The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas
It is perfectly reasonable to charge for API access. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that Huffman seems to think he can do whatever he wants without consequences. It wasn’t “Hey, we’re going to start charging for API, here’s a reasonable price, and a reasonable time frame, and we want to make sure everyone has a reasonable opportunity to continue providing applications that lots of users and mods use to access and shepherd the site.”
It was, “We’re going to start charging an exorbitant amount for API access, in an unviably short timeframe. If you have any complaints or disagreements, we’re going to provably lie about our interactions with you to make you look bad, oh and we’re also going to completely forget that there are people with accessibility needs and basically ignore them except as an afterthought. We’re also going to threaten existing mods who don’t play along, and replace them with people who do if we feel like it.”
That’s the problem.
Because the point was never to monetize the APIs. The point was to get rid of the third party apps. A minority of users are still using the not monetized versions of reddit. old.reddit.com, and the third party apps. The people using new reddit, and the reddit app, have a totally different, heavily monetized, modern social media experience full of ads and suggested posts. They want everyone to either have that experience, or leave.
But they can’t come out and say that, because it’s a huge fuck you. A fuck you to their original members, a fuck you to the apps they used to fuel their growth for a decade. Now they want a controlled ecosystem like Facebook, but they can’t say it directly. So instead it’s surprise API costs, refusing to talk to app developers, lying about conversations with Apollo devs.
But just like everything else they do, reddit can’t plan for shit. So they didn’t at all consider the fallout for accessibility tools, mod tools, etc. Which is why all their messaging since then has essentially been “No, we weren’t trying to kill accessibility and mod tools, just the third party apps for normal users!” But they can’t say the second part directly.
There is another point you are missing. Reddit uses browser fingerprinting to doxx and identify it’s user base so that they can bin your data properly when they sell it. Third party apps thwart this effort as they can’t tie your account to somebody who logs into the web site or uses their app.
I really wonder how much longer old.reddit.com will last. Surely that’s “costing them millions of dollars” they could be saving as well, right?
Considering they’ve straight out said during this whole debacle that they had no plans to mess with old.reddit.com, just the same as they told the Apollo dev back in January they had no plans to mess with the API anytime in the near future - yeah, I have been wondering this, too.
It makes me sad for the future of troubleshooting older hardware and software problems. I have a lot of legacy equipment, and appending “site:reddit.com” to my search queries often gets me further faster than searching error messages alone. So many people are overwriting and deleting their old comments and posts while Reddit itself is fucking the accessibility of the information they steward, and it’s going to punch a little gap into the collective knowledge of the internet. That sucks.
