Fully agreed. Reddit without Apollo, Narwhal, RIF, Sync, etc is just plain unusable. The official site and app are so blatantly built around pumping "engagement" without regard to user experience and are engineered badly to boot.
I just wish one of the countless Reddit alternatives in the past ten years had gained any significant amount of traction (outside of very niche groups or groups far on the political fringe).
It doesn't matter. It is their service and the API terms are subject to change at any time. So either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase access for a high price.
Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse and TikTok have decided to ban third-party apps. Twitter and Reddit decided to charge for it.
In this case with the developer of the third party Reddit client, unless he is making enough to cover the API costs, then it make no sense to build on someone else's API with little to no revenue. That is the risk.
It is no different to TapBots (creators of TweetBot) doing the same mistake.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse, and TikTok all launched with first party apps.
Twitter and Reddit both allowed a thriving third party ecosystem to develop before they made apps. (And in both cases they just bought the most popular apps.) Hell, the word tweet was invented by Twitterific, a third party twitter app.
While it certainly is completely up to the platform to allow whatever they want, it's shitty to make a change that big and alienate many of your original most dedicated users.
It is not at all accidental. Elon Musk has given cover for other social media sites to imitate many of his moves, such as Facebook introducing a subscription tier.
It's not about being rational, instead it is a kind of "vice signalling" between billionaires.
It would be a better question to ask "Why did Mark Zuckerberg buy successful VR game companies and shut their games down?" (if you were having fun you wouldn't visit Horizon Worlds) or "Why did Zuckerberg damage a successful brand by renaming it?"
It's not about money, it's about power. The primary currency of power is deference and if one powerful person demonstrates they can take an action and get deference that action is appealing to other powerful people who want to prove they can to do the same.
I think it has all to do with AI accessing sites for "training", you can't blame reddit for wanting a piece of the action. Is the price high ? To me it is, but for a large company doing AI, probably not.
It's all about keeping reddit safe for dark patterns.
There is some good content on reddit still, if you look hard to find it, but one thing that makes it hard is that reddit blends ads into the content and I think also blends in non-sequitur content that further confuses the reader into looking at and clicking on the ads.
They just can't let reddit clients provide a good, never mind better, experience.
> No redditor wanted them to selfhost photos and videos
Honestly, this was probably one of the more reasonable features they've added. Having to upload images on an external site added a lot of friction for users, and put Imgur in an awkward spot as well when problematic content was removed from Reddit, but not from Imgur.
Their video player still sucks, though. I'm not sure how they managed to make it so bad.
Wow, that price is insane. To me, that's pretty clearly a shot at any competitor apps for Reddit. Purely anti-competitive behavior here, which to me is silly. Let other apps pop up to better serve your users. At the end of the day, they are still your users and you might learn things from the other apps.
Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.
The idea that it's anti-competitive to do with your platform what you want is in my mind silly. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from building a reddit clone to compete against reddit besides your ability to attract their users.
It comes off as extremely entitled to think that reddit should supply you with the data created by their platform to do what you want with it.
Reddit didn't create data. I did, you did, random users did. Why did it happen on Reddit? Because Reddit, at least for a while, seemed like it was a relatively open place where data wouldn't be stuck and made inaccessible without an account.
Reddit exists _despite_ Reddit's incompetent management and tech teams, not thanks to them.
Um, the users create the data, and consume it. Reddit provides a "marketplace" for that, and sells your data in exchange. Now, they want to rent-seek from the very people making it possible to create and consume that content easily.
And it IMO, is anti-competitive - they are intentionally killing all existing competitors, vs. improving their own offering.
Apollo is not a competitor to reddit, it's a consumer of reddit. Those are very distinct things. It literally doesn't even exist without reddit.
If I have a backyard and let you host a couple concerts in it free of charge and then next year I decide "hmm, I think I should be paid for those concerts you're hosting in my backyard" is that anti-competitive?
On the other hand, I think the price is damn steal. If Apollo's numbers are to be believed, Reddit is willing to sell its traffic at ~$2.50/user/month. That's half the value of a pre-Musk Twitter user and a third of the value of a Facebook or video streaming user.
So, if you already have a sophisticated ad tech and sales team, you'd be able to pull 50%+ profit margin without having to worry about running the infrastructure for content.
That being said, there's maybe only a handful of companies with a more competent ad tech/sales team than Reddit, and Reddit's is pretty damn bad. So while the numbers make sense, the strategy does not given the competencies available in the market they're trying to sell in.
You're still allowed to use the API for passion/personal use. They're "passion hobby projects" trying that collect revenue by selling the app to other users. It's disingenuous to pretend they're not also a business.
If you're building your business to be completely reliant on another unsustainable, unprofitable business, don't be too surprised when they ask you to help row or get off the boat before it sinks.
For API restrictions, Reddit has been in a doomed if they do, doomed if they don't situation for a while now. I think there's about a thousand other better decisions they could've made before being forced to make this one about API usage, but I also don't see their numbers and their time simply might've already run out.
Why? A FOSS app can allow the user to just use their own API key. The only reason this is an issue is because the dev of Apollo is profiting off the app; his margins will go away with the new pricing and he's dubious that there's enough demand at the raised rates to sustain development. A FOSS app is under no such pressure.
> If Apollo's numbers are to be believed, Reddit is willing to sell its traffic at ~$2.50/user/month.
That's only one side of it though. According to the same post, Reddit's ad revenue is closer to $0.12/user/month. So, they are apparently willing to sell traffic to advertisers for a much much lower price than API users.
Except there’s a first party client for Reddit, so they’re both a client and server. Their client competes with other clients, and they use their control over the server to give their client an advantage.
Now, whether this constitutes “anti competitive” in the legal sense is probably not going to fly in court: it’s unlikely Reddit can be compelled to offer an API at any particular price. It’s their service, they can do what they want with it. Rather, it’s a lesson that third parties should not be developing clients for other company’s services, as it is building a foundation on quicksand.
I deleted the Twitter app a while ago, and if my only way to access Reddit is with their official app... I guess I'll be a little more productive this year.
You'll still be able to access the website, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried killing that, too. If I were a profit-above-all bastard that was trying to squeeze my users for telemetry, I'd force them to use the mobile app exclusively to access my service.
Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase their revenue, they're doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened.
Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.
Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all.
Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.
Reddit Admin itself will blanket ban accounts in entire sub-threads with no recourse or explanation.
Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy, but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant?
Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.
Yeah they track quite a lot of bits of data for users. It's the very reason why most new users are found bemoaning how annoying it is to start posting on reddit.
It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser fingerprint info, search terms, information from their partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit, what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes and so on.
Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots, people harassing you, completely unrelated comments, report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much data.
This is has always been an interesting aspect of Reddit.
On the one hand, this is fine: Reddit is supposed to be a collection of independently moderated sub-communities with their own rules and administration. On the other hand, you have a unified identity and content history across those communities, so it's a lot easier for one community to take action based on your history in another, which is a strange dynamic.
I actually think Facebook Groups are onto something with the way post history and profiles work: each Facebook Group a user posts in creates a separate sub-profile for that user which is specific to the Group. Users in that Group can see a user's post history in that Group, and that user's "main" profile depending on their privacy settings, but a user can't walk "across" to see a user's post history in other Groups unless they search from that other Group.
I feel like per-subreddit post histories along with a global user profile would help move Reddit more towards the "sub-community" vision if that's the direction they want to go.
The issues Reddit have are:
* Cross-stalking, as discussed above.
* Content discovery. This is the same problem every user-generated content platform has. What sub-communities get surfaced on the logged-out front page? Cross-pollinated to existing users? Every type of content will be objectionable to someone, so deciding what to show is always going to be a lightning-rod issue with advertiser dollars at stake.
* Global moderation. What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? What happens when that user is completely banned (do all of their old posts disappear?) Should large-scale content moderation like spam be handled at a platform or a community level?
Not to victim-blame, but which subreddits? I pop into new subreddits from time to time, and I don't know that I've ever been banned from a subreddit in my accounts 14+ year history. I'm also less sympathetic if the bans were because you posted somewhere like the_donald (I can't think of a more timely controversial sub) vs somewhere innocuous like r/gaming or r/technology.
Ikr. I feel like there's lots of problematic folks? doing a lot of heckin wrongthink out there in the current climate? and its making me feel like so unsafe?
A moderator's job is to keep their subreddit a functioning community. It seems entirely reasonable to me that they might notice a pattern and cast a wide net to save themselves a lot of hassle.
Far from it. They have great recent user growth and everybody is appending “Reddit” to the end of their google searches in the quest for non-gamed search results
Primarily because google has become completely useless. I get more accurate search results with Yandex, Brave, and bing, in that order. That’s how bad it is. And I hate Yandex. They’re always making me do captcha challenges.
It's not a sustainable position though. Advertisers aren't idiots, the market will adjust as it makes sense to adjust. You already have bot accounts flooding certain keywords on reddit with product placement. If everyone ends up on reddit, that's where the SEO spam crap you see today will follow them. If everyones on twitter, it goes there. If everyone goes to mastodon, so be it, there be the bots. It almost doesn't matter what the service is exactly, once it hits a critical mass it gets enshittified just because of the business opportunity it presents.
> Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.
I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy, and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting a 3 day ban.
I used to have a (long) list of posts/comments that they refused to remove after I reported them. Most of these were (at least to me) _very_ obvious cases of being against the TOS (and the law).
I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered my email.
Whereas I had 3 accounts permanently suspended for calling someone an idiot on /r/idiotsincars for "harassing speech". I have other accounts, but they took out 1 old account and a squatted account. Like, really? For using the term "idiot" on a subreddit with that very word?
I have here, Masto, and a few other places that at least have mostly sane policies. All I know is that reddit is definitely on the decline. And this whole API debacle is going to be their own Digg V4 moment.
There is no sane middle ground on most of reddit. There are subs where you'll get reprimanded far quicker for "annoying mods" by bothering to report anything, and then there are the other subs that are so uptight and intense that your comments can only be fluff anything else gets slapped down for one of the vague rules it has. Good luck debating subreddit mods for their vague rules, you'll just annoy them and admins do not care in the slightest to resolve these petty things.
They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for everyone involved.
Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling absolutely dead.
Lol I had the sane thing happen, then when I asked the mods what happened in got reported to the admins for harrasment. There's no way tho discuss, just a brick wall. Wild been on that site an embarrassingly long time without issue
I mean for Reddit that is "abuse of the report button". It's a very tame comment compared to a lot of what's posted and considered acceptable. What did you expect or think should have been the outcome of reporting that?
I got permabanned for having an alt account with auto generated name...that contained 88 in it because "hate group symbolsim".
Literally a name reddit generated for me and I paid no mind to it.
Fun fact, reddit uses browser fingerprinting to ban all your accounts afterwards.
Also fun fact, there is a way to get innocent users banned as a result too.
You can't report to the moderators, they're just anonymous users that for some reason wants to work for free for Reddit. Often times they have their own agendas, I've used third party sites to show deleted comments that makes it clear some mods support calls for violence against certain groups, depending on which subreddit it is.
I've reported threats of violence similar to what you describes over at https://www.reddit.com/report and they removed it after a day or two, even comments that were highly upvoted.
I got banned from a sports related subreddit for spreading misinformation by saying, "Helmets do not and cannot prevent concussions." The mod's justification was, "That is the entire point of helmets."
Perhaps the mod has taken too many to the ol'noggin.
None of those social media are rudderless, just that, money’s circulating in hyperspace and the lower dimension slice of those just has to be mostly consistent on time axis. We are looking at a cross section at ballast deck of a ship.
It's not "their" data in the same way that last mile network access isn't "their" (telco's) pipes.
If value in a platform comes from third parties choosing to use the service, and those third parties are free to use alternatives, then platforms should be very careful about how greedy they get in exploiting their users.
Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use.
> Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use.
OpenAI should start a clone, make it nice, and train their LLMs off of it. If discussion boards have immense future value from hosting humans interacting, clearly the cost of hosting them is worth it.
Seems to me this is more them trying to push ads on people; apps like Apollo do not serve ads (or, as a long time user of Apollo, I've never seen them). I think this has been a long time in the works, before all of the LLM buzz.
But I wonder if they really fulfil this goal. How do they solve the unsolved problem of allowing scraping / SEO (Google, Bing etc.) but not teaching their LLMs?
It's obvious or an open secret that Alphabet/Google and Microsoft will use their web copy for teaching their AI.
If that's the real issue, then offer two licenses. One that allows you to use the data to train an AI. Another that doesn't and says that if you do they will permaban your API access and sue your pants off.
Third-party client apps can keep doing what they do, knowing that attempting to use the data to train an AI would destroy their business forever. Companies that want to train an AI can use the other license and pay big stacks of money.
You cannot just "change the APIs" to inject ads—ads require a lot of external verifiable measurement and have specific requirements over display and placement that third-party apps can't provide. Injecting ads into existing third-party apps would mean putting specific requirements for measurement SDKs (binary third-party code from trusted adstech vendors) and developing a lot of new APIs for reporting that that third-party developers would have to implement
> If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.
Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them.
If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features.
Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party clients, but to appease advertisers Reddit has to make guarantees around visibility. It's not enough to check if third parties are calling the correct API, they will actually need to regularly audit all third party clients.
It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.
Yes. I don't see how this is a problem. It is their service which is subject to change at anytime. Either make money and pay for access to the API or shutdown.
Realistically, it was only a matter of time. Also predicted here: [0]
> Either make money and pay for access to the API or shutdown.
I agree. And I think people should also keep in mind that OSes also have APIs as well, and should be wary of systems that try to prevent user freedom.
Then again, I've been running Linux for ages now. And I don't have to worry about anti-user garbageware on a forced update coming my way, or updates that de-feature my system.
I feel like there's a major difference here. Services you mentioned never really had any third party clients, while Reddit has pretty much built itself upon them.
Why not let users bring their own keys? I wouldn't mind paying $2-3 to use Apollo. Apollo has to also pay 30% of their revenue to Apple so their subscription fee will be way higher and not feasible for most users.
This also seems like the most reasonable solution to me, the guy who is generally supportive of Reddit trying to make money.
But having worked on platforms like this, this solution opens up yet another support vector. A cost that works for the most potential buyers may not be high enough to actually pay for support requests.
That's a good point. Apollo does charge a one-time fee to create posts. They also have a subreddit so the community offers support. I think Apollo should pivot into a feed app that connects to Reddit, Twitter, RSS feeds, Substack, etc. and lets users bring their own keys.
There's an obvious solution here, which is to stop participating on platforms that are ad-funded. Charging user subscriptions and fees to businesses should be sufficient to cover costs. If it's not, maybe it shouldn't exist.
An obvious way to fund ad-free platforms is as a public good / utility.
Nowadays with the brain damage that has been inflicted by adtech social media over decades it is hard to imaging mass adoption of such a publicly funded outlet. People have become literally social media junkies. Unless you do a tiktok like race to the bottom you can't disrupt the incumbents.
But establishing the principle is important even if its a small audience. 2% of billions is still a large population. Just like public TV being typically of higher quality (where it exists) such platforms could be really interesting, worthwhile places.
If the experiment succeeds one can start thinking of introducing user fees and other funding mechanisms and eventually maybe restoring sanity and delegating the targeted adtech industry in the darkest corner of hell where it belongs.
I feel like this is Conway's Law at play. People would create high quality paid apps if the users that want to pay for them could find them, but if somebody makes something that's perfect for you, how do you discover that it even exists? The organizational structure of the web is the problem.
Google and social media platforms have shaped the web to be entirely advertisement driven. If they were capable of showing you things you wanted to buy, without the creators paying to be seen, they'd never make any money.
Almost anything you ever want to do, someone else has already done well, but despite that, it's hard to find snippets of code you can include in your projects. It's easier to just write it all yourself. If the usefulness of ChatGPT is an indicator of anything, it should be an indicator of how much is out there that you never get to see. The sad part is realizing that that's intentional.
you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views
Except that's not what Reddit is doing here. They're charging 3rd party clients ~21X what they lose in ad views, pricing them completely out of the market.
A big claim like this requires a source and not handwavy estimates from the person who is impacted by this change (and upset for good reason!).
Otherwise I will ignore this claim because we simply don't know what ad revenue per user is, and we don't know what Reddit's projected future revenue per user is, which I would also expect to be covered by this pricing.
This is a story practically as old as the internet at this point. Grow with open API and third party client ecosystem, but ultimately shut the hatches and revert to single in-house client stacks to maximize control of the user experience and advertising opportunities. Mainly the 2nd part.
To look to the Twitter example, even when I used a third party Twitter client before Elon came onboard, old Twitter were regularly playing silly games with issuing auth tokens to third party clients, for all of the same reasons.
At this stage I view third party clients as nice to have for major free web service APIs, with the expectation one day it will probably stop working. Reddit doesn't owe anyone a public API, as much as I will miss third party clients (big Narwhal user here).
Maybe, but I'd still take the other side of this bet sadly. Is there any data on usage rates for third party Reddit clients? Anecdotally, I don't know anyone outside of tech who would even notice this change, really.
Debatable - supporting a small number of users on the public API may be a legitimate technical debt issue, and a running cost as the API can't change without a lot of documentation, release planning to support all those third party stakeholders etc. Your future internal work has to remain compatible with legacy design choices if you don't want to shutdown/change the existing public end points - the list of issues has potential to be pretty big. Public APIs by their nature can't introduce major change too often without upsetting existing communities.
If the API is solely for your own consumption, this can be simpler, and of course third party clients are harder to monetize as the kinds of ads you can serve are going to be restricted to what you can force a third party client to receive and render.
If the number of users on third party clients is really low, all of the above can carry more weight in internal business case style discussions too.
Seems to me just better to entirely stop supporting the public api than to make the costs so ridiculously high. I mean then you're _still_ supporting it, yet you've basically scared almost all customers away. Charging a ridiculously high amount seems maybe like the worst approach of all.
I think you've probably described exactly whats happening - they do want to stop supporting the public API, but only for third party clients. There are other API access use cases they want to support. If the pricing kills third party clients but not the new use cases, that seems like a design choice to me.
They would instead rather charge far more money for data access for things like AI training etc, Twitter have also made similar changes to their own API to prioritize high bills for AI training use cases, not third party clients. That's at least how I see this change. The high pricing for these customers also removes the need to worry about the ad tech situation as is the case in the third party clients - you can just offer them an ad free feed at these prices for the training requirements.
I suspect the internal at Reddit desire to have less third party clients may well predate the AI discussion too, given almost all companies in this position eventually want to wind down those clients as history has shown again and again, for all of the reasons discussed in this thread.
Reddit was the only thing that resembles social media I ever used. Was a long time RiF user, as I absolutely hated the default interface. Even moderated a couple of subreddits back in the day (although I sort of dropped Reddit in the past couple of years, so I may be out of the loop).
My fellow mods and all prominent users I interacted with (the vast majority of them not from tech as it was not a tech focused community) were all well aware of 3rd party clients, and many used them.
This is very anecdotal, but amongst Reddit more "intense" user base, I would be surprised if 3rd party client usage was low.
On Google Play I see 100M+ downloads of the official Reddit app. 5M+ downloads of Reddit is Fun, 1M+ each for Boost, Bacon, Sync, and Relay. Many more in the 100K+ range. Thats maybe 10% at most.
I wonder how many power users, heavy users, or content generating users use unofficial apps. The passive lurkers are great for ad revenue, but the people who comment make the site worth browsing.
> It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.
I really want to be the fly in the room looking at their grafana for monthly active users and see what happens to it in the coming months.
I’m someone with ADHD and obsessive behavior is kinda one of the main symptoms of it. I think with this change, it’s not going to be hard for someone like me to drop it.
I suspect that because of these changes, Reddit is also going to make it harder for search engines to index them - which is going to further reduce how useful Reddit is for information discovery.
This is going to hurt reddit, and I personally don’t think the growth is going to be as strong as it has been once they take these actions. Social media sites depend on their users, and arguably only a small portion of their users create content. And a smaller portion that than create useful content. Once you’ve pissed off and pushed away that small %, you’re not recovering.
I’m guessing this is some decisions made by MBAs who have learned some theoretical stuff, but don’t realize their courses haven’t really covered businesses like Reddit, Twitter, StackOverflow etc. They’re in for a rude awakening.
Remember that Tumblr effectively died once they made some decisions.
Think like someone who wants to run a business to make money and has no interest in the site as a community for a moment. Why would you ever elect to have no control over the site's presentation?
Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Which is honestly kind of stunning. Reddit is presumably much less than that, but they might be reasonably gunning for a number better than Pinterest, with an ARPU of ~$1.50[1].
To put the pricing post into the same context, we're talking $7.50 per Apollo user/quarter, which is closer to what Facebook makes per user than Pinterest.
That said, presumably 3rd party client users are especially active and would skew higher ARPU than the average Redditor, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were more likely to live in developed countries.
I dunno. I started running the numbers expecting to be outraged, but the cost doesn't seem crazy far from what Reddit could conceivably hope to earn off these users. I doubt Reddit is monetizing anywhere near that well right now, but if they're pricing the API in a forward-looking way, rather than planning to ratchet it up every quarter inline with monetization efforts, it could make sense.
> Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US.
Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?
My first though was that maybe 1% of users buy something in a given year, but that's $24k to acquire a customer and is so far from reality that my perspective must be way off.
Our CAC is higher than $240. Lots of services are. When you start thinking about a customer being worth multiples of their revenue (not even profit) it makes a lot of sense.
Also, online advertising can lead to in store sales. When you look at those dollars people spend a couple orders of magnitude more than $240 on stuff every year.
>> Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US.
> Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?
1. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of businesses lose money on their Facebook ads, but either don't realize it or Facebook has enough churn that it doesn't matter if the quit (e.g. a revolving door of unsophisticated local businesses spending money on Facebook because it's the biggest game in town).
2. A lot of advertising is broad "brand awareness," and I imagine it's actually very hard to determine if it's actually working in many cases.
Meta's reach is gigantic, their data is detailed and expansive. You're actually paying less on average when spending on Meta platforms than you are elsewhere, and likely getting more back. This is why companies are comfortable with throwing an ad campaign on Meta platforms just to get email signups, there was a blog on Shopify where a smaller company talked about spending $5000 for a newsletter ad, and per new subscriber they only spent $1.50 on the ad campaign. Even though technically they've really lost money on such a situation, they feel comfortable doing it again on calculations for future revenue.
Not quite $240, but Netflix apparently spends about $100 for customer acquisition [1] (data is a few years old). I imagine the other streaming sites have similar unit economics.
In consumer finance, CACs are even higher. For standard credit cards it’s around $200 but can be over $1000 for premium cards.
I would doubt it. There aren't going to be many companies publicly discussing their CACs, and if it did exist what would someone do with the information?
A another way to estimate how many conversions is looking at the average price, at average conversion rates. Right now average cost for 1000 impressions is about $10 based on revealbot, for the US. If the conversion rate was 0.1%, $240 a year revenue per user means 24 conversions per year, that the average US facebook user is buying two products per month. 0.1% is on the low end
The most successful marketing campaign of all time is the marketing team convincing everyone that marketing works.
Of course the money is all being spaffed for nothing. It doesn’t take a degree in applied ecosystem analysis from Aberyswyth Technical College to figure out that Coke spending 50m on a christmas campaign doesn’t sell anymore Coke.
My thoughts exactly. People ask for paid options in lieu of ads and tracking, but when sites like YouTube and Reddit offer paid plans at reasonable prices ($3-$10/mo) there is an equal amount of outrage. You will never be able to please users who simply want to pay nothing.
Reddit doesn't supply a valuable service. They basically just ran and squatted on the concept of "internet forum" and used VC/network effects to bully almost all the normal forums into (temporary) nonexistence.
Anyone reading this can make their own Reddit-esque forum on a VPS and serve a few thousand people for a few bucks a month. And if Reddit ever kicks out all the polished app users/old.reddit users, you'll see that start happening a hell of a lot more
Which is funny because Internet forums used to be a software package you acquire and run on your own servers. No one really asked for a centralized system where you didn't have any control. It seems pretty straight-forward to go back to that original idea.
I think youre right. People are always trying to imagine the next reddit and its not going to be some clone like voat or whatever. Hackernews is actually a lot like reddit used to be but its not going to scale to reddits size without subreddits, or the like.
I dont know if anything will overtake Reddit for a very long time because of network effects. But discord is probably the best guess. Although I actually think people do want centralization. They want 1 login to 1 website that has everything.
Yes, true. I'm not a defender or proponent of discord by any measure, but I do see them as the most serious competitor for the same kind of communities that hang out on the more focused subreddits.
They don't really offer a service, though. They just built a toll gate and tricked people into needing to cross through it. An ever-increasingly annoying, crappy toll gate at that.
Presumably that's why they haven't booted old.* users yet. They realize that a really substantial amount of their network effects and their moat stem from quality posts by people using computers.
Reddit is about to fuck around and find out, and unfortunately I think they're going to find out that people will just dump everything into even more annoyingly gated-off Discord communities
I had the same thoughts, that Reddit's reasons must stem from opportunity cost.
The Apollo developer does however address this in his post and he claims that Reddit's ARPU is only $0.36/quarter. Reddit has likely been doubling down their efforts on Ad Targeting, etc and perhaps forecasts much higher.
Christian's reddit post only addresses ads though, but Reddit has been trying to diversify and create multiple products and revenue streams. They have gold for purchase and if I recall they were trying to launch some Clubhouse-esque product. Point is, it's hard to push any of these things if so many users are on 3rd party clients that don't support such features.
Cool, that assumes those users will continue to use Reddit after the third party apps have been killed.
For me, I don’t think that will be the case. I almost exclusively use Reddit on mobile though Apollo and Reddit’s own app is absolutely garbage (unpleasant to use and heating up my phone burning through the battery).
I used to pay for Reddit premium, but I stopped after realising that Reddit wasn’t providing me a better experience for it.
Reddit wants to make money on the backs of their unpaid mods. I really don’t like them, but: Reddit has a ton of infrastructure costs they need to cover due to the centralization of these communities.
I do not like telegram or discord communities due to history issues. Same with Facebook. Reddit posts popping up on Google searches is really great.
I really wish we could go back to forums. The thing Reddit gave us was a central place to find communities as well as a unified login and feed. I feel like an aggregator of forums could help with finding communities. Forums that support oauth and rss would help bridge the gap of unified login and a central feed. The nice thing about forums is that their infra costs only need to scale with their community.
> Finally, to ensure that all regulatory requirements are met in the handling of mature content, we will be limiting access to sexually explicit content for third-party apps starting on July 5, 2023, except for moderation needs.
Reddit really buried "no nsfw outside official reddit apps" (from the end of your first link). Didn't Tumblr do something similar and lose a significant fraction of its userbase and revenues?
I can only assume Reddit wants to kill NSFW altogether. They require you to authenticate now if you want to see any of it (though of course they promise that somehow this will still be "anonymous"). Once they turn off old.reddit.com, I think that'll be the end of NSFW content on Reddit altogether.
I assume they hope to attract more advertising money this way.
They subject all of their dark patterns to multivariate testing. I suspect this is to elicit feedback like yours, and suppress the ability to respond to it, as they have never in years promoted any of it to general availability.
I’ve been in tests where the entire site is gated, demanding I download the app. I’ve been in tests where SFW content is marked as NSFW, demanding I log in. Etc.
They don’t view you as a user... most companies who are ad supported fundamentally view everything as an impression/page load which is simply a container for ad placements. Click through, conversion rates and revenue per thousand impressions are the only metrics that matter to the health of the business.
Everything else is secondary and most product managers don't view a/b tests as anything other than experiments on ways to increase those stats.
Is that only for not-logged-in users? I don't see how limiting access to the official app does anything special from a regulatory standpoint. If an account is approved/authorized for nsfw content who cares which app the account is using?
> As of July 1, 2023, we will enforce two different rate limits for the free access tier:
> If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id
> If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute
So... doesn't this mean that each logged in Apollo/3rd party client user can make 100 requests per minute for free?
The Apollo developer says his average user makes less than 400 requests per day and it's somehow going to average $2.50 per user per month. I must be missing something.
Technically that could be done. Each user could create a client ID and then input that in the app and then the app could use it to make requests. But I doubt Reddit will be happy about that and will quickly send a cease and desist to the developer and ban those users.
No. That's the limit of how many queries can be made per minute on the free tier, but it doesn't state what the free tier entails or what it can be used for. My guess, based on Christian's post, is that third-party clients would not be eligible for the free tier and that the free tier is for uses like bots.
They would be eligible but they can't be useful if their allocation is just 100 requests per minute. That would be like 10 concurrent users tops. Probably even less.
Someone at Reddit has since restored the linked post[0]. I think the content is unchanged, but it may have been subtly edited while it was "[removed]".
I'm more surprised that reddit has maintained features like old.reddit.com and their API for this long. To me, this is textbook enshittification. Either die unprofitable or live long enough to see yourself rip features from TikTok.
Let me take a moment to express gratitude that I have no idea what “DID,” “tradcath,” and “groyper” mean. Seems like I’ve made the right choice to eschew Twitter and Reddit.
Have you used Reddit or Twitter recently? They're basically open air insane asylums.
You should spend 0% of your life talking about being a "Based Alpha Male." You absolutely should not use the same website as a "Based Alpha Male" influencer.
I can come up with left wing equivalents if you're more into that?
What I can say is that there are some extremists on both Twitter and Reddit on both sides and as also found in other communities. Unfortunately, the commenters you are replying to choose to pretend that it is not the case with ridiculous anecdotes such as 'on my feed', 'not for me though' to dodge and as another question without answering yours.
As soon as one uses an anecdote, it is safe to immediately dismiss their comment.
I don't see any of that crap you are talking about on my feed. I am subscribed to tech, news, soccer, some linux subreddits, a few game subreddits like Dyson Sphere Program, Diablo and finally programmer memes. I browse "home", ignore "all" or "popular". It's a really nice tool that is being destroyed by incompetence.
That's a smart strategy. If you allow your feed to have things from whitepeopletwitter, blackpeopletwitter, politics, news, damnthatsinteresting (and other similar things), then you get a really awful experience. Every bit as bad as some people claim.
But if you filter all those out and go for smaller, targeted subreddits in your interest area, you might as well be on an entirely different site, it isn't the same at all.
Having spent too much time on Reddit recently, I'm not entirely sure. The comment is hyperbolic, to be sure, but on the other hand the most popular subreddits have gone largely insane. Quite noticeably in the last year. Every subreddit now has a political ideological stance, and some quite overtly threaten your access if you don't toe the line.
I don't think this is a Reddit problem. All social media platforms have increasingly large groups of crazy people. However, I highly suspect that those groups are just a very vocal minority and not hundreds of millions of people as the OP said.
If I recall the statistics, and assume them to be accurate, something like 1 out of 100 people make almost all the posts you see on a site like Reddit. Which means if anyone who looks at Reddit thinks the thoughts & opinions they are reading are representative of the population at large, they are very mistaken.
I think after a while a lot of the quieter people get so turned off by the whole experience they just step away altogether. I strongly suspect that a subreddit claiming to have a million subscribers probably has at least two orders of magnitude fewer in reality. And that may still be an overestimate.
Whether or not "toe the line on the subreddit's political stance or be banned" is insane depends heavily on what the political stance is. Saying you can't post your Nazi grandpa in SS gear in r/oldschoolcool is a "political stance" but it makes total sense to force users to toe that line.
The cause are the people not the platforms. The same people will move over to "digg version 3" once reddit finishes shooting itself in the foot and you'll add a new name to your list of "problematic" platforms. It's the minds that need changing, not the CSS or the domain name of a website that is effectively lists of URLs and comments.
The data is all fully public and easily scraped from APIs (both reddit and twitter). Who is the audience for these paid plans? Is this for oauth enabled access on behalf of users?
In Reddit's case data scraping is soon to be against the Terms of Service (which is already the case for Twitter), which will earn you a Cease and Desist if you try to make a business off the data.
So the AI companies secretly scraping the data and without producing a direct attribution or affiliation are precisely the ones unaffected by this, meanwhile devs trying to make
complementary tooling (and thus fully public who they are and thus targets of C&D’s) are negatively impacted.
I like reddit, I really do. So it's sad to see them taking a page out of the twitter playbook and are taking active measures to destroy their thriving ecosystem.
The official reddit app is an absolute nightmare and essentially unusable. Their "new" website also completely sucks and is even worse on mobile than it is on desktop. If this actually gets implemented as is, I'll definitely have a very productive rest of my year. I have no data to back this up, but I feel like with reddit, even more users only rely on third party clients than it was on twitter.
What's the granularity of a Reddit API call? Is e.g. loading a submission with all the comments, or loading the top 20 submissions to a subreddit a single request? Or do you actually end up doing tens of requests for what's effectively a single page load (one for the submission and a few comments, one for the each image, one for each additional batch of comments)?
$0.24 for 1000 full page loads wouldn't actually sound insane (if you compare to typical CPMs of sites with ads), but it seems hard to believe that the average user is doing that 350 times / day.
Eh this is actually concerning. I already feel like I barely interact with Ruby or JavaScript posts anymore compared to how much I did 10 years ago. I would easily say that 90% or more of my engagement on HN in the past year has been more political and or lifestyle type posts. The more the site grows, the more fractured the tech stack becomes (driving tech posts to be irrelevant to large swaths of the userbase) and the more upvotes the lifestyle/politics posts will get in comparison to those tech posts as a result of them being relevant to most people.
Keep in mind that Reddit has said they're going to stop serving NSFW content via API too. So if you enjoy that stuff you won't get it in Apollo even if you pay them.
Reddit seems to want NSFW content gone altogether. At this point you can only see it anonymously if you go to old.reddit.com, if you go to the regular UI it requires you to authenticate before you can see any kind of questionable content.
I agree, but I find it funny that it seems to be backfiring. I've noticed a pretty large increase in the number of posts that are people getting maimed or killed on subs that show up on the front page. Subs like publicfeakout that used to be stuff like people yelling at each other in mall now regularly have gore voted to the top.
It looks like it's currently blocked on "new Reddit" only for mobile user agents. If I try opening https://www.reddit.com/r/boobs/ in a desktop browser (or with a desktop agent on mobile) I get an option to just click on an "I'm over 18" button to see the content.
Browse a little farther. Last time I found myself in that position, I could say I was over 18 and it let me go. For another click or too, then it interrupted again and insisted I sign in.
Maybe they are A/B testing further restrictions. Just now I tried scrolling continuously through r/boobs on desktop Firefox in a private window. I was able to load hundreds of posts after clicking the "I'm over 18" button. I also clicked on a dozen posts to open them in a separate tab. I never saw additional interruptions.
I've never worked on a web platform like Reddit, nor with any per-request priced APIs. Reddit's charge of $0.00024 per request still looks like it is _significantly_ above what their own costs are.
Wasn't Reddit's pay-for-API-access announcement originally phrased as a desire to claw back some of the value that LLMs have found in Reddit data? I don't understand how per-request API pricing actually accomplishes that. (I was vaguely anticipating Reddit's API pricing to have some sort of expensive "firehose" endpoint for OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc to pull from.)
It looks like they're instead going to squeeze out all third-party apps instead. I don't think this bodes well for Reddit's future.
Their pricing likely includes the cost of potential ad revenue that an API call is displacing. There's no easy way to integrate ads into an API, so they just offload the advertising/monetization problem to whoever buys the content.
The tricky bit with ads is that someone is paying for a user to see it, so if the user never scrolls to it, or perhaps scrolls past too fast, you probably need to know so you don't bill for it. If the user taps on it you definitely need to know that, regardless of whether the ad link is working, but you can't redirect and slow down the ad link.
You need highly accurate data about user behaviour around the ads, and highly optimised display and linking.
I've built a similar system, albeit not for ads, for recommendations, based on viewing items in a feed. With a simple model, across web and app, all developed in-house, it was still hard and required a lot of care to get good ML signals and signals that people really understood.
Doing this across third party clients may be prohibitively difficult. I'd like to see attempts, but so far I've not seen any.
> Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month.
I just don't understand why developers underprice their apps so much. You're talking about an app that people are constantly raving about, and that people use for multiple hours per day. Charge $5/month, that's half the price of Netflix or Disney+.
The reddit ones won't be though, unless they scrape instead of use the api. I doubt that's viable for a consumer app though, Reddit will probably break your app constantly.
I suspect that a fraction of users would convert and many others would trash the developer/app for the switch to subscription. Users of free apps like this have a seriously warped view of software costs.
It seems like Reddit is pushing these changes because that's exactly what they want to happen. They want all users to be using the free first-party Reddit app.
LMAO can you imagine paying monthly to use Reddit? That'd be like paying monthly to browse this site or 4chan. I think I'd reevaluate my life if I considered paying monthly to access that cesspool.
Reddit is already nearly entirely astroturfed advertisements, and you pay for the site by reading the shill posts that fill its pages. The fact that anyone pays Apollo or Reddit for a subscription is already just sad. Like paying for cable.
I agree. The OP makes the case that it will cost him on average $2.50 per month per user - so... charge $3 per month - no blog post needed.
Same with Twitter. So many businesses were built upon basically free API access and are now shocked the company responsible for their app's customer appeal wants some of that action.
It's not Reddit's responsibility to float OP's business and make it profitable. OP's billions of monthly requests have a real cost for Reddit - and now that Reddit's API is so coveted, they can charge whatever they want for it's access.
Seeing how all the numbers are private, I don't know how anyone can reasonably estimate it's value. Seeing how unaffected Twitter has been in public discourse, and media, it seems these estimates are grossly underinflated.
Lastly - Twitter's market price has nothing to do with it's profitability. That seems obvious, but apparently needs to be said here.
> You forget how unprofitable Twitter has been over the past decade.
I haven't forgotten anything.
> It's crazy this stuff needs to be said on HN folks.
This shouldn't need to be said, but "Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The argument you are putting forth boils down to folks like Apollo should receive free API access because they increase the usefulness of Reddit for end-users.
That would be a fair argument, except for the fact that nothing is really free and Apollo currently makes millions in profit at Reddit's expense.
That is not sustainable... any business should have realized this right from the beginning. Apollo's own business model requires income to continue to run... so Reddit's doesn't?
This is just a silly discussion to be having. Of course Apollo and businesses like Apollo were going to be required to pay for API access at some point. The business owner complaining "it's not fair", or that it's not priced like API's that nobody cares about is just staggering.
While I very much agree with what you're saying in this thread: Reddit is not a public service, it's a business, and the owners want to make money off it.
I wouldn't call that Apollo app's author a fool. My understanding is they were turning a profit from the app up to now. So, apparently, it was a nice business. It's just that their business model is about to stop working.
Well, that happens to other business too sometimes. They'll have to adapt somehow or come up with another business. Life as usual.
Honestly, reddit is the only one irritated me enough that I get a third party app. The ass behavior of popping sub I didn't subscribe and pretend it is a notification of reply to me just drives me insane.
They are just truly shitty at make a working app. It's really not a business or what, just the official one truly don't work.
Popup ad to notification is already bad, pretend it to be user message? How the fxxk do they think it is going to encourage the engagement?
That's fine. If you can't or don't want to pay, you can look at Reddit's ads. I do not use Reddit very much, so it's not worth $5/month to me. But why would I expect to get a third-party ad-free client for free?
I would wager the majority of HN users can point to several dumb >=$5 expenses in any given month. If you don’t value Apollo enough to pay for it, fine. Just don’t pretend that $60 a year is a morally outrageous amount for software.
Who cares? It doesn't matter one bit. OP built a profitable business off free API access. That is the mistake here... assuming it would always be free.
> Complaining you don't get free stuff anymore is really unbecoming of an entrepreneur.
He wasn't complaining about that. He was led to believe that the price would be reasonable, and he was willing to pay a reasonable price, as he already pays Imgur.
How does the Apollo maintainer get to decide what's a reasonable price? It certainly can't be through hand-wavy and supposedly "generous" estimations of how much money Reddit makes.
Only Reddit knows how much money it loses per user who doesn't see ads.
> This is why the developer himself can't just raise his own prices by any arbitrary amount. Buyers have some say in the price.
Indeed, but this is the risk in selling a middleware product. The Apollo developer doesn't own the platform, and was lucky he hadn't yet been asked to pay for the share of maintenance costs his app created.
It wasn't a bad bet, the API was free for well over a decade. I'm sure he made a ton of money as the sole developer of the most popular reddit app (next to the official one) on Iphone. I bet he has zero regrets.
I'm guessing that you work in the tech industry in the US and makes $100k+ per year?
$5 is not an insignificant amount to a lot of people all over the world, including Europe and maybe the US. Especially when every single app and service wants you to subscribe to them now, I've heard plenty of people saying they're going to cancel their Netflix subscription when password sharing stops working.
344 requests per day is not worth $5 per month for the average user.
My comment was mostly about the comment about developers underpricing their apps. If all apps would charge a minimum of $5 there would be a lot fewer app users.
According to Apollo's developer 80% of the users make less than 500 requests per day, so I'm guessing the proportion of power users making a lot of requests are in the single digits. I doubt enough of them want's to pay enough to subsidize the others.
There's also the point that using Reddit is a two way street. Reddit is made up of user created (or user stolen) content, and moderators are working for free. Reddit's whole value is made up of user interactions, allowing users to make those interactions is not just a cost.
Why should the app developer pay anything at all? The users are also Reddit's users, they authenticate and can use Reddit's resources in a number of ways, why not charge them directly? Will Reddit be sending a bill to Mozilla for my page loads?
If the user is already paying reddit directly, it's even less likely they are using a third party client. All the benefits are in the first party app.
And then Reddit would have to audit third party apps to ensure paying users are getting what they pay for. Sounds more onerous than just making third parties pay up.
I can log in with my Spotify premium account to a number of third party clients without expecting them to contain the same thing as the official one, no auditing by Spotify needed.
> My comment was mostly about the comment about developers underpricing their apps. If all apps would charge a minimum of $5 there would be a lot fewer app users.
Not all apps are worth $5/month, but this particular one that people apparently love enough to spend hours per day on certainly seems like it should be. A slightly nicer calculator app that you use twice a month? $0.99 is fine. A professional productivity app that saves a high-value worker hours of time? Way more than $5/month.
It's ok if not everyone can afford an app.
> Why should the app developer pay anything at all?
The app developer is just a proxy for the users, who are using Reddit without seeing any of Reddit's ads.
It’s a Reddit client. It’s marginally better than the official one but there is absolutely no way that it’s 5$ a month better to most user. I did purchase it and thought it was too expensive for what it is (it’s noticeably worse than most free Android client for exemple) and always refused to pay the subscription because, well, it’s a bloody Reddit client.
That’s fine, it’s not worth it to me either. But if it’s not worth $5 to anyone, then why is anyone even talking about it? If it’s not $5 of value, why would anyone care if it disappeared?
You can’t arbitrarily decide that being ready to pay $5 a month is magically an appropriate filter under which people are not allowed to care. This argument has no substance.
> There’s no reason for $5/month to be what the average user pays. It’s for power users who spend way more time on the app.
According to the Apollo dev, the average user would cost $2.50/month in API fees. I imagine power users would be substantially more costly, so $5/month would not cover the API + apple tax for just themselves, let alone supporting the regular users.
I doubt that people would be paying for Disney+ or Netflix if there was an free alternative that had slightly worse UX, that was officially sanctioned and available at the top of the app store if you searched for them. The appeal of those two is access to the content - Reddit has an official website and app where the content can be accessed for free.
There are a large portion of moderators who will quit if they cannot use RedditIsFun because the official app is complete crap for moderators.
I really don't know why it has to be API use based anyway. We all log in to our individual accounts through the API. For clients they should be able to determine requests/account or let users pay for their own usage or something. They're in full batshit MBA mode.
I don't disagree with either party here. $12k for 50 million requests is not egregious, but $2.50 per user for something that is probably cheap/free to users is a non starter.
Reddit has failed to adequately monetize their userbase, they've run into the same "politics and porn" issue that every social media platform has, and they've raised way, way too much money.
The worst part? I couldn't tell you the last legitimate ad that I saw on reddit. Facebook shows semi-relevant ads, sometimes location based. Reddit ads are visual flotsam.
I might have too much privacy stuff enabled but Facebook could not be further from what I am interested in.
I'm pretty sure FB thinks I'm a republican country hunter with a big beard who loves driving his huge truck to crossfit. Because of where I live possibly?
I'll never forget a couple years ago when facebook showed me an add for asian american christians. If facebook doesn't know I'm not asian or christian then what does it know about me?
This means the end of a lot of my reddit use. Sure, I'll use it on my computer in a browser, but no more on my phone. This is probably a good thing, but I have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of some communities. And I pay for Apollo premium and just reupped. The app is a complete joy to use. The app developer is first rate. For how complex the app is, it is both easy to use and surprisingly bug free. (I know there are bugs, from the release notes for new versions, but I've never seen one.)
Reddits mobile app, and website are one of the worst UX experiences I've encountered on a UGC site. Terribly bad. I they should be working with people who can make products people want to use to consume their content, not killing them off with absurd pricing.
Not to go all “I told you so” but I do recall Christian talking about how Reddit would never do anything like this and how much trust he had in their developer relations team now, oh, sometime earlier this year. Hope he took the suggestion to have a backup plan seriously…relying on the whims of a single company is a hard way to make your income. Doesn’t mean you can’t try it but it is fundamentally pretty risky.
Everything in life is risky. Show me the 100% reliable path to financial prosperity and happiness. You could get laid off tomorrow by your current employer. The stock market could crash, and any investments you made could amount to nothing.
Nope, you don’t understand. You make apps for macOS. I understand that there is risk there. I’m not one of those people who go around telling you it’s your fault when Apple pulls the plug on you, because you understand the risk you operate in and I think it’s fine for people to do this.
Now, if you paraded around telling people you trust Apple and that they would never hurt you in any way, and that you had conversations with their management and they want you to succeed, now we have a problem.
> Now, if you paraded around telling people you trust Apple and that they would never hurt you in any way
This feels like exaggeration. Unless there's something I missed?
"My thoughts: I think if done well and done reasonably, this could be a positive change (but that's a big if). If Reddit provides a means for third party apps to have a stable, consistent, and future-looking relationship with Reddit that certainly has its advantages, and does not sound unreasonable, provided the pricing is reasonable." https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
> you had conversations with their management and they want you to succeed, now we have a problem.
If this did happen, but later management double-crossed me, would you then rip on me?
Sent you a copy, it's a bit stronger than this (although from several months ago).
For your question, though: I don't think it's "your fault" that anything bad happens to you. It's obvious that the problem lies with the company you're working with–it's just that this kind of bad behavior is unlikely to change, so you unfortunately need to take it into account when dealing with them. If you had asked me earlier I probably would have said something like "be wary: the management of today might not be the management of tomorrow, or they may shift priorities, or they might just straight up being lying to you". If all goes well, that's awesome, but I still think it's important to consider these things.
By way of example, one of the apps I work on has effectively gotten approval from senior management–essentially, what it does is "legitimate" and "within the rules". What this means we have reduced our investments in thinking about scenarios where it gets removed from sale, but continue to maintain our ability to deploy elsewhere even if it is little-used right now.
And in the replies to the thread, the admin is now publicly back-and-forthing with Christian about the number of requests made by his app and how "other bots and apps" are more efficient.
Honestly a dumb conversation from the admin if you ask me. Let's say Christian is using 3x the requests for whatever reason. That just means he's on the hook for a $6 million bill at the end of the year if he optimizes things. There's not really a big difference here.
I feel like it's the same thing with people who have a youtube channel.
If you're in a situation where all of your income comes from a company, but you don't have an employer/employee contract with that company. It seems like such a precarious position to me.
$2.50 / month / user does not seem that insane when it's put into that sort of perspective, but certainly more than I think most of the current users of the app would be happy paying. Hopefully they can compromise somewhere around $5 / user / year which I think most users would happily pay for for a third party app.
APIs should not be revenue generators! I don't mind companies charging for an API, either to cover the costs of service or to encourage efficient behavior. But Twitter and now Reddit seem more like they are rent seeking with their APIs and it's just not going to work out well. Particularly galling since they're effectively charging to access all this content that users generated for free.
The other explanation is these charges are intended to kill third party uses of the API. I'm pretty sure that's what is mostly motivating Twitter (down to the weed joke price).
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] threadDiscord, Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse and TikTok have decided to ban third-party apps. Twitter and Reddit decided to charge for it.
In this case with the developer of the third party Reddit client, unless he is making enough to cover the API costs, then it make no sense to build on someone else's API with little to no revenue. That is the risk.
It is no different to TapBots (creators of TweetBot) doing the same mistake.
Twitter and Reddit both allowed a thriving third party ecosystem to develop before they made apps. (And in both cases they just bought the most popular apps.) Hell, the word tweet was invented by Twitterific, a third party twitter app.
While it certainly is completely up to the platform to allow whatever they want, it's shitty to make a change that big and alienate many of your original most dedicated users.
It would be a better question to ask "Why did Mark Zuckerberg buy successful VR game companies and shut their games down?" (if you were having fun you wouldn't visit Horizon Worlds) or "Why did Zuckerberg damage a successful brand by renaming it?"
It's not about money, it's about power. The primary currency of power is deference and if one powerful person demonstrates they can take an action and get deference that action is appealing to other powerful people who want to prove they can to do the same.
There is some good content on reddit still, if you look hard to find it, but one thing that makes it hard is that reddit blends ads into the content and I think also blends in non-sequitur content that further confuses the reader into looking at and clicking on the ads.
They just can't let reddit clients provide a good, never mind better, experience.
this looks more malicious than ignorance or inefficiency. they want to mimic twitter by building off of community then claiming "costs".
fuck reddit. No redditor wanted them to selfhost photos and videos, yet they replaced imgur with their own. Why?
Honestly, this was probably one of the more reasonable features they've added. Having to upload images on an external site added a lot of friction for users, and put Imgur in an awkward spot as well when problematic content was removed from Reddit, but not from Imgur.
Their video player still sucks, though. I'm not sure how they managed to make it so bad.
Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.
It comes off as extremely entitled to think that reddit should supply you with the data created by their platform to do what you want with it.
Reddit exists _despite_ Reddit's incompetent management and tech teams, not thanks to them.
And it IMO, is anti-competitive - they are intentionally killing all existing competitors, vs. improving their own offering.
If I have a backyard and let you host a couple concerts in it free of charge and then next year I decide "hmm, I think I should be paid for those concerts you're hosting in my backyard" is that anti-competitive?
Absolutely not.
By consuming its apis.....
So, if you already have a sophisticated ad tech and sales team, you'd be able to pull 50%+ profit margin without having to worry about running the infrastructure for content.
That being said, there's maybe only a handful of companies with a more competent ad tech/sales team than Reddit, and Reddit's is pretty damn bad. So while the numbers make sense, the strategy does not given the competencies available in the market they're trying to sell in.
they're passion hobby projects that'll disappear rather than turn into a job
If you're building your business to be completely reliant on another unsustainable, unprofitable business, don't be too surprised when they ask you to help row or get off the boat before it sinks.
For API restrictions, Reddit has been in a doomed if they do, doomed if they don't situation for a while now. I think there's about a thousand other better decisions they could've made before being forced to make this one about API usage, but I also don't see their numbers and their time simply might've already run out.
That's only one side of it though. According to the same post, Reddit's ad revenue is closer to $0.12/user/month. So, they are apparently willing to sell traffic to advertisers for a much much lower price than API users.
but those users don't see ads on 3rd party apps. they already know what all they can implement to improve user experience. they just wont, willingly
That's pretty much the definition of enshittification.
An app that uses reddit is not a competitor to reddit, it's a client of reddit. No definition of "anti-competitive" applies here.
Now, whether this constitutes “anti competitive” in the legal sense is probably not going to fly in court: it’s unlikely Reddit can be compelled to offer an API at any particular price. It’s their service, they can do what they want with it. Rather, it’s a lesson that third parties should not be developing clients for other company’s services, as it is building a foundation on quicksand.
Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.
Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all.
Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.
Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy, but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant?
Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.
Worse, they use browser fingerprinting AND IP.
It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser fingerprint info, search terms, information from their partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit, what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes and so on.
Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots, people harassing you, completely unrelated comments, report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much data.
On the one hand, this is fine: Reddit is supposed to be a collection of independently moderated sub-communities with their own rules and administration. On the other hand, you have a unified identity and content history across those communities, so it's a lot easier for one community to take action based on your history in another, which is a strange dynamic.
I actually think Facebook Groups are onto something with the way post history and profiles work: each Facebook Group a user posts in creates a separate sub-profile for that user which is specific to the Group. Users in that Group can see a user's post history in that Group, and that user's "main" profile depending on their privacy settings, but a user can't walk "across" to see a user's post history in other Groups unless they search from that other Group.
I feel like per-subreddit post histories along with a global user profile would help move Reddit more towards the "sub-community" vision if that's the direction they want to go.
The issues Reddit have are:
* Cross-stalking, as discussed above.
* Content discovery. This is the same problem every user-generated content platform has. What sub-communities get surfaced on the logged-out front page? Cross-pollinated to existing users? Every type of content will be objectionable to someone, so deciding what to show is always going to be a lightning-rod issue with advertiser dollars at stake.
* Global moderation. What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? What happens when that user is completely banned (do all of their old posts disappear?) Should large-scale content moderation like spam be handled at a platform or a community level?
explicit deepfakes
I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy, and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting a 3 day ban.
I'm out.
I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered my email.
I truly believe they just don't care.
I have here, Masto, and a few other places that at least have mostly sane policies. All I know is that reddit is definitely on the decline. And this whole API debacle is going to be their own Digg V4 moment.
They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for everyone involved.
Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling absolutely dead.
The lesson I learned is not to report anything because trying to be helpful is not worth the risk of blowback
Literally a name reddit generated for me and I paid no mind to it.
Fun fact, reddit uses browser fingerprinting to ban all your accounts afterwards. Also fun fact, there is a way to get innocent users banned as a result too.
I got banned for false reporting.
Clicking the link through to the reported comment showed ... a deleted comment from a deleted account.
Lesson learned!
I've reported threats of violence similar to what you describes over at https://www.reddit.com/report and they removed it after a day or two, even comments that were highly upvoted.
Perhaps the mod has taken too many to the ol'noggin.
If value in a platform comes from third parties choosing to use the service, and those third parties are free to use alternatives, then platforms should be very careful about how greedy they get in exploiting their users.
Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use.
OpenAI should start a clone, make it nice, and train their LLMs off of it. If discussion boards have immense future value from hosting humans interacting, clearly the cost of hosting them is worth it.
But it doesn’t matter what is, it matters what they think and they’ve got AI cash fomo.
Seems to me this is more them trying to push ads on people; apps like Apollo do not serve ads (or, as a long time user of Apollo, I've never seen them). I think this has been a long time in the works, before all of the LLM buzz.
Aren't they closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out? Literally all their data from 2005 to March 2023 is still available via torrent.
It's obvious or an open secret that Alphabet/Google and Microsoft will use their web copy for teaching their AI.
Third-party client apps can keep doing what they do, knowing that attempting to use the data to train an AI would destroy their business forever. Companies that want to train an AI can use the other license and pay big stacks of money.
Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them.
If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features.
Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party clients, but to appease advertisers Reddit has to make guarantees around visibility. It's not enough to check if third parties are calling the correct API, they will actually need to regularly audit all third party clients.
It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.
Same reason why Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. don't have alternative clients.
Nothing unusual.
Reddit is proceeding along the well-trodden path to monetization optimization.
Realistically, it was only a matter of time. Also predicted here: [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447084
I agree. And I think people should also keep in mind that OSes also have APIs as well, and should be wary of systems that try to prevent user freedom.
Then again, I've been running Linux for ages now. And I don't have to worry about anti-user garbageware on a forced update coming my way, or updates that de-feature my system.
The difference is really that Reddit was relatively late in a concerted effort to monetize.
But it winds up at the same place regardless.
Then the third party app can choose between adding their own ads, or charging a subscription.
But having worked on platforms like this, this solution opens up yet another support vector. A cost that works for the most potential buyers may not be high enough to actually pay for support requests.
Nowadays with the brain damage that has been inflicted by adtech social media over decades it is hard to imaging mass adoption of such a publicly funded outlet. People have become literally social media junkies. Unless you do a tiktok like race to the bottom you can't disrupt the incumbents.
But establishing the principle is important even if its a small audience. 2% of billions is still a large population. Just like public TV being typically of higher quality (where it exists) such platforms could be really interesting, worthwhile places.
If the experiment succeeds one can start thinking of introducing user fees and other funding mechanisms and eventually maybe restoring sanity and delegating the targeted adtech industry in the darkest corner of hell where it belongs.
Google and social media platforms have shaped the web to be entirely advertisement driven. If they were capable of showing you things you wanted to buy, without the creators paying to be seen, they'd never make any money.
Almost anything you ever want to do, someone else has already done well, but despite that, it's hard to find snippets of code you can include in your projects. It's easier to just write it all yourself. If the usefulness of ChatGPT is an indicator of anything, it should be an indicator of how much is out there that you never get to see. The sad part is realizing that that's intentional.
Except that's not what Reddit is doing here. They're charging 3rd party clients ~21X what they lose in ad views, pricing them completely out of the market.
Otherwise I will ignore this claim because we simply don't know what ad revenue per user is, and we don't know what Reddit's projected future revenue per user is, which I would also expect to be covered by this pricing.
To look to the Twitter example, even when I used a third party Twitter client before Elon came onboard, old Twitter were regularly playing silly games with issuing auth tokens to third party clients, for all of the same reasons.
At this stage I view third party clients as nice to have for major free web service APIs, with the expectation one day it will probably stop working. Reddit doesn't owe anyone a public API, as much as I will miss third party clients (big Narwhal user here).
And maybe they will soon learn that they are not owed an audience.
If the API is solely for your own consumption, this can be simpler, and of course third party clients are harder to monetize as the kinds of ads you can serve are going to be restricted to what you can force a third party client to receive and render.
If the number of users on third party clients is really low, all of the above can carry more weight in internal business case style discussions too.
They would instead rather charge far more money for data access for things like AI training etc, Twitter have also made similar changes to their own API to prioritize high bills for AI training use cases, not third party clients. That's at least how I see this change. The high pricing for these customers also removes the need to worry about the ad tech situation as is the case in the third party clients - you can just offer them an ad free feed at these prices for the training requirements.
I suspect the internal at Reddit desire to have less third party clients may well predate the AI discussion too, given almost all companies in this position eventually want to wind down those clients as history has shown again and again, for all of the reasons discussed in this thread.
My fellow mods and all prominent users I interacted with (the vast majority of them not from tech as it was not a tech focused community) were all well aware of 3rd party clients, and many used them.
This is very anecdotal, but amongst Reddit more "intense" user base, I would be surprised if 3rd party client usage was low.
I wonder how many power users, heavy users, or content generating users use unofficial apps. The passive lurkers are great for ad revenue, but the people who comment make the site worth browsing.
Credible citation needed
EDIT: Okay I see the 20x figure in the article
2. It's the OP's assertions and estimations as an outsider, it's not based on any insights.
And they do. Over time they have become less and less distinguishable from post of humans.
I wonder what's going to happen with Apollo.
And what about my script to randomize my posts after a while? Yea, it doesn't do a lot, but still...
I really want to be the fly in the room looking at their grafana for monthly active users and see what happens to it in the coming months.
I’m someone with ADHD and obsessive behavior is kinda one of the main symptoms of it. I think with this change, it’s not going to be hard for someone like me to drop it.
I suspect that because of these changes, Reddit is also going to make it harder for search engines to index them - which is going to further reduce how useful Reddit is for information discovery.
This is going to hurt reddit, and I personally don’t think the growth is going to be as strong as it has been once they take these actions. Social media sites depend on their users, and arguably only a small portion of their users create content. And a smaller portion that than create useful content. Once you’ve pissed off and pushed away that small %, you’re not recovering.
I’m guessing this is some decisions made by MBAs who have learned some theoretical stuff, but don’t realize their courses haven’t really covered businesses like Reddit, Twitter, StackOverflow etc. They’re in for a rude awakening.
Remember that Tumblr effectively died once they made some decisions.
What evidence do you have that a majority of these users are not already using the first party app?
I guess if they go through with it we’ll see what impact it has.
To put the pricing post into the same context, we're talking $7.50 per Apollo user/quarter, which is closer to what Facebook makes per user than Pinterest.
That said, presumably 3rd party client users are especially active and would skew higher ARPU than the average Redditor, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were more likely to live in developed countries.
I dunno. I started running the numbers expecting to be outraged, but the cost doesn't seem crazy far from what Reddit could conceivably hope to earn off these users. I doubt Reddit is monetizing anywhere near that well right now, but if they're pricing the API in a forward-looking way, rather than planning to ratchet it up every quarter inline with monetization efforts, it could make sense.
0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/995251/pinterest-quarter...
Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?
My first though was that maybe 1% of users buy something in a given year, but that's $24k to acquire a customer and is so far from reality that my perspective must be way off.
Also, online advertising can lead to in store sales. When you look at those dollars people spend a couple orders of magnitude more than $240 on stuff every year.
> Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?
1. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of businesses lose money on their Facebook ads, but either don't realize it or Facebook has enough churn that it doesn't matter if the quit (e.g. a revolving door of unsophisticated local businesses spending money on Facebook because it's the biggest game in town).
2. A lot of advertising is broad "brand awareness," and I imagine it's actually very hard to determine if it's actually working in many cases.
In consumer finance, CACs are even higher. For standard credit cards it’s around $200 but can be over $1000 for premium cards.
[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/01/23/netflixs-83-millio... [2]https://www.unifimoney.com/blog/changing-the-vicious-cycle-o...
Of course the money is all being spaffed for nothing. It doesn’t take a degree in applied ecosystem analysis from Aberyswyth Technical College to figure out that Coke spending 50m on a christmas campaign doesn’t sell anymore Coke.
Anyone reading this can make their own Reddit-esque forum on a VPS and serve a few thousand people for a few bucks a month. And if Reddit ever kicks out all the polished app users/old.reddit users, you'll see that start happening a hell of a lot more
I dont know if anything will overtake Reddit for a very long time because of network effects. But discord is probably the best guess. Although I actually think people do want centralization. They want 1 login to 1 website that has everything.
Presumably that's why they haven't booted old.* users yet. They realize that a really substantial amount of their network effects and their moat stem from quality posts by people using computers.
Reddit is about to fuck around and find out, and unfortunately I think they're going to find out that people will just dump everything into even more annoyingly gated-off Discord communities
If I could just pay for the service without Google's malicious intents, then I would have no problem paying for YouTube Premium.
Same goes for Reddit and all the other bad actors.
The Apollo developer does however address this in his post and he claims that Reddit's ARPU is only $0.36/quarter. Reddit has likely been doubling down their efforts on Ad Targeting, etc and perhaps forecasts much higher.
Christian's reddit post only addresses ads though, but Reddit has been trying to diversify and create multiple products and revenue streams. They have gold for purchase and if I recall they were trying to launch some Clubhouse-esque product. Point is, it's hard to push any of these things if so many users are on 3rd party clients that don't support such features.
For me, I don’t think that will be the case. I almost exclusively use Reddit on mobile though Apollo and Reddit’s own app is absolutely garbage (unpleasant to use and heating up my phone burning through the battery).
I used to pay for Reddit premium, but I stopped after realising that Reddit wasn’t providing me a better experience for it.
I do not like telegram or discord communities due to history issues. Same with Facebook. Reddit posts popping up on Google searches is really great.
I really wish we could go back to forums. The thing Reddit gave us was a central place to find communities as well as a unified login and feed. I feel like an aggregator of forums could help with finding communities. Forums that support oauth and rss would help bridge the gap of unified login and a central feed. The nice thing about forums is that their infra costs only need to scale with their community.
They may suspect they're larger than Digg ever was, and can simply weather that storm.
They may be right, to be honest.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda... and
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...
Reddit really buried "no nsfw outside official reddit apps" (from the end of your first link). Didn't Tumblr do something similar and lose a significant fraction of its userbase and revenues?
I assume they hope to attract more advertising money this way.
There was a few months where it was required, but it isn't anymore.
I’ve been in tests where the entire site is gated, demanding I download the app. I’ve been in tests where SFW content is marked as NSFW, demanding I log in. Etc.
Everything else is secondary and most product managers don't view a/b tests as anything other than experiments on ways to increase those stats.
I still routinely run into it on my phone where I cannot view the site at all unless I download the reddit app, especially if its a NSFW subreddit
https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit
> If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id
> If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute
So... doesn't this mean that each logged in Apollo/3rd party client user can make 100 requests per minute for free?
The Apollo developer says his average user makes less than 400 requests per day and it's somehow going to average $2.50 per user per month. I must be missing something.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...
You should spend 0% of your life talking about being a "Based Alpha Male." You absolutely should not use the same website as a "Based Alpha Male" influencer.
I can come up with left wing equivalents if you're more into that?
However, this comment doesn't make a ton of sense but you're not engaging in Good Faith so I'm done with this thread.
What I can say is that there are some extremists on both Twitter and Reddit on both sides and as also found in other communities. Unfortunately, the commenters you are replying to choose to pretend that it is not the case with ridiculous anecdotes such as 'on my feed', 'not for me though' to dodge and as another question without answering yours.
As soon as one uses an anecdote, it is safe to immediately dismiss their comment.
But if you filter all those out and go for smaller, targeted subreddits in your interest area, you might as well be on an entirely different site, it isn't the same at all.
I think after a while a lot of the quieter people get so turned off by the whole experience they just step away altogether. I strongly suspect that a subreddit claiming to have a million subscribers probably has at least two orders of magnitude fewer in reality. And that may still be an overestimate.
You might have better odds in court with a precedent but you'll still be out legal fees.
What a lovely model.
The official reddit app is an absolute nightmare and essentially unusable. Their "new" website also completely sucks and is even worse on mobile than it is on desktop. If this actually gets implemented as is, I'll definitely have a very productive rest of my year. I have no data to back this up, but I feel like with reddit, even more users only rely on third party clients than it was on twitter.
$0.24 for 1000 full page loads wouldn't actually sound insane (if you compare to typical CPMs of sites with ads), but it seems hard to believe that the average user is doing that 350 times / day.
Between this and trying to crowd out third party clients, one has to wonder if they're trying to position themselves to become the next Digg.
I've never worked on a web platform like Reddit, nor with any per-request priced APIs. Reddit's charge of $0.00024 per request still looks like it is _significantly_ above what their own costs are.
Wasn't Reddit's pay-for-API-access announcement originally phrased as a desire to claw back some of the value that LLMs have found in Reddit data? I don't understand how per-request API pricing actually accomplishes that. (I was vaguely anticipating Reddit's API pricing to have some sort of expensive "firehose" endpoint for OpenAI/Google/Meta/etc to pull from.)
It looks like they're instead going to squeeze out all third-party apps instead. I don't think this bodes well for Reddit's future.
I can only imagine the man hours that went into Google's Adsense bot, and it only had to verify websites rather than mobile apps.
You need highly accurate data about user behaviour around the ads, and highly optimised display and linking.
I've built a similar system, albeit not for ads, for recommendations, based on viewing items in a feed. With a simple model, across web and app, all developed in-house, it was still hard and required a lot of care to get good ML signals and signals that people really understood.
Doing this across third party clients may be prohibitively difficult. I'd like to see attempts, but so far I've not seen any.
This is why I am sticking with the web-based Old Reddit.
Any further strangulation and it's "hasta la vista, Reddit".
I just don't understand why developers underprice their apps so much. You're talking about an app that people are constantly raving about, and that people use for multiple hours per day. Charge $5/month, that's half the price of Netflix or Disney+.
It seems like Reddit is pushing these changes because that's exactly what they want to happen. They want all users to be using the free first-party Reddit app.
Reddit is already nearly entirely astroturfed advertisements, and you pay for the site by reading the shill posts that fill its pages. The fact that anyone pays Apollo or Reddit for a subscription is already just sad. Like paying for cable.
Same with Twitter. So many businesses were built upon basically free API access and are now shocked the company responsible for their app's customer appeal wants some of that action.
It's not Reddit's responsibility to float OP's business and make it profitable. OP's billions of monthly requests have a real cost for Reddit - and now that Reddit's API is so coveted, they can charge whatever they want for it's access.
No Twitter - no Twitter App.
No Reddit - no Reddit App.
It's really simple...
Apple takes at least 15% of that, or 30% depending on the developer's revenue, leaving $2.55 or $2.10.
Reddit, Twitter et all don't owe you anything. They do not make money via read-access API calls - they lose money. It's super simple...
Only a fool would build a business around a free service with no escape plan.
Twitter eliminated 3rd party clients, and now Twitter is estimated to be worth 1/3 of its acquisition price.
Lastly - Twitter's market price has nothing to do with it's profitability. That seems obvious, but apparently needs to be said here.
It's not profitable. That's why they're cutting to the bone and not even paying a lot of their bills.
They had to make an advertising exec the nominal CEO, because a lot of advertisers have fled the platform.
I haven't forgotten anything.
> It's crazy this stuff needs to be said on HN folks.
This shouldn't need to be said, but "Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That would be a fair argument, except for the fact that nothing is really free and Apollo currently makes millions in profit at Reddit's expense.
That is not sustainable... any business should have realized this right from the beginning. Apollo's own business model requires income to continue to run... so Reddit's doesn't?
This is just a silly discussion to be having. Of course Apollo and businesses like Apollo were going to be required to pay for API access at some point. The business owner complaining "it's not fair", or that it's not priced like API's that nobody cares about is just staggering.
Incorrect. Straw man. I already explained this in another comment (which you already replied to, so you know this). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142316
> Apollo currently makes millions in profit
Citation needed.
> Apollo's own business model requires income to continue to run... so Reddit's doesn't?
Reddit is making a lot of income.
> This is just a silly discussion to be having.
Yes, because you keep making extremely uncharitable interpretations of my comments.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/27/tech/elon-musk-twitter-si...
I wouldn't call that Apollo app's author a fool. My understanding is they were turning a profit from the app up to now. So, apparently, it was a nice business. It's just that their business model is about to stop working.
Well, that happens to other business too sometimes. They'll have to adapt somehow or come up with another business. Life as usual.
Reddit even gives each user 100 API queries per minutes for free.
Why can't apps use that to access the data for each user?
When I go use an app that talks to OpenAI for example, it asks me to put in my API key. So why not just do that for third party reddit apps?
I think the app can just ask the user to OAuth with it and then it should be able to use that user's API access up to the free rate limits.
It sounded like an OAuth'd user gets an individual allocation of free rate limited API queries (100 per minute).
They are just truly shitty at make a working app. It's really not a business or what, just the official one truly don't work.
Popup ad to notification is already bad, pretend it to be user message? How the fxxk do they think it is going to encourage the engagement?
For the average HN user? Lol, no it’s not.
I would wager the majority of HN users can point to several dumb >=$5 expenses in any given month. If you don’t value Apollo enough to pay for it, fine. Just don’t pretend that $60 a year is a morally outrageous amount for software.
Depends on who you think an average HN user is.
Complaining you don't get free stuff anymore is really unbecoming of an entrepreneur.
He wasn't complaining about that. He was led to believe that the price would be reasonable, and he was willing to pay a reasonable price, as he already pays Imgur.
It seems the OP has a very distorted impression of what "reasonable" means to another for-profit company.
Only Reddit knows how much money it loses per user who doesn't see ads.
Prices are a two-way street. You can name any price you like, but if buyers can't afford it, then you make $0.
This is why the developer himself can't just raise his own prices by any arbitrary amount. Buyers have some say in the price.
Indeed, but this is the risk in selling a middleware product. The Apollo developer doesn't own the platform, and was lucky he hadn't yet been asked to pay for the share of maintenance costs his app created.
$5 is not an insignificant amount to a lot of people all over the world, including Europe and maybe the US. Especially when every single app and service wants you to subscribe to them now, I've heard plenty of people saying they're going to cancel their Netflix subscription when password sharing stops working.
344 requests per day is not worth $5 per month for the average user.
Netflix has introduced ad-supported tiers where you pay less. That’s the same here, those users can use the website or first-party app.
According to Apollo's developer 80% of the users make less than 500 requests per day, so I'm guessing the proportion of power users making a lot of requests are in the single digits. I doubt enough of them want's to pay enough to subsidize the others.
There's also the point that using Reddit is a two way street. Reddit is made up of user created (or user stolen) content, and moderators are working for free. Reddit's whole value is made up of user interactions, allowing users to make those interactions is not just a cost.
Why should the app developer pay anything at all? The users are also Reddit's users, they authenticate and can use Reddit's resources in a number of ways, why not charge them directly? Will Reddit be sending a bill to Mozilla for my page loads?
Because Reddit makes money off the ads. They can't guarantee third parties will always show the ads in the way they've designed.
So now they are charging third parties the cost of losing ad views.
And then Reddit would have to audit third party apps to ensure paying users are getting what they pay for. Sounds more onerous than just making third parties pay up.
Not all apps are worth $5/month, but this particular one that people apparently love enough to spend hours per day on certainly seems like it should be. A slightly nicer calculator app that you use twice a month? $0.99 is fine. A professional productivity app that saves a high-value worker hours of time? Way more than $5/month.
It's ok if not everyone can afford an app.
> Why should the app developer pay anything at all?
The app developer is just a proxy for the users, who are using Reddit without seeing any of Reddit's ads.
According to the Apollo dev, the average user would cost $2.50/month in API fees. I imagine power users would be substantially more costly, so $5/month would not cover the API + apple tax for just themselves, let alone supporting the regular users.
Edit: just to put my money with my mouth is, Reddit Premium sub cancelled.
I really don't know why it has to be API use based anyway. We all log in to our individual accounts through the API. For clients they should be able to determine requests/account or let users pay for their own usage or something. They're in full batshit MBA mode.
Modding is about to get a lot harder.
Reddit has failed to adequately monetize their userbase, they've run into the same "politics and porn" issue that every social media platform has, and they've raised way, way too much money.
The worst part? I couldn't tell you the last legitimate ad that I saw on reddit. Facebook shows semi-relevant ads, sometimes location based. Reddit ads are visual flotsam.
I'm pretty sure FB thinks I'm a republican country hunter with a big beard who loves driving his huge truck to crossfit. Because of where I live possibly?
Now, if you paraded around telling people you trust Apple and that they would never hurt you in any way, and that you had conversations with their management and they want you to succeed, now we have a problem.
This feels like exaggeration. Unless there's something I missed?
"My thoughts: I think if done well and done reasonably, this could be a positive change (but that's a big if). If Reddit provides a means for third party apps to have a stable, consistent, and future-looking relationship with Reddit that certainly has its advantages, and does not sound unreasonable, provided the pricing is reasonable." https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
> you had conversations with their management and they want you to succeed, now we have a problem.
If this did happen, but later management double-crossed me, would you then rip on me?
For your question, though: I don't think it's "your fault" that anything bad happens to you. It's obvious that the problem lies with the company you're working with–it's just that this kind of bad behavior is unlikely to change, so you unfortunately need to take it into account when dealing with them. If you had asked me earlier I probably would have said something like "be wary: the management of today might not be the management of tomorrow, or they may shift priorities, or they might just straight up being lying to you". If all goes well, that's awesome, but I still think it's important to consider these things.
By way of example, one of the apps I work on has effectively gotten approval from senior management–essentially, what it does is "legitimate" and "within the rules". What this means we have reduced our investments in thinking about scenarios where it gets removed from sale, but continue to maintain our ability to deploy elsewhere even if it is little-used right now.
Dude, you run an interface to another company’s core business. You cannot make any guarantees about what they may or may not do.
If you're in a situation where all of your income comes from a company, but you don't have an employer/employee contract with that company. It seems like such a precarious position to me.
Your employer can dump you at any time. If you hadn't noticed, there have been mass layoffs in many tech companies this year.
The other explanation is these charges are intended to kill third party uses of the API. I'm pretty sure that's what is mostly motivating Twitter (down to the weed joke price).