this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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[–] Dark_Blade 95 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Poor Christian, going through all that shit just because spez is jealous about him having a better product.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Imagine if instead of all of this he worked with Christian to understand why his product is better.

[–] dustyData 17 points 1 year ago

You're asking too much from an egomaniac.

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[–] twentyfumble 54 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All third party app developers have been calm, reasonable, professional and level headed through the entire process.

[–] kwot 22 points 1 year ago

Which makes this debacle all the more frustrating. Capital over humanity mirite

[–] savjee 41 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I think Reddit's CEO is making a fool out of himself by how he's managing this situation. I think however that the solution is very simple and straightforward.

Let's start: I can understand that Reddit has costs to operate the platform. I also get that they don't want big companies to abuse the API to train ML models and profit of it. Fair game!

But why not offer a generous free tier for regular users? Say, every user gets 500 free API calls per day. Regular users stay within the free tier, while big companies can't do anything meaningful with only 500 calls per day (so they end up paying money).

Seems pretty straightforward to me. Everyone happy! Many other companies offer generous free-tiers for exactly this reason. Am I missing something?

[–] HollowNotion 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Am I missing something?

Yeah. They want to kill the third party apps so everyone has to use the ad-supported Reddit app.

[–] zeppo 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

It's not clear why they don't just serve ads in the API and require them to be displayed, or implement profit-sharing with 3rd party devs (as in, they pay reddit a portion of their income from ads/subscriptions). The only clear reasons would be for control and to pump up numbers for the IPO.

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[–] phr0g 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I still believe that the ML companies "argument" is just a giant smokescreen. Reason is simple: ML companies can, and probably always have, just scrape the website. Why build an integration for every API under the sun if you can just build a web crawler once and be done? There are even existing, free implementations available so that's an absolute no-brainer.

It's about killing independent clients, nothing else.

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[–] nucleative 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit could let users access the API like this easily. They could stream ads along with the comments coming from the API. They could let individual users pay a subscription fee for their own api access. They could develop an advertising platform for 3P apps to show reddit ads.

They could even have said: look, we're going to kill off 3P apps because we have another idea now, thanks but you are no longer required. At least that would have been a genuine approach.

Spez evidently has an idea about what he really wants and isn't sharing it yet. I'm sure it will be clear after the IPO.

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[–] zeppo 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My impression is they're being disingenuous, for the reasons you say. They could easily support 3rd party apps but ban large-scale data mining. Saying "supporting these apps costs us money, so we need to charge" is a manipulative half-truth. Like Selig said, they've priced it not just at covering their costs but making a healthy profit.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

They priced it to destroy third party apps. There is no other reason for doing it the way they did:

  • very expensive, suspiciously like Twitter, with no basis in real cost or a revenue model based on 3d party clients.
  • a very short timeline so app developers have no time to implement the change
  • claiming that 3d party apps were never the intended use of the api, which is a blatant lie.
[–] fsk 37 points 1 year ago (25 children)

There are lots of mistakes Reddit made that shows they aren't trying.

  • They could have given more advance notice for the API price increase. This would give apps more time to update their code to use fewer API calls. Many apps are subscription-based, so it would give them more time to update their subscription price.

  • The price should have been based on Reddit's actual costs, actual revenue, and actual profits. I.e., if it costs Reddit $0.10 per user per year and their revenue per user is $0.15 per user per year from ads, then the API price should have been $0.15-$0.25 per user per year. The actual pricing shows they made it artificially high to kill the 3rd party apps. (I don't know what the actual numbers are.)

  • Even if Reddit really did want to charge $5 per month for API users, the right way to do it is to start from a lower price and increase it 20%-50% per year until they get to their target price.

  • If a user had Reddit premium, they should have been given extra API call tokens they can give to their 3rd party app.

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[–] kratoz29 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So wholesome to see that reaching on top of r/all

[–] eyepatchcheetah 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm really going to miss Sync...

[–] kratoz29 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

For real man, I used Boost then Sync, both are great Reddit apps and I hope the devs get here eventually.

The Reddit app sucks balls hence I'm not going to use it ever.

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[–] TurnItOff_OnAgain 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

LJ posted today on his sub to guage interest in a lemmy version of sync.

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[–] heliumlake 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's wild how quickly reddit went from being beloved despite some missteps to an absolute pariah on the internet.

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[–] CannaVet 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All these big brain assumptions about Reddits actions, but it's far more simple.

He's taking Musks advice to making a platform profitable, so they're going to drive costs down by chasing off all the pesky users providing value then monetize the rest by catering to terrorists for $8 a pop

[–] beanz 10 points 1 year ago

My grandparents could probably monetize Reddit more effectively than that twerp.

[–] TragicNotCute 23 points 1 year ago

That was the first time I have been on Reddit in a week. Fuck that place.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

spez can fuck himself. If he was on fire, I wouldn't piss on him to extinguish the flames because it's not fair to make the urine exist in proximity to that miserable fucking waste of oxygen.

[–] focusedkiwibear 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i wish i could give christian my support but i've completely nuked all my accounts on Reddit and don't even go there if I can help it. poor guy - what the heck did he do to deserve this turn of events?

[–] tylerthehuman 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

from the original post

Not to turn this into an infomercial, but that is a lot of money, and if you appreciate my work I also have a fun separate virtual pets app called Pixel Pals that it would mean a lot to me if you checked out and supported (I’ve got a cool update coming out this week!). If you’re looking for a more direct route, Apollo also has a tip jar at the top of Settings, and if that’s inaccessible, I also have a [email protected] PayPal. Please only support/tip if you easily have the means, ultimately I’ll be fine.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] mintiefresh 16 points 1 year ago

Talk your shit Christian

[–] kinther 15 points 1 year ago

Slam dunk. Reddit is purposefully doing this. Given everything I've seen it's obvious they are trying to kill 3rd party apps to generate more ad revenue on their own 1st party app.

[–] elghoto 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Would it be that difficult to make Apollo work with Lemmy? I'm not a fan of Jerboa, but it is what it is and I'm thankful for it..

[–] Aeoneir 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Sync is being rebuilt for lemmy. It's definitely possible but it's less of a conversion and more of a brand new app that looks and acts similarly to the original from what I understand

[–] TurnItOff_OnAgain 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
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[–] rarkgrames 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Christian's words were it would be a "gargantuan" effort. From what he's said in interviews / posts etc. I'm not sure he actually wants to rebuild it for another service. It's a shame as it's a fantastic app, but every endpoint for every action would need to be re-written, tested etc. and of course, Lemmy and Reddit don't always have like for like feature sets anyway, and the APIs could be vastly different. Essentially he'd be re-building the app from scratch.

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[–] overlordror 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm really hoping some of the reddit devs are interested in helping out the people who were most loyal to them. I use Boost on Android personally, but I would be willing to buy another version of the app that is designed for the Fediverse. I'd pay double what I paid for the reddit app, just to support the active developer of my app.

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[–] CthulhuDreamer 10 points 1 year ago

I went back just to upvote this.

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