this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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This will be an unpopular opinion, but I think reddit is mostly in the right with these API pricing changes. It makes no sense from a business perspective to allow other apps to freely profit off their services. They only fucked up with the arbitrarily short timeline which Huffman has no reasoning for and the poor communication throughout the whole process. Even Apollo dev said he was fine with them charging if he had had more time to make the transition.
I think charging to use the API is fine, but it was definitely overpriced to the point that it was obvious they wanted to nuke TPAs. They need all that sweet user data to sell to others, and they can't get to that with TPAs.
How can they not get user data on TPAs? It's their user and their data which they are serving to TPAs.
I mean user data can very much be completely inferred from API calls. It's not about the user data itself, it's about being able to say to advertisers "all our users will see your ads".
I haven't seen a developer of the third party apps complain about there being a price at all, just that the price is too high given how much a user costs reddit itself, and how tight the timeline is given at that price. And yeah he basically just said "well we were gonna do it at some point, so why not now?"
I think the issue is that he's saying that he is "willing to talk" but Christian said many times that he feels he's talking to a brick wall. So how can he feel comfortable having discussions when those discussions might not happen until after he starts getting charged prices that he wants to talk about?
For some reason spez doesn't get that and it's really annoying to see him talk about how they're the only company in town offering free lunch, no one is asking for that.
Even if you think the pricing is fine, the time window the apps get to make changes is way too short. They kept asking when would we have to start paying, and the answer always been in the distance future. Now they have 30 days to get the funding for a huge amount of users.
I don't think charging for the API is inherently wrong, but they want to charge a ridiculous amount. It should be 1/4th of what it is, or less. The Apollo guy calculated it is 20x more than what the average user makes them, via Reddit's own previously posted user monetization stats.
Yeah it's hard to say what is a reasonable price without seeing the numbers across platforms. I know the apollo dev said it was an unreasonable amount to charge, but the relay dev said he thinks he'd be able to charge a subscription fee between $2-$3 a month and still make a profit after reddit and googles cut. He said his users average ~100 calls per day versus apollo saying ~300. Maybe there's an optimization issue there or just a lot of power users on apollo, idk. Either way, I feel like if the timeline was more like 6 months to a year transition and there would be no issue.
Monetising API access isn't bad, but at a reasonable rate.
The Snoo Platform hiked the rate up to the unaffordable is just insane.
I would agree, if Reddit were a service provided by Reddit for customers. But it’s not. It’s a social network where most of the value of the site is generated by the users contributing content. No users, no value. They have tens of thousands of moderators donating countless hours of free work to the site, too. So if we leave the morality to the side for a moment and just put on our business hats, if Huffman pisses off the community too much, he loses critical mass and a large value proposition for the site. He is betting that no major exodus will occur and he can continue turning the screws.
It at least goes to show, once again, that when building on top of other services, those services can fuck you over at any time, for any reason.
The pricing they chose seems not reasonable at all. That‘s why I still think the whole thing is to kill third party apps.