Thousands of subreddits are still dark.
So they designed an API that they didn’t intend thirdparties to use at all? And documented it publicly without the intention of any devs reading the docs? Right.
What annoys me the most is that they would rather force users to see their ads and interract with their new and useless engagement features than just take payment directly from us, the users, for accessing the API. I’ll gladly pay for a premium++ ultra gold plus reddit subscription to continue using Sync. I don’t get why they would rather charge the 3rd party devs that literally gives them more users.
What should bother you is not the particularities of the pricing. It’s the overtly dirty dealing. Even the Apollo dev said he might have been able to make the pricing work, but certainly not in just 30 days. Admins said there would be time – months of it – and only gave 30 days. They said pricing would be based on reality, but no sensible analysis indicates that it is. Admins told the users they were worthless and literally defamed devs that were trying to work with them.
There were tons of ways they could’ve gotten ads in front of people. This wasn’t about ads. This wasn’t about some particular price point. This is about getting users onto their official app or website, presumably to mine data and control conversations.
The infinite free VC ran out when interest rates went up. Suddenly, real financial pressures they had plenty of time to address and never bothered worrying about were at the door. So they revved up the enshitification engine and got to the hard work of destroying the only source of value the site had.
If they came out tomorrow and declared they would keep the API free and that Spez was fired, it oughtn’t change how you feel. It’s time to be off that site.
It seems all reddit pricing is made to keep you away from anything that would give you control over what you see. The price of Reddit premium is about as realistic as the price they set for the API. Reddit seems to make at most 1$/year in advertising per user, so to block ads it’s 40$/year O_o… And they’ll still track & manipulate you in all kinds of other ways…
Despite what advertising executives believe, the majority of us would gladly pay if it meant not having to deal with ads. I hate ads so much.
I think that depends on the price, but yeah, if they charged a reasonable price, sure.
So after saying for weeks, if not months, that the new pricing wasn’t designed to kill third-party apps, he’s now saying the exact opposite? And thus admitting that Reddit lied to its community for the whole?
Please, can someone give to this dude any PR training? Even the bare minimum would be an improvement at this point.
He’s so bad at this that I can’t help but believe he’s actually trying to kill Reddit.
Napoléon said something of the like “don’t attribute to malice when it’s incompetence instead”.
I worked for Microsoft for many years and the fact is many companies’ marketing and PR departments think their customers are morons. Or perhaps it’s that they think their customers don’t mind being treated like morons.
The shit they would send flowing down the pipeline that we were supposed to say to our customers just blew me away. “You know our customers aren’t STUPID right? I can’t talk to them like they’re stupid or they’ll escort me off premises.”
This just in CEO absolutely clueless.
If that would have been the case then why was the API not protected from public use? Why did it use API-Keys?
Omg what a dumb idiot. What is a third party app that adds functionality and usability? Certainly not a tool right?
And he didn’t know that there was this increased API usage? Did he just woke up from a coma?
Huffman isn’t clueless, he’s a liar. He selectively remembers thing, the man is a snake who has somehow managed to fail upwards into the position he is currently in. Even Pao was preferable, as she at least believed in what she was doing. Spez just does whatever gets him paid.
The guy literally built Reddit from scratch… He’s more than aware why there is an API, and how it has been used for years. The guy is just a douchebag and a liar that want to kill third party apps and acts like he is right from the beginning, never said or did anything wrong, because the bad people are devs, mods, and users. Why? Because he created Reddit so he can’t be wrong…
By the looks of it, it was never designed to support first party apps either.
I don’t think anyone is saying that Reddit shouldn’t charge the 3rd party apps. Pretty sure they just wanted fair pricing.
If they would have just made it so that you needed Reddit Premium to use 3rd party apps I would have thought that was fair and subscribed
Find it hilarious how perfectly this solution solves all of the problems reddit spoke about.
Reddit not profitable enough? Not enough premium subs? Third party app users can’t view ads? Api use is too high and you’re not making money off of it? Making premium a prerequisite for third party app use hits all 4 birds with one stone lol.
Not even “fair pricing”, because no one can know what is truly fair unless they have access to the P&L statements. Maybe this pricing really is based on the lost opportunity cost Reddit is paying as a result of third-party apps – we honestly don’t and can’t know for sure, even if it seems completely absurd.
The devs and users of the site were lied to. Repeatedly. We were told one thing while the C-suite planned something else. We were gaslit and lied to about timelines, pricing, and intentions, and more. We were told our opinions are just worthless noise and that the only goal of the site is profit, not community.
It’s our job to believe they don’t want us, at this point, no matter how much they do or do not backtrack in the coming days, weeks, and months.