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.
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.
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 $$$.
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 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 price they’re asking is ~70x more than imgur, which hosts images WAAAAAY heavier to host than text, and links etc.
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.
The fact is, if this was purely about money, they’d be willing to negotiate on price.
That still holds true, though.
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.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat on the reddit board for years and was briefly CEO for 8 days.
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.
If I were implementing this nefarious Reddit I probably wouldn’t have edits wipe out the original Tatars data. It’s certainly not necessary to implement edits that way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well that’s kind of what they said. That they’d be charging for API use. The controversy started when their API fees were astronomically high as to constructively end all 3rd party apps.
Everything else is just bad crisis management.
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:
- Reddit went back on their word about no API cost changes this year
- Lied about making the API cost reasonable
- Gave developers very little time to adjust
- Treated developers and their apps as freeloaders instead of as a source of growth for Reddit when they didn’t even have an app yet
- Blatantly slandered Apollo’s developer
For moderators:
- Reddit treated moderators as if their input didn’t matter despite providing free labor for the site
- Framed them as being power hungry for disagreeing and protesting Reddit’s decisions
For users:
- Reddit treated users as if their input didn’t matter despite Reddit being a user-generated content site
- Treated their contributions to the site as Reddit’s property, not their own
- Essentially said users are just a bunch of whiney babies who are powerless, have no willpower, and will visit the site no matter what we do
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.
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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
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Get users upset with the lack of features on the official app
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Make the 3P app developers look like bad guys
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Wait a month or so
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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
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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.
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?
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.
