So they designed an API that they didn't intend thirdparties to use at all? And documented it publicly without the intention of any devs reading the docs? Right.

What annoys me the most is that they would rather force users to see their ads and interract with their new and useless engagement features than just take payment directly from us, the users, for accessing the API. I'll gladly pay for a premium++ ultra gold plus reddit subscription to continue using Sync. I don't get why they would rather charge the 3rd party devs that literally gives them more users.

So after saying for weeks, if not months, that the new pricing wasn’t designed to kill third-party apps, he’s now saying the exact opposite? And thus admitting that Reddit lied to its community for the whole?

Please, can someone give to this dude any PR training? Even the bare minimum would be an improvement at this point.

This just in CEO absolutely clueless.

If that would have been the case then why was the API not protected from public use? Why did it use API-Keys?

Omg what a dumb idiot. What is a third party app that adds functionality and usability? Certainly not a tool right?

And he didn't know that there was this increased API usage? Did he just woke up from a coma?

By the looks of it, it was never designed to support first party apps either.

I don't think anyone is saying that Reddit shouldn't charge the 3rd party apps. Pretty sure they just wanted fair pricing.

I asked him if he felt that Apollo, rif for Reddit, and Sync, which all plan to shut down as a result of the pricing changes, don’t add value to Reddit. “Not as much as they take,” he says. “No way. They need to pay for this."

I don't think anyone has ever said they want the API to remain free, they just want a fairer price model and/or more time to allow existing year-long contracts to be valid. Why the sudden urgency to push out this stupidly high pricing model? The only time-critical event I can think of is Spez's precious IPO, and he's doing a great job at showing potential investors that everything's under control

/s ( <-- are we allowed to use that here?)

But... 3rd-party apps are literally a free advertisement to the service which the app connects to?

Oh, that’s rich. The API was created for third party access. And if he didn’t like it, why was it tolerated for so long? Hmmm…maybe because they brought in more users and their data to fatten the pig before IPO?

Damn, bro really just essentially said "get fucked". He also in essence admitted in the interview that the intention was to kill off certain third party apps, saying they provide little to no value to the platform.

I really think the root problem here is that we're building communities on private platforms owned by for profit corporations. The intention is to make money off your interactions, and to an extent how you have them. Instead of providing you with a service, you become the service. A commodity to be sold to advertisers and whatever nonsense they can get you to look at on their platforms.

This is why ActivityPub is important. You (mostly) don't see this kind of fuck shit happening with SMTP, instead they just couple services in with your email (O365, G Suite). Communicating and connecting with other people shouldn't be a business venture, and I hope social media continues to become increasingly unprofitable for these companies.

Reddit gave the 'fuck you' price for third party apps, then the guy in charge lied through his teeth about convrosations that has happened.

Deleted my reddit account. Twitter lost my patronage. Soo too will reddit. I'm not putting up with this noise.

Let it go, overwrite your content and leave reddit.

From this article:

While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that; more than 80 percent of the top 5,000 communities by daily active users are now open

Meanwhile from https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/15/reddit-threatens-to-remove-subreddit-moderators/

If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.

Absurd stance to take, but that's why we're here and not there after all.

If it wasn’t for old Reddit and RES I’d be off there today or if platforms like this one get a good user base of quality people. This Fediverse thing is really neat but I think most people will not want to invest the time to learn how to use it. Today is my first day here and I still have a lot of questions for example I know that Mastadon is part of the Fediverse. Does that mean I can use that service due to having a Kbin account or do I have to sign up with one of their servers?

@okcool Math is not my greatest skill but "Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site." Are they so bad that they can't cover the cost of 3% usage? Why is he still CEO?

Oh, well, that makes it ok then. Everybody back to Reddit!

So, Alien Blue was not a third-party app?

Great Snoo Platform... lie.

Deleted my account with the message "Your contempt for your users disgusts me". Oh well, account since 2012 permanently gone. Long live the Fediverse!

It was never designed to support third-party apps.

My brother in Christ… you bought a third party app that used the API

🤦‍♂️

Wow, the reddit ceo is a dick! Also, someone needs to tell him that one reason we use 3rd party apps is because his official reddit app is an ugly piece of crap that most people are only using because they didn't realize there were choices.

Doesn’t he realise the reddit app was a 3rd party app originally that they have made into a shit show?

He's a liar, there is no way the would have let 3rd party apps use their API for over a decade if they "didn't mean for 3rd party apps..."

3rd party apps came before the official app - in fact didn't the official app start out as a 3rd-party app before it was acquired by Reddit?

"While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that; more than 80 percent of the top 5,000 communities by daily active users are now open, according to a fact sheet shared by the company on Thursday. In the fact sheet, Reddit writes that there are more than 100,000 “active communities,” that the company sees 57 million “daily active uniques,” and that there are more than 50,000 daily active moderators. "

This is why we need it to be indefinite.