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Reddit starts removing moderators behind the latest protests
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Technology
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All they had to do was offer API keys with Reddit Premium. Plug-and-play into your 3rd-party-app of choice. Can't believe those dum-dums chose to kill off their golden goose instead.
I suspect they could've overcharged still, but just shut their mouths and continued as normal. Each new tactic is awful and self harming.
All the 3pa's shut down business the moment the actual API prices were announced. This wasn't a protest move, the prices were simply 20 times higher than what they were promised and impossible to work into their business model. Reddit couldn't have overcharged and continued as normal - it was a deliberate move to kill off 3pa while pretending they are not. Reddit COULD have charged this API price to users directly via Reddit Premium, but failed to do so.
I think it also important to note that it wasn't just the pricing itself, which was indeed already heinous, but that the rate calculation changed. It used to be a rate per user per app (apikey+oauth) but they changed that to just the per app ... that then has a multiplicative effect on the costs and makes the "free tier" they were talking about especially pointless....
It would be easy for an app to start at free tier ... not have much growth through word of mouth but enough given the per app rates to push it over boundary points ... and then be due a significant and unavoidable invoice in a couple of months...
This would have been the way
Speaking of API keys, the free key allows just a little bit of traffic, which is probably just enough for a single user, but not enough for all the Apollo users added together. So, my idea is that what if every user had their own personal key…
Currently the key provisioning system is really only meant for developers, key requests have to be manually approved by reddit admins. You couldn't have millions of users jump in to request their own keys. This uncertainty is why the 3pa devs considered and discarded the option of letting users provide their own keys, choosing to shut down their apps entirely. Making the system official and automated via Reddit Premium would have solved that.
Figures. Would have been too good to be true. Thanks for the explanation anyway!
Reddit would likely put a wall up to prevent non-developers from getting keys. I deal with enterprise applications that do that to prevent just that sort of thing. Basically you require developer registeration, and refuse any applicant that doesn't show they are really a developer.
I just asked Bing to write some VBA code that adds two numbers together. Here’s the code.
`Sub AddTwoNumbers() Dim x As Integer Dim y As Integer Dim z As Integer
End Sub `
I’m a VBA developer now. I’m entitled to get my own API, right?
Oh, but that’s not all, there’s also a Whitespace version of my program.
`Here is a possible whitespace code that adds two numbers together 1+1: