Okay, what bothers me about this - they're so damn two faced.
Either:
3rd party apps are a huge chunk of the userbase and just hemoraghing money because of all the API usage they drive (which from all usage charts seems unlikely)
They are not a huge chunk of the userbase and they could mostly go on not being charged
But their wording just says both and it bugs the hell out of me. "Not many users use these, but they're so much of our API that we're just dying under the pressure"
On top of that, they blame AI training. Well, if that were true why not.... classify the users of their API and make tiers of pricing, where 3rd party apps (who serve content directly to users) get to continue using for free/cheap, and users who train AI are charged. There, I solved the problem where everyone is happy, you can make the check out directly to me instead of paying your lawyers.
We are all performing a thought exercise with the presumption Reddit’s goal was to come to a mutually beneficial understanding with third party apps. The proposed solutions are fundamentally misunderstanding Reddit’s intent.
Reddit doesn’t want to find a way to be paid by the apps. They want to kill the apps. Any compromise measure is counterproductive to that goal.
The excuses that Reddit gives are not meant for people like us. The excuses don’t hold up to scrutiny but they were never meant to. The excuses are so that people who are only tangentially plugged in see a headline like above, scroll past without reading about it, and subconsciously just accept it.
Agreed, the arguments don't hold up to any critical thinking because they're not supposed to. This is just the most PR friendly way to funnel all users through the main app. Look on Reddit proper and you get tons of people saying "What's the big idea, it doesn't affect me, I use the main app" and scroll past
Makes me think that they want to profit off of AI training but can't meaningfully differentiate between API use for AI and API use for third party apps. Solvable problem of course, but you gotta do the work.
If Reddit really wanted to not target 3rd party apps, they could do it, idk if they can see what kind of app are making the APIs calls, but they could've worked something with the 3rd party app devs, I'm not believing what they say.
"Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app," the Reddit worker said.
This reminds me of the "average user" Comcast would talk about when they introduced price discrimination metered billing. Just include the long tail of lurkers and signups who almost never use the service, and you can claim that the Apollo users (who are power users) are just outliers who should pay more.
Ultimately for me this is a reminder that when there's a for-profit business ramping up to an IPO, it ultimately has to decide what the products are. Reddit tried to make itself the product with Reddit Gold, but clearly not enough people were paying for it, so it has to make users the product. It's hard to "monetize" users through someone else's app, so they've basically decided that for app users, if the developers figure out how to sell a very expensive service, more power to them, otherwise fuck 'em.
It's not necessarily that "not enough people" were paying for Reddit Gold, but that subscription models like that tend to be great for making a stable profit but not so great for line-go-up-forever endless growth, which is what shareholders always, always want. It doesn't matter to them if reddit is profitable if it's not even more profitable than last year.
Either way, yeah, the reddit users are the product and the free labor and not the customer.
For house users, they create shareholder value by selling ads and by curating their experience in future ways that manipulate them in one way or another.
But for API users, it's murky how to create shareholder value, but one obvious way to do it is to charge a shitload for the API. If that results in an exodus from API users, well, no worries because they weren't creating value anyway.
no no, it's the apps that are inefficient. I mean, I'm staring at my Lemmy instance and I'm pretty sure that the thousands of requests I've taken in have warranted...
Nope, it's cost me maybe a penny so far running it.
If they just wanted to get paid, they'd restrict API access to paid accounts and be done with it. It's pretty clear they're specifically trying to kill third-party apps.
Edit: The irony is that I'm not using a third-party app with Lemmy. I don't need one here; the built-in web interface is already clean, efficient, and mobile-friendly.