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Relay for Reddit API Subscription Fees (www.reddit.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world to c/reddit@lemmy.world
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

One of the remaining 3rd party Reddit apps (Relay) has begun discussing what it would be charging for subscription fees. Imo, they actually seem somewhat reasonable. The weird thing is that every upvote or downvote is an API call so you can rack up a huge number of API calls from voting.

Also, while the costs might be reasonable now, there's nothing preventing Reddit from jacking up prices again.

Edit: Also, there wouldn't be any NSFW content with the app.

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[-] Bigs@kbin.social 57 points 1 year ago

What is happening with reddit is so sad. The users made that platform what it is and were never compensated by reddit. Meanwhile, reddit is pissed off that tech like chatGPT used it to train models and not compensate reddit. If that ain't the pot calling the kettle black. The indifference/ignorance is staggering.

[-] haywire7@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago

I really don't see the point in them restricting the NSFW stuff. Some stuff will slip through, it'll lead to posts being made in ways to try and reach the most people and get around it.

Then there will be arguments and someone will say think of the children or something.

[-] briongloid@aussie.zone 26 points 1 year ago

The point of the restriction was to silently remove the apps with excuses that it's just a side effect of other actions.

[-] crowsby@kbin.social 18 points 1 year ago

This is what I believe too. With interest rates rising, companies have been under a great deal of pressure to show profitability, and especially with Reddit aiming for an IPO, it seemed (superficially at least) a great idea to badger their userbase into adopting their mobile app, where they could be monetized to a much larger extent.

So of course they made the conditions of using their new API incredibly onerous.

The whole point was to discourage developers from using it. And then by cherrypicking a handful of select 3rd-party developers to offer more amenable terms to on the downlow, they can show that they were just being reasonable good guys, and doing their best to work with everyone, and that it must be the developers at fault if they decided to walk away and abandon their users.

So yeah, they've managed to get their app center stage, and the only minor tradeoffs have been:

  • Launching/boosting a fleet of competitors (lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/tildes/etc)
  • Driving their very talented 3rd-party app devs into making apps for said competitors
  • Creating a massive breach of trust between Reddit Inc and its unpaid volunteer mods
  • Squandering any remaining goodwill Reddit once had in the tech community
  • Driving away folks who enjoy using 3rd-party apps
  • Ruining the image of the CEO
  • Negatively affecting the overall community to the point where it's both a more hostile and unpleasant site, and simultaneously less moderated.
[-] DoisBigo@lemmy.eco.br 1 points 1 year ago

I only use Lemmy because RIF stopped working.

I'm not an activist and do not tend to act when my bubble isn't affected. When I heard all the commotion I thought "damn! I liked RIF. Welp, let's download the new Reddit app. C'est lá vie."

I proceeded to download it and... IT ASKED ME FOR LOGIN CREDENTIALS 🤡!!!!!!

On that moment I gave up. One of my favorite things about Reddit was the pseudonym aspect of the site. I could see a post about some topic, create an specific pseudonym just to reply that post and preserve my identity and my main online aliases. I'm not against demanding information for accounts that post on the site and even taking measures to limit the number of aliases a single person can have. But demand login to lurk!? Fuck that! Complete greed. Absolutely barbaric!

[-] rikudou@lemmings.world 8 points 1 year ago

I'd say the same reason as usual - the card processing companies are led by hypocrites and they don't want to allow payments for NSFW stuff.

[-] ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Also, you can bypass the restriction by making yourself a mod of a subreddit 🤦🏾‍♂️

[-] haywire7@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I heard that. I was going to try it but then I thought nah. They are killing off Joey the app I liked using why would I want to stay?

Haven't b and n back since Joey stopped working.

[-] Neato@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Is that just to post NSFW on your own sub? Or do see NSFW from all subs on a 3rd party app?

[-] ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

You can see other NSFW content (at least on Relay).

[-] peterpan520@feddit.de 12 points 1 year ago

There are significantly more people in the comments willing to pay than I thought.... But the prices are also lower than expected.

[-] ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Yeah, it's cheaper than Reddit premium so it's kind of strange that you'd get an ad-free option for cheaper than what Reddit officially offers.

[-] empireOfLove@lemmy.one 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Of course it's cheaper. You aren't allowed access to ANY NSFW tagged content, which is probably about 60% of Reddit as a whole, so it's an actively degraded experience.

[-] kratoz29@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Is NSFW stuff really that big on Reddit? I only followed subscribed communities and none of them were NSFW focused by any means.

Even finding that content here on Lemmy in C/All I can't say it's the biggest perk of Lemmy.

I know my this is only my opinion, I'm actually kinda shocked there was a lot of backlash because they getting rid of this with 3rd party apps (I was more pissed that my beloved apps were gonna die).

[-] doc@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

There's a subreddit for everything, including every kink you can imagine.

[-] davostheSecond@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

The API protests/mod purge killed a lot of the quality niche communities, sadly. More than half of my "alt" feed is unmoderated bot spam now.

[-] empireOfLove@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

NSFW is pretty big, yeah. Mind you, that includes all posts tagged as nsfw, even those with only "disturbing imagery" or tagged as a joke in non-nsfw subs. And even if nsfw is not your thing, it's simply the bad principle of segregating user experiences and locking content behind what's effectively a personal data pay wall that stinks to hell.

[-] Ashtear@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

That does seem reasonable.

Makes me curious, did Reddit finally budge on the pricing or did this dev figure out a way to optimize calls? Latter seems unlikely given each vote is a call.

[-] ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

I do remember people saying that Apollo was badly optimized for API calls.

I always felt like there has been some backroom negotiations between Relay and Reddit because Relay has (allegedly) been eating the costs of the API calls. Doesn't seem like it would be cheap for the dev to just eat that cost.

[-] empireOfLove@lemmy.one 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I do remember people saying that Apollo was badly optimized for API calls.

"Those people" were Spez and admins, who have a vested interest in actively attacking Apollo, and then ran an entire smear campaign trying to accuse Christian of blackmailing reddit when just calling his app bad wasn't enough. Nobody else ever corroborated those baseless claims made using unlabeled bar graphs. That info has exactly zero credibility, please do not repeat it.

The reality is, users that care enough about their experience to use a 3rd party app simply use reddit more. And make more api calls for content.

[-] ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

That's fine, just trying to figure out how Relay users are having much lower API calls. I guess people could just be using it less. But, the kind of people to post on the Relay subreddit seem like they'd use Reddit more.

[-] doc@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As a long time relay user but not an Apollo user, my impression from reading all the drama of early June was Apollo had a lot more features than I had seen before, and that was what set it apart from other clients. More features means more API calls, generally.

As an example, I had relay poll for PM once an hour, but I remember seeing Apollo was doing it every few minutes or maybe alongside thread views so notifications were more immediate. The user experience would be better but at the expense of far more API hits.

[-] empireOfLove@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Again, there's no guarantee that the number of API calls reported by Reddit are even remotely accurate. I'm pretty sure apollo was the only one to release his own API call numbers unless I'm just being a retard and forgetting, so there's nothing to compare anyone to.

If anything the offical Reddit app makes the most API calls out of any app with as many fucking ads it preloads 24/7.

[-] suction@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

How are you going to figure out when all you have to go on is speculation? We don't know how many API calls Relay has in comparison with e.g. Apollo, and even if we did, wouldn't a better app have more API calls anyway because it's more fun to use and therefore being used longer and more often? I could make a Reddit app with very low API call numbers because I'd make it so bad that people close it after a minute ;-)

[-] dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net 13 points 1 year ago

Christian seemed pretty confident Apollo was no less efficient than other apps in terms of API calls.

[-] Neato@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Relay is probably just hoping to capitalize on a market everyone else abandoned. When it fails, can't they just declare the company as bankrupt and move on?

this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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