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submitted 1 year ago by savjee@lemmy.world to c/reddit@lemmy.world
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[-] Dark_Blade@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

Poor Christian, going through all that shit just because spez is jealous about him having a better product.

[-] Zana@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Imagine if instead of all of this he worked with Christian to understand why his product is better.

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

You're asking too much from an egomaniac.

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[-] kratoz29@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

So wholesome to see that reaching on top of r/all

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

I'm really going to miss Sync...

[-] kratoz29@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

For real man, I used Boost then Sync, both are great Reddit apps and I hope the devs get here eventually.

The Reddit app sucks balls hence I'm not going to use it ever.

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

LJ posted today on his sub to guage interest in a lemmy version of sync.

[-] twentyfumble@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

All third party app developers have been calm, reasonable, professional and level headed through the entire process.

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

Which makes this debacle all the more frustrating. Capital over humanity mirite

[-] savjee@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I think Reddit's CEO is making a fool out of himself by how he's managing this situation. I think however that the solution is very simple and straightforward.

Let's start: I can understand that Reddit has costs to operate the platform. I also get that they don't want big companies to abuse the API to train ML models and profit of it. Fair game!

But why not offer a generous free tier for regular users? Say, every user gets 500 free API calls per day. Regular users stay within the free tier, while big companies can't do anything meaningful with only 500 calls per day (so they end up paying money).

Seems pretty straightforward to me. Everyone happy! Many other companies offer generous free-tiers for exactly this reason. Am I missing something?

[-] phr0g@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I still believe that the ML companies "argument" is just a giant smokescreen. Reason is simple: ML companies can, and probably always have, just scrape the website. Why build an integration for every API under the sun if you can just build a web crawler once and be done? There are even existing, free implementations available so that's an absolute no-brainer.

It's about killing independent clients, nothing else.

[-] EfreetSK@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Actually when I think about it you are absolutely right. The ML argument is complete bullshit. I mean to train a ML algorithm an API is nice but scraping should do just as fine. I don't know how complicated the Reddit API is but you essentially need just GET so I guess not that much. How much time would a development team need to switch the implementation from API to scrape? A week? We're in corporate world so let's say a month with all the corporate bs around. That's still nothing

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

My impression is they're being disingenuous, for the reasons you say. They could easily support 3rd party apps but ban large-scale data mining. Saying "supporting these apps costs us money, so we need to charge" is a manipulative half-truth. Like Selig said, they've priced it not just at covering their costs but making a healthy profit.

[-] drlecompte@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

They priced it to destroy third party apps. There is no other reason for doing it the way they did:

  • very expensive, suspiciously like Twitter, with no basis in real cost or a revenue model based on 3d party clients.
  • a very short timeline so app developers have no time to implement the change
  • claiming that 3d party apps were never the intended use of the api, which is a blatant lie.
[-] nucleative@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Reddit could let users access the API like this easily. They could stream ads along with the comments coming from the API. They could let individual users pay a subscription fee for their own api access. They could develop an advertising platform for 3P apps to show reddit ads.

They could even have said: look, we're going to kill off 3P apps because we have another idea now, thanks but you are no longer required. At least that would have been a genuine approach.

Spez evidently has an idea about what he really wants and isn't sharing it yet. I'm sure it will be clear after the IPO.

[-] drlecompte@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago

They looked at the numbers, concluded that 3d party apps were a fringe phenomenon that could threaten their control over the platform, and just killed them.

There are many possible revenue models that include 3d party apps and a more open API, Reddit just isn't interested. They see Twitter as a shining example for some reason.

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

Am I missing something?

Yeah. They want to kill the third party apps so everyone has to use the ad-supported Reddit app.

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

It's not clear why they don't just serve ads in the API and require them to be displayed, or implement profit-sharing with 3rd party devs (as in, they pay reddit a portion of their income from ads/subscriptions). The only clear reasons would be for control and to pump up numbers for the IPO.

[-] ijeff@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

They're likely more interested in control than revenue.

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[-] fsk@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

There are lots of mistakes Reddit made that shows they aren't trying.

  • They could have given more advance notice for the API price increase. This would give apps more time to update their code to use fewer API calls. Many apps are subscription-based, so it would give them more time to update their subscription price.

  • The price should have been based on Reddit's actual costs, actual revenue, and actual profits. I.e., if it costs Reddit $0.10 per user per year and their revenue per user is $0.15 per user per year from ads, then the API price should have been $0.15-$0.25 per user per year. The actual pricing shows they made it artificially high to kill the 3rd party apps. (I don't know what the actual numbers are.)

  • Even if Reddit really did want to charge $5 per month for API users, the right way to do it is to start from a lower price and increase it 20%-50% per year until they get to their target price.

  • If a user had Reddit premium, they should have been given extra API call tokens they can give to their 3rd party app.

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[-] mintiefresh@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Talk your shit Christian

[-] heliumlake@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

It's wild how quickly reddit went from being beloved despite some missteps to an absolute pariah on the internet.

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[-] Trebach@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago
[-] Midou@kbin.projectsegfau.lt 2 points 1 year ago

They don't even plan to scrape the website, so libreddit might eventually die. To be fair i think that would be a great way for me to stop lurking at reddit and look for answers and solutions elsewhere in the end.

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

spez can fuck himself. If he was on fire, I wouldn't piss on him to extinguish the flames because it's not fair to make the urine exist in proximity to that miserable fucking waste of oxygen.

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

That was the first time I have been on Reddit in a week. Fuck that place.

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

I went back just to upvote this.

[-] focusedkiwibear@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

i wish i could give christian my support but i've completely nuked all my accounts on Reddit and don't even go there if I can help it. poor guy - what the heck did he do to deserve this turn of events?

[-] tylerthehuman@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

from the original post

Not to turn this into an infomercial, but that is a lot of money, and if you appreciate my work I also have a fun separate virtual pets app called Pixel Pals that it would mean a lot to me if you checked out and supported (I’ve got a cool update coming out this week!). If you’re looking for a more direct route, Apollo also has a tip jar at the top of Settings, and if that’s inaccessible, I also have a tipjar@apolloapp.io PayPal. Please only support/tip if you easily have the means, ultimately I’ll be fine.

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

Slam dunk. Reddit is purposefully doing this. Given everything I've seen it's obvious they are trying to kill 3rd party apps to generate more ad revenue on their own 1st party app.

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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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