I want to debunk Reddit's claims, and talk about their unwillingness to work with developers, moderators, and the larger community, as well as say thank you for all the support
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?
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.
Actually when I think about it you are absolutely right. The ML argument is complete bullshit. I mean to train a ML algorithm an API is nice but scraping should do just as fine. I don't know how complicated the Reddit API is but you essentially need just GET so I guess not that much. How much time would a development team need to switch the implementation from API to scrape? A week? We're in corporate world so let's say a month with all the corporate bs around. That's still nothing
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.
They looked at the numbers, concluded that 3d party apps were a fringe phenomenon that could threaten their control over the platform, and just killed them.
There are many possible revenue models that include 3d party apps and a more open API, Reddit just isn't interested. They see Twitter as a shining example for some reason.
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.
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.
Valid point. My proposed free-tier would make them no money.
However, by charging a reasonable amount of money for the API, they could make way more than they are right now. Christian noted that Reddit makes about $0.12 per user per month. If they would charge say $0.99 for an average user, they'd have to run no ads and make 8 times more money per user than using their own app.
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.
I think a smol problem here is that Apollo offered a "Lifetime Subscription" for a flat amount. In order to honor that Christian would be obliged to take money from elsewhere to cover those subscriptions, potentially for decades.
I'm a lifetime subscription holder and I would have, without a doubt, been fine with having my flat amount cover a few months of the new model, then switching over to the per month amount needed to keep Apollo running. But that wasn't even offered!
He just decided that he'd had enough and pulled the plug.
The bigger problem is that Selig and other developers have an actual conscience and understood that the pricing for the new model would be way too high (in the ballpark of $20-$25 per month per user) to even cover the costs.
Not only that but he would lose around 2m per month in the rollover while ending life time and long term subscriptions bringing up the costs another 250k. Just to change it to a model that very few would pay for.
Instead he decided to cut losses, terminate the subscriptions and not owe 2m per month.
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.
They don't even plan to scrape the website, so libreddit might eventually die. To be fair i think that would be a great way for me to stop lurking at reddit and look for answers and solutions elsewhere in the end.
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?
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 tipjar@apolloapp.io PayPal. Please only support/tip if you easily have the means, ultimately I’ll be fine.
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
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.
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.
He also said he’s been pretty burnt out with everything going and he just doesn’t know if he has it in him right now. And I totally get it. Dude deserves a break.
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
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.