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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Uhh... Plenty of services charge less than half of that for the same number of API calls, and they are still able to make money. I would imagine that as large as Reddit is, their cost per 1k calls is way less than $0.10, unless their API is poorly engineered and inefficient AF. This is 100% them just trying to drive third parties out so they can get that sweet sweet ad revenue.
So they expect less than 4166 API calls per user per month, or 138 per day? That doesn't sound like much.
I just loaded reddit.org and my browser did 57 XHR requests. I clicked on a post with zero comments and it went up to 84. Clicked on a second one with 430 comments and I'm already at 137 requests...
For context, it looks like "Apollo requires ~345 requests per user per day".
The majority of those might be user profile and telemetry stuff that doesn't show up on a third-party app. Fetching comments doesn't consume that many requests as 200 comments are retrieved in a single request.
All the more reason to not use their shitty website.
Exactly what it looks like to me. This is clearly an attempt at driving up revenue for the upcoming IPO, but I think there’s a little more to it.
We all know that Reddit depended on third party apps for years before releasing their own, which is full of ads and all the other features they cram in there that long-term users don’t care for.
To me it looks like they’ve planned for this move to drive out long-term users, who remember old Reddit before the crazy amounts of ads, and will still have the people who will tolerate the official app, and the many people who have only ever used new Reddit and the app, and of course are used to the ads.
I think they’ve underestimated just how many of their mods and content contributors are using/dependent on third party apps.