to do unpaid work just so the CEO can get rich. This API stuff is just exposing it.
The weird thing is that they ARE compatible. They could have charged slightly more per user than they make on the official app and everything would have been fine. This move reduced shareholder value and user value.
Reddit makes $350m a year in advertising revenue, it is in theory a fantastically successful business that could make plenty of profit for its shareholders.
The problem is solely down to them raising more and more capital the latest at a $10B valuation. Because of this they need to increase the revenue even further to try and justify the inflated valuation and that is what has led to the latest situation.
I am sure they could use less drastic ways to rise revenue, clearly without spreading lies about Apollo creator and alienating moderators. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things. And than there is very wrong, Reddit way to do things.
What really told me that reddit was squandering its revenue sources was when they shuttered redditgifts two years ago. Maybe there were issues behind the scenes, but they had commissions from the storefront and from elves, and something reddit has never been particularly good at: Good publicity. And instead of figuring out how to make it profitable, they just killed it.
They didn't even bother to answer questions why.
It was at that moment I knew the current leadership was rudderless, and now everyone's finally come around to it.
A slight profit is compatible, I get it you can't run at a loss. But it's no longer "look at this neat thing we can do with everyone". They're not building goodwill with the unpaid creators and mods. Everything they've said and done is oozing with "Get back to work you unpaid peasant! We need to IPO and get rich!" They've shown nothing but disdain towards mods and users.
Why not slightly less? That would make more sense to me.
A user on a third party app isn't as valuable to the company. They miss out of all the valuable spying and tracking they can do by installing their own software on your phone. Plus just the presence of this party apps means you can't demands extra permissions on your own app and tell users to deal or suck it (in nice PR speak). So it makes sense to charge TP apps more for reducing the "value" of a given user.
Charging less is basically subsidizing third party apps out of your own pocket - which was exactly the complaint in the first place. Although it would've been better to gradually ramp up prices to less-subsidized and eventually to a profitable partnership.
The other thing is that they've just handled things so incredibly badly. Limited communication largely directed at third-party media sites, erratic rules changes and enforcement, doubling down with heavy-handed admin actions.
I think that even beyond a need for profit they lost sight of why they have substantial value in the first place. The majority of their value came from their community which made "the front page of the internet" a pretty honest claim. Their software isn't worth billions, but the front page of the internet sure is. They should have had a substantial community engagement department specifically to kiss ass and build relationships with mods (and users via AMAs) so that open lines of communication existed - and they probably should have taken control over key things like inserting an employee as top mod of the top 50 subs (make it standard practice for hitting top 50, offer cool extra services like a visit to HQ and such for the mods so its like they "win" rather than "reddit seizes control" even if that's what it is).
Instead they stayed way too hands-off and basically treated their community as an afterthought. The poor communication made me feel disrespected as a user, so I can only imagine what its like for the mods who put far more time and effort in and are in the direct line of fire of erratic admin actions. I mean, this isn't even hard. Just make a vague corporate statement that you're "very sorry" about all the "confusion" and you'll be "putting changes on hold an re-evaluating while you work with various parties to come up with solutions". You make some token concessions and then do 80% of what you were gonna do anyway, 1-2 months later. Its dishonest and shitty but it's not rocket science to take some of the fuel away from the fire. Like, do they even have a PR department or... did they completely forget that the community even mattered?
If Reddit has an employee on staff as a mod that can approve posts, then they lose safe harbor protections. Anything that mod approves is considered representative of Reddit, giving them editorial control and causing them to be handled more strictly. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/1856011.html
Further, if Reddit gave bonuses to mods, then mods would be considered unpaid employees. Any kind of "swag" or quid pro quo for being a mod of a big subreddit increases the chances that those moderators will be considered unpaid employees by the Department of Labor. AOL famously got in big trouble for giving free/discounted internet access to their volunteer moderators. https://casetext.com/case/hallissey-v-america-online-inc-sdny-2002 (Settled in 2009 for $15 million in back pay.)
Combining the two is terrible news for Reddit and would make their business model absolutely unsustainable. Every mod would be an employee and every post would be representative of Reddit as a company. If a mod approves a link to copyrighted material, then Reddit could be sued.
Notice how Reddit haven't engaged in any positive damage control at all? It's just been hit pieces against devs, an AMA with completely canned responses and unprecedented wide-spread hostile action against it's content creators/power users/mods?
Reddit is in full-blown sell out mode right now and nothing but money matters anymore. It's all down hill from here.
Yeah, I don't care about third party apps or API anymore. Their handling of it became very clear that they are headed in the direction of a Zuckerberg run type multi billion dollar company fully monetizing and extracting data from users, so I don't feel like using their sketchy app like I would never use a Facebook app or Tiktok app, or make an account for either of those two. And don't want to provide location based behavioral data they get from ip addresses and what type of interests I'm into so they can sell that type of demographic data to companies.
People share way more on reddit than they do to people they know because of pseudonyms, so yeah I don't want to directly provide anymore than I have to towards the profits of a large corporation.
It does certainly seem like it, but what exactly are they trying to achieve? They don't have an IPO yet and even if they got one now it would be devalued over before the shit show. And with every new day reddit shows potential investors that they have absolutely no control of the situation, and just doubles down on idiocy.
How is it supposed to make money at this point?
Ad revenue should convince the investors. Who cares if there’s no real content besides automated reposts and bot spam, as long as there are some users who they can shower with an endless stream of ads.
Yeah, and with ip logs and ad click throughs and people also providing comments that can form a personality type that type of data can be useful to marketers to see what people with certain interests go on to buy. Add downloading the official app on smartphones with the permission requests, and that's even more data to provide. Especially if the app is able to get info like your email address or phone to then connect to a public directory.
Memory is short on the internet. Reddit are hoping for this to blow over "quickly" (i.e. in a month or two) because they know the bulk of their users will continue to show up (out of inertia or a lack of viable alternatives). If they can keep the front page showing decent posts, they think they'll make it through.
I think the knock-on effects of losing mods and "power users" will take some time to play out. The real long term effects won't be known until it becomes clear that the loss of those key users has effected the quality of the posts and therefor usage by your "average Redditor."
There would have been no outrage if Reddit valued its users. If they came out and said they were going to start charging (a reasonable amount) for API access but were giving developers until the end of the year to prepare no one would have batted an eye.
Most would probably migrate to the Reddit app for free. Some would just start paying to use the app of their choice and we’d have moved on.
Reddit showed their true colors which was a big f you to the free labor and free content producers of their platform.
I would’ve paid $5-$10 a month to Apollo had this all been handled professionally. Instead I’ve deleted Reddit , fired up an rss feed app and I’m also here now. There’s a handful of communities I haven’t found a suitable replacement for but I’ll live.
The initial spark definitely came from Reddit's clear backstabbing of 3rd party developers with the API change. There was no attempt to work with developers, just to remove them indirectly.
This being particularly bad when 3rd party developers were basically holding up most power-users, most moderators, and basically anybody who actually needed accessibility features (seems like Reddit's never heard of blind people by the way they made their app).
When you combine that with the catastrophic mishandling of the situation with that incredibly awkward AMA, the internal leaks, and the accusations towards Apollo Dev, it made it incredibly obvious that Reddit wasn't acting in good faith...
That's really what started the shit storm that's still raging now with the blackouts, subs and mods being blackmailed, subs converting to NSFW, the John Oliver stuff. It's all because of how badly Reddit mishandled the situation. It's almost like they forgot their website is mostly ran by the same volunteers they were screwing over.
However, I think you are right to an extent that if Reddit had taken the time to add accessibility and moderation features into their apps, and just improved the interface in general instead of just focusing on sucking the most money and telemetry out of their audience possible, then things would never have advanced as far as they did...
But I also think that's one mighty big "what if" because if they would have had the foresight to do any of that, they would've had the foresight to not mishandle everything else as badly as they did either.
It's not about the spoken message but just the "our way or the highway" attitude and blatant gaslighting. If I had wanted that I would have stayed with my ex.
I'm perfectly ok with paying to get rid of ads. I've had Reddit Premium. I use YT Premium. I have Spotify Premium (for free with my phoneplan). I pay for Twitch Turbo. All stuff I use a lot and for me worth the price to have them ad-free.
The problem is more about Reddit not giving a fuxk to the users who have made the platform. They obviously know in advance what 3rd party apps and tools people have been using. If they are really keen on keeping the matter civil, Reddit could have granted them free or reasonable access but it prefers not to. I think this is pretty telling.
Yah, no, a big part of this from the start was to force users on to their app. They want to go public and cash out but to do that they need to consolidate control of the platform. As it stands, users being able to customize their experience and choose how they interact with the sight through an open API undermines the companies ability to manipulate users experiences to suit the interests of investors and advertisers.
Getting rid of third party apps was always one of the central goals, not an accidental casualty, it was never going to be civil with that goal in mind.
I was upset to lose Apollo but hearing that they where going to exclude some apps for accessibility I thought to just move there. My main issue is ads. Just any alternative to avoid the ads on their app was gonna be good for me…. Then they started completely mishandeling the protest exercising their technical authority over the subs and content and i got to lemmy real quick.
That is just a trap. Any app that gets exceptions will either be heavily restricted or instantly get too many users and reddit can then claim it's not just an accessibility app. They have not spent any time thinking about how that would work and they just said it because it was an argument against them. If they cared even for a second about accessibility the app would already have it but they they chose to add NFTs to the app instead.
Yup, ive read the post from r/blind they are just stabbing in the dark to calm ppl down at this point.
For me, it didn’t have to do with ads at all. It was about Reddit charging exorbitant fees for the APIs needed for tools required to make moderation fun enough to actually do, combined with his actions related to 3PA devs and moderators after the fact.
Reddit could have invested in their API and made it an ad distribution platform; instead they invested in NFTs and let the API system remain a mess.
That and the outright lies Huffman said about Christian!
That really did put the nail in the coffin for me.
He lied about that. What else will he lie about? How many other innocent people will he accuse of wrong-doing in the future? He's obviously shown that he is very openly willing to do so.
No thank you.
I used to subscribe to Reddit for the ad-free experience when I was a mobile web user. They kept making mobile web worse and worse and didn’t listen to user feedback after a point and made it so unusable I unsubscribed then found Apollo after refusing apps for years. Only been on Apollo maybe a year and now they’re destroying that. I’ve tried their app and it is a battery hog (spyware is my guess), works like crap and has too few features that I want .
There’s a few communities that I will miss over there but other than that I’m very excited for the fediverse and hope meta and bots don’t kill this platform before it gets going.
The push towards app from mobile browser was insane. In the end they even made NSFW marked posts impossible to view in web browser. WTF.
If he'd announced that they were going to force the app developers to share ad revenue or charge users a reasonable monthly fee for ad-free access and share that with Reddit, I think the backlash would have been far less.
But that's not what Steve wants. He wants to get all the ad revenue AND be able to track user activity to sell to the data brokers/advertisers. This was never going to be a situation that we users found reasonable.
Steve, in fact, was part of the BoD when Reddit stopped the revenue sharing scheme that some apps had up until... 2021? Something like that, don't quote me on it.
I pay YT premium, I can listen to hours and hours of music, or watch hours of videos, plus I can download them and go to a poor connection area.
I don't mind they hooked me with a free service and then offered me the option of ad free.
The move from reddit is if you start to use more the service, if you want to see more posts, if you have more subs, if you upvote/downvote more, if you send more messages, if you comment more, if you post more, if you have more moderation actions to help a sub stay on focus and remove spam then you have to pay more.
Edit: damn it, I again replied to a comment instead of the post hahaha
Personally I used to pay for YouTube Red (back when it was called that). I stopped in protest against YouTube's changes to their partnership programme screwing over smaller users (when they introduced the recurring viewership hours to qualify for partnership). That was the final straw after their abhorrent attitude towards copyright over a long period of time.
On Android, formerly Vanced, now ReVanced, get me everything I could want out of the official app with YouTube Premium, but for free.
I HATE ads with a passion. Even taught my kid from a very young age to put his hands over his ears, look away, and say "la la la!!" until an ad ends.
Once Vanced shut down, I was devastated. ReVanced really saved my experience, though, and I'm so thankful it exists.
If their official app and "new" reddit layout ain't shit there won't be so many users using paid 3rd party apps to begin with. Fix your product instead of force killing competitors.
Reddit could have avoided protests if they had said something like: "We're going to roll out a plan to start charging third party app developers to cover the cost of API access and/or lost ad revenue, as it is unsustainable for us to keep foregoing these funds. We're going to be super transparent about the process. We're going to apply a small mark-up (say, 10%) but we will allow devs ample time (>=1 year) to plan for this. And we will provide public support to help these developers work through this with us."
Of course, they would have to actually back up that talk with actions. A big part of the reason for the protests is how many blatant lies Reddit has made around this situation, including baseless accusations against the Apollo app, clearly false statements about their pricing plans and their plans to charge for API access during 2023, etc. So tbh at this point I don't trust anything Reddit says anyway. Show, don't tell.
Facta non verba, deeds not words
Our ancestors thousands of years ago understood this and spez still doesn't
I used reddit 10x as much as Netflix, if not more. So I'd have been more than happy to pay the same price for all eternity to access the api.
Hell they could have given out individual api keys tied to usernames so that regardless of the app, you'd be fed input from the free tier (with ads & rate limiting) or pro tier (unlimited and no ads). That would also help to curb malicious bots and reduce the number of alts in the game.
But no, they chose the nuclear option and are now choking on the fallout. And Huffman's erratic and hostile response further down the line really sealed the coffin for me.
Yep. Before the AMA, I was defending just doing the two day blackout, rather than, as many were suggesting, blacking out for a longer period. My reasoning was you can always escalate later if a compromise isn't reached. Then Spez opened his mouth, and I (and so many others) realized "this fucker has no interest in compromising" and totally changed my position. Since then, I support any and every form of protest that has been devised, including leaving the site for good (and mostly already) on June 30th.
Same. Only a select few communities I browse now, waiting for them to move on
Yep, he went down the deep end with no chance of ever restoring his public image. As an investor, that would make my skin crawl... They should sack him before the end of next week and revert all changes, hoping the exodus can still be stopped. Which I doubt, but there would be hope, at least.
/u/spez really is the fucktard in the pool here
I really don't think that 3rd party apps were anything but collateral damage. I think his real goal is to try and capitalize off of AI training.
He clearly saw these companies using reddit data to train AI for like no money and got upset.
I call BS on that. Large-scale content scraping was already against the TOS to begin with. And you can't kill off slow stealth scraping without also blocking search engine crawlers. Or at least not without hurting the searchability.
I can't stand ads, but ad blocking is easy enough. I decided to leave because Reddit is only leaving me with terrible interfaces to use. The official app is painfully slow and bloated. I browse reddit to pass time on my phone, I'm not about to lug out my whole laptop or move over to a desktop to keep using the site with old Reddit + RES. All the terrible CEO comments since the announcement just make it easier because the tiny, niche non-Nazi alternatives are suddenly large and bustling platforms.
If this had been handled differently, Huffman could have even won the support of redditors to help make the platform profitable.
I'm sure most reasonable people believe Reddit should be able to pay its bills so that we can have it as a resource. Spez just came out of the gate pissing everyone off and then doubled down at every opportunity to explain the move.
Obviously the details matter, and many things happened all at once.
For example, the original policy was going to force out all free open source clients, and that was later retracted, but the damage to the company's reputation was already done.
For example, clients for the visually impaired could have been set aside as a special case immediately, and they weren't, and as I understand it they still aren't.
For example, third-party clients that don't show ads could have been blocked without restricting third party clients that assist mods.
For example, the result of the blackout could have been some sort of sympathetic statement, but instead it was the hammer getting laid down, leading to even worse results.
So you're a question is whether the outcome would have been different if the administrators had acted differently, and of course the answer is yes. That being said, what we've learned is that the administrators do not value the mods or the end user. All of the above issues simply don't matter to them because they don't care.
You talked about capitalism as if it's inevitable, but you're wrong. The decision to try to make a lot of money was made, many other online services have made other decisions, and you don't get to excuse the actions of anyone in the administration on the grounds that it's just the natural consequence of capitalism.
I used the main Reddit app and was planning on going back after the protests were over but everything spez had done since then has made me uninstall the app
What I actually want is to be able to pay Reddit or Google or whoever it is a fair amount of money, say the amount they'd make by showing me a reasonable number of ads, plus a bit more. Say 10% more. In exchange for making more money from me than they would with ads, they would let me use old.reddit.com, or a third party app and not show me any ads.
I get an ad free service, Reddit gets more money than they would have before.
I figure that the amount would be easily less than $10 per year.
They would have to show something like this: at the end of each month, they tell me that I consumed so much of Reddit. They would have shown an ad every 25 posts, at $0.0005 per ad impression. So my payment for the month will be $x.
But then you'd be a premium user and in a demographic even more likely to spend money so you'd get "catered purchase opportunities" from advertisers that paid even more for your special eyes...
Hence why I pay for YouTube.
I have as blockers up the wazoo, but they provide a very solid service. I’m happy to pay to get something I value without ads.
Digital ads are a time tax on the poor and technologically illiterate.
Well, that might have helped, but Paint Hufferman decided to insult us all and treat us as useless, even parasitic freeloaders when WE are the ones who, in concert, built that goddamned site. He was never going to show any respect for us or what we've accomplished... to him, we're livestock. Fuck him with a hot lead pipe.
Lol normally i dislike making fun of people's names bc it's childish but paint hufferman made me laugh hard so i guess it'll be an exception
If it wasn't for the amount being much higher than most other companies charge, and what it costs Reddit itself to do the same, and a 30-day timeframe with which to get around those changes on top of it, I think that they would have been much better received. The third-party app developers didn't any problems with paying for things like Imgur APIs, and would have happily paid up for Reddit's, if they had the time to implement it, and didn't have to deal with the exorbitant cost.
However, I do think that Spez made things much, much worse. If Reddit didn't make a discussion, and just put out the announcement, people would have shrugged, and moved on. His AMA, and everything else after was just throwing fuel onto the fire, which was further boosted by Reddit admins suddenly wading into the fray, something that they had not done previously, even rom the perspective of moderator tyranny. The previous response tended to always be "we're sorry to hear that, but you can just go and create your own community if you have an issue with them", unless the problem was bad enough it got press attention.
I can’t blame reddit for wanting to be profitable,either. They just went about it in the worst, most confrontational way possible. They insulted the people who gave reddit all of its content, and alienated their core users.
Even if Huffman had been nicer about it, though, no amount of diplomacy would make up for the fact that their API pricing is ridiculous. Nor would it make their complete inflexibility and stubbornness more palatable. The arrogance and disrespect they’ve shown is astounding. Trying to “fix” that with pretty words, but without actually changing anything, would be like trying to polish a turd.
I think there would still be a massive protest. The only difference would be the tone.
As of 3 weeks ago, I would've been willing to:
Now I'm basically unwilling to do any of those things. The interviews they gave up through the first 2 days of the blackout made me pledge not to actually pay reddit any money (and I've paid for gold from when it was first announced, as a "charter member," till when they decided to dramatically increase the price in exchange for a complicated "premium" offering).
And since then, the hamfisted way they've dealt with mods and protests are getting me to leave the site early, too, and going out of my way to delete my old comments and posts that actually added information to the site, plus deleting or otherwise breaking the URLs of my content that have been linked from anywhere on reddit (whether in a post by me or reposted by someone else).
The way I see it is since I'm not a reddit customer, then I'm the product.
Except, if I'm the product, you're probably not supposed to nickle and dime me.
It's kinda like if McDonald's was trying to charge cows for the privilege of being ground into patties, but relied on them to go through the process of their own free will.
Without user content, reddit is just an empty husk, a waste of data center resources, yet they behave like they're somehow entitled to my engagement on the platform.
As for how they've handled things, it's been a train wreck.
Just requiring reddit premium to have access to the API/3rd party apps would have made a few waves, but nothing like this. Keeping their mouth shut would have been more useful than almost everything they've done... whatever their strategy was...
Even without any of that though, they've been working hard at making the experience worse for a while. The redesign focuses on the user consuming ads instead of content, dooms scrolling instead of reading or commenting.
TL;DR: They were going to shit regardless, they just decided to use more fans.
I personally would be a paying subscriber to Apollo right now if Reddit had announced they were going to charge a reasonable amount of money for the API. I totally understand how a massive website like that and all the servers and storage required must have cost a fortune. Paying to avoid ads is cool with me… cutting off my access to the best way to use Reddit is not.
That IS what happened, in april.
What happened this month is that the API users (aka 3rd party authors) expressed their dismay at trying to work with reddit's announced changes or getting any movement out of reddit that would allow them to continue.
Nobody is against them making money, but personally it was just the iicong omn the cake. The censorship was my biggest issue, then they started requiring emails, etc....losing my apps and then threatening mods was it.
It wasn't what they did it was how they did it. If they wanted to I'm sure they could have worked out a compromise where everyone stayed happy.
A good way to foster resentment is to profit off a bunch of mods and devs donating time for love of community and then spit in their face by forcing them out. I think it's one the most blatantly asshole things I've ever seen a corporation do, one for the history books.
I do wonder if it will really make a difference. I think it might be their undoing. Social media users are a somewhat fickle bunch and can move on to the next big thing, that's historically been the case.
They weren’t going to make everyone happy. They want vastly more money, and every way of squeezing money out of a thing makes the thing suck more. They certainly could have fucked the PR aspect less severely, but no business in history has ever had anyone enjoy the part where VC investors try to get their returns.
I was the founder of a 73k sub API the API rules changed I used Apollo and rif the AMA came decided to protest from the 12th to the 14th came back after the day of the 14th my subscribers said shut it down. I shut it down then u/spez did that leaked memo then I decided to delete my 350k 6 years front page 5x account. It was tuff but I got kbin, Lemmy and Mastodon to help me fill the void. Yes I know I only need one account but it's a personal preference l!
The option they should have gone for was to put the onus of 3PA on users: Either you pay for reddit premium or you use the app. This would have worked out more and I absolutely would pay a fair price to keep using Boost. This is what they should have done.
But, they didn't. And then offered a tight window, and that's why we're here.
Venture Capital isn’t compatible with asking people to pay what something is worth. You might find a fair price that keeps enough users to make the business sustainable, but that’s what they derisively refer to as a "lifestyle business". VCs are looking for 100x profits in a couple of years, and that necessitates slimy revenue models. Nothing else works.
I wouldn't have even hesitated to buy Premium if it was the only way to use third party apps. That seems reasonable. I paid more for a completely pointless Snoo bobblehead like a decade ago, at least Premium in that context would provide some actual benefit!
I have not heard anyone, other than articles trying to lead the narrative, say that it should be free.
It was always how much and how long they had to adapt.
Plus all the lies
Also the specific price they chose. Also the lack of regard for blind users
I would be just as disappointed as I am now. I am never using their dogshit app, ever. How they killed my beloved 3rd party app makes no difference at all. I'm gone just the same, and sabotaging the subreddits I mod just the same.
Didn't reddit used to be profitable? I think we should start by asking what decisions they made that reduced their profitability. Is it the video player that nobody asked for? Deciding to self-host images? Developing an app that nobody wants to use? It seems to me like they put themselves in this position.
I think it is within the company's right to revenue increasing opportunities. That said I view the slandering of the Apollo creator as the turning point. It was very poor taste and their communication around this has been horrendous. It kick started the migration to the fediverse and a critical mass has adopted it. So now there is no good reason to go back to Reddit even if they reverse their decisions. Heck, had there been a different stimulant to fediverse adoption without any missteps from Reddit, I would still have transitioned my usage to a system where the users are more in control.
No one really has an issue with Reddit charging for API access. It's the insane amount they're asking for, the small window of time they gave devs to require monetization, and the fact that the API would no longer provide all content that is the problem.
The stuff you mention is bad too, but it's hardly the first issue here
Reddit killed internet fora. By being easier and cheaper, while making no profit.
If they suddenly do want to make profit?
The terms change, there are alternatives.
I agree. They built a better mouse trap and now they want to go back to the old one because they figured out they can sell cheese. The better mouse trap still exists.
A few years ago when I could afford it I bought a lot of Reddit coins to award posts. At the end of the day, this is the thanks I get.
I definitely wouldn't be as upset as I am right now. I would consider paying to be able to continue to use the service.
However, right now, I wouldn't come back to Reddit even if they called of the whole thing and decided to leave free access to the API. I have zero trust in Reddit after all that happened. To be honest I'm kinda glad it all went down like this. At least we got to know their real colors.
IMO the issue that people are upset about, and as a result all the publicity going on, is just related to how much they wanted to charge people for the API.
If they rolled out something reasonable for pricing, and allowed people to use their own individual API keys in third party apps on a free tier, I think a few would have complained here and there, but otherwise it would have been fine.
Obviously they need to make money to pay for costs of running things somehow, there's nothing wrong with that.
Let's not forget that they also nuked NSFW content on the API, which is at least 50% of the uproar. Nobody likes to mention it, but it's a big reason that a lot of people use Reddit.
And how little time they were giving. And quite frankly, the incredible entitlement spez has shown in the wake of the incident. And honestly from the start as if reddit had cause to be frustrated OpenAI built something cool off of Reddit users' content. As if he built the whole of reddit and all its content without decades worth of free hours from users and mods alike.
He doesn't want to build a platform for communities. He and his company want personal enrichment he already feels entitled to. He's making that pretty clear. Otherwise, IPO tomorrow and use it as a cash infusion rather than a liquidity event.
Reddit needing to make $ to maintain the resources is understandable.
There were other ways to generate revenue without being greedy.
For example, users pay for awards like gold etc on Reddit. This concept could have expanded to a marketplace for 3PA stickers. If 3PA apps have stickers that they were pushing as additional revenue for the developers, Reddit could have stepped in and developed a marketplace to host and promote them for the developers as well. It would be a similar model to the Google Play and Apple App stores taking a commission for in app purchases. It doesn't have to be in the vicinity of 30% either. It's not a perfect example by any means, so don't flame me or the idea.
I deleted all of my accounts, posts and comments after the clusterfuck of an AMA. The interviews Huffman gave the following week to The Verge and other media sites totally reinforced my decision not to go back. I still go back to get some tech resources that I need but it's through alternative addresses so I don't add to their analytics stats.
Stickers and Reddit gold are, by the wildest and most nonsensically optimistic estimates imaginable, not going to be even in the same state as the amount of revenue they’re looking for.
Stickers or gimmicky items like that seem to be popular enough for Selig to spin it off as a separate business.
My comment was about Reddit’s inability to think of a smarter long term solution with the 3PA developers. Instead they went with a moonshot for a short term gain that reeks of arrogance, greed and stupidity.
I would be happy to pay a fair price to remove ads and gain access to 3rd party apps. They should just bake that into the Reddit Gold perks.
The app devs, including Selig, often, said they were perfectly fine and found it quite reasonable that Reddit wanted to charge for API access-- they even looked forward to it because the y believed it would. open up access to previously walled-off parts of the API such as chat, polls, and other features only available in the native app and the website. This was public info, and users also looked forward to this.
The problem came with both he outrageous pricing and the absurd 30-day timeframe. Then, further with spez's refusal to be flexible by listening to the reasonable complaints of the devs, slanderous accusations against Selig, profound and entitled disrespect towards the mods, and shitshow parade which started with his mind-boggling AMA and then continuing by taking interviews with any news agency that would talk to him, further spreading the lies, slander, disrespect, and disinformation-- ending by praising the king turd of tech: Elon Musk.
THAT is what provoked the outrage, protests, and overall "uprising". THAT is what is killing Reddit.
Once Selig announced that he could not keep Apollo going after June 30, I was done with Reddit. That was days before Huffman said anything publicly - even before the AMA in which he pasted prefab answers to 14 questions.
I'm strongly of the opinion that instead of killing Apollo, Selig should featureflag most of the features, scale it back, implement ActivityPub quickly and a guided process to get started. Just killing Apollo gives Spez exactly what he wants, especially with the amount of algorithm rigging they are doing to block ActivityPub/Lemmy/Kbin info from making it into Top and Popular.
Spez is going to get what he wants either way, really. He just wants third-party app activity gone from Reddit, and Apollo moving over to ActivtyPub is just more of the same, even if the app itself is around.
Personally, I think that dropping Apollo might make more sense. It was designed as a Reddit Reader, so instead of cramming new app functionality into it, it would make sense to just split it off into its own app.
A lot of ActivityPub/Lemmy/Kbin features are natively supported, so he wouldn't need to keep paying for things like Imgur API access, unlike with Reddit where third-party image hosting is the only way to do image hosting, without using the official app.
Plus, after the recent shenanigans from everything, he probably deserves a break, for a while, at least.
Same. Different app, but it was the same day. Once I realized my app would die, reddit was dead to me. I came to kbin a bit earlier than others but it was super dead in the beginning.
yeah. the protest was small but reddits response has been great and has lead to where we are at today. like you said it wasnt really the pricing but how reddit went about it and afterwards. hell if he had announced that their intention was to kill off third party apps but was more transparent about it and wasnt acting like an elon musk there might not have been any protest at all.
In a nutshell:
Imagine if you own a nice Jaguar - keep it in your garage and let the neighbours borrow it to go to the shops. Now you need to do some maintenance, and make up for losses in your taxi service (which might cost $2 per km) so you wanna price this as a premium service. ... so you could charge them $5 takeout fee plus $1 per km, or (if you're greedy) just go for $5 per km.
What Reddit did is say 'Fuck you, you want to use it, you pay $100 per km or fuck off - we don't care'.
The amount of money Reddit makes for you getting advertisements is actually less than $1 per km... The same occurs with YouTube. If you actually click to donate, then you can pay enough to cover thousands of hours of advertisements in one small swipe.
What we need is MICROpayments spread across a wider user-base to balance the ad-supported platform, and then people will accept that small payments are better.
Two things would have done it for me. They could have offered a user token subscription that I could port to all my accounts. Sure there could be token sharing with that method, but for a "modest" user cost, I might have been tolerable of it. They would have had to open the third party apps at the same time, but it would have bought time. The second thing would have been extending advertising through the third party app. That might discourage users of the free third party app, but it would also have given time to readjust the market price. Maybe the compromise would be that the free app could still be free of Reddit ads, but it wouldn't be customizable or would be limited in the number of additional subreddits with certain ones that were fixed to those free accounts. The key in both cases would be to work at making Reddit still available to those third party apps via the API and not the way it was brought to those developers. Lose the third party support, lose the support of moderators who have learned to be efficient with their way of using the site, lose the site.
To get rid of the promoted and ads on the reddit website I started using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-ad-remover/cgipdekhdobcdhnobaimhlapmhpgdpjl
At the current price he wants? Yes. Because it would still represent an attempt to kill off all third party apps. Reddit wants to look like the good guys in having a price structure, but it is a transparent bit of trickery. Because the whole thing isn't about API costs to Reddit, but gathering all the data to sell about its users and to push ads. Reddit is attempting an IPO. And shareholders will demand a path to profitability, unlike Silicon Valley investors.
Would honesty and transparency made the protests smaller? On some fronts yes. But many Reddit users would have been pissed with the model they want to use (facebook). So maybe the protests still would have been as widespread. But we could have skipped the whole, "Reddit CEO disrespecting unpaid mods and Reddit users" phase.
I'm not entirely sure why Reddit was going to charge outlandish fees for the third-party APIs. Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it. It's really a combination of pushing them out of the market and then being a smug little bitch that really nailed it in the coffin for a lot of people.
i don't think they were trying to make money off of the API changes. like others are saying, it has to do with AI and they figured they might as well take the chance and knock out 3rd party in the same swoop so that they can funnel more people onto the official app
they can data harvest much better that way
AI has nothing to do with it other than a convenient, topical scapegoat.
I feel like AI being the reason doesn't hold up particularly well from a technical standpoint. From my searching, web-scraping is completely legal. It'd be slower, but a massive dataset is still very collectable.
Plus building a web-scraper is so easy now. Funny enough, generative AI like chat gpt can get you like 95% of the way there in just a few minutes.
Though, none of the reasons they've stated so far seem to hold up to scrutiny.
It's slower, but to use an API requires you to customize your system to use each different sites unique API. It would be a massive development undertaking, for such a small benefit that it would never pay off. For an LLM, you only need to read each page once, you just wait til a post is a month or so old, and essentially all discussion has stopped, and you will get everything you need. So "fast" isn't really a concern at all.
You can pull much more data much quicker through the API than some sort of HTML scraper. These LLMs need a lot of data and reddit is a big site.
It would have been perfectly possible to charge a different rate for AI harvesting than for Reddit Apps.
of course, but they wanted to kill 3rd party apps without explicitly saying "we're killing 3rd party apps"
this way they can (or at least they thought they could have) had plausible deniability saying stuff like "we tried to work with them" and this is essentially what they tried in the first couple of days
The outright lies about blackmail didn't help.
Every user they lose they'll replace with 10 bots.
This isn't about longterm thinking, this is a push to control how many "users" they can put on their IPO docs. Steve and the current board (VC monies) are going to cash out and what happens to Reddit after the IPO is the least of their worries.
Every fewer third-party app is one fewer datum that they are lying about the number of real, fleshy users. This has nothing to do with AI training or APIs or anything but legitimizing bot activity to pump up the numbers.
Facebook and google have been selling ad "impressions" to people of questionable realness for decades at this point.
But that is exactly what his goal was. If he really was interested in working with the 3PA devs, this would have been handled completely differently. The fact that it was handled as it was, with essentially zero engagement between the company and the community, and with essentially zero flexibility on the part of the company on the implementation, is pretty clear evidence that their goal all along was to drive the 3PA's out of business.
They don’t want the developers to pay anything. They want the developers gone so that all the users are monetizeable through ads.
That is exactly what he said. It's just not remotely what he intended. Bad faith etc.