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Reddit and the End of Online ‘Community’
(nymag.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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That's why this whole debacle is so mystifying to me. If they would have tried to monetize the 3rd party space by way of charging a reasonable API price to the devs, it's not hard to imagine that most serious Reddit users wouldn't have any qualms with parting with a few bucks here and there to keep the status quo. I can't imagine that Reddit is able to create a situation where they earn more from their advertising platform per user than having users simply pay to maintain the existing experience.
The only theory I've heard that makes a lick of sense is that if Reddit fundamentally changes the site experience to pursue other monetization options (Hello Reddit NFTs), then 3rd party apps would've been able to just ignore implementing those features entirely.
My speculation is that they want to charge LLMs like ChatGPT, especially for training. Those devs basically want to access every conversation on Reddit.
I guess too. IPO might be for sale to AI big tech.
What's weird, it doesn't make sense even then. I feel like it started as a simple miscalculation by Spez which he took personally. I mean, the part he insulted the Apollo dev is clearly that, but maybe the whole thing as well?
Is there anything stopping an organization with programming talent from accessing all of Reddit via http and bypassing the API fees?
Google Scholar does just that stoppage, for example. It'd be cheaper to pay API fees.
My "make it make sense" theory is--this is entirely about the IPO and we need to look at the biggest issue from last years social media sale.
Musk sued Twitter for obfuscating/failing to disclose how much of it's activity was bots during negotiations. It was a legit point of contention. These social media services are incentivized to turn a blind eye to the problem. (eg The "impressions" number that Facebook and Google sell advertisers is all malarkey) You'll notice that now that Musk owns twitter he doesn't say a word about bots other than occationally patting himself on the back for shutting bots down (ok yeah sure elon).
I think reddit is in a similar predicament where they really want to inflate their user stats with bot activity for the IPO, but they can't because the app stores provide solid stats on users and user activity and they don't control that flow of information, the 3rd party developers do.
If they think 15%-30% of the sites activity is repost bots, they really don't care about alienating the 5% of users using third-party apps.
The AI learning angle is all smoke-and-mirrors.
And in reddit's case, rather than someone like Elon buying/fact checking the terms of purchase, for IPOs you have to get your disclosure documents past the SEC. Smart people, but hardly experts at how social media companies run.