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Comment by boredtofears | Hacker News Reader

> Reddit’s API will remain free to developers who want to build apps and bots that help people to use Reddit

I'd be fine if they didn't. The ratio of useful bots to annoying ones is very low.

Bots? eh... probably gonna agree. Apps, hard no. API access to third-party apps is the only way to make competition work out in the end. IRQ, AIM, and MSN Messenger all existed around the same time, and thanks to XMPP, worked equally well on an XMPP client. This made it reasonable to use all 3 if a user wanted to, plus they could use their own server too, or a friends, or a company, or whatever. Thanks to SMTP, email is (mostly) the same way right now. On the other hand, the perfect example of how shuttering API access to apps can completely kill any competition exists right now in the form of Discord. Sure, Guilded exists, and one could argue Slack is a competitor, but tell me, do you genuinely use all three? Would they be interchangeable? Or do you split personal and professional between Discord and Slack? If all 3 had a common standard, or at least had open client api's, we'd already have a unified client, making all 3 easy to access at the same time, and we'd have good competition. Reddit has competition, and there are many third party apps that allow using all of them under one roof. Killing that off would not be a welcome change.

So yeah, Reddit may not need bots, but refusing to allow apps is just pushing another nail in the coffin of competition.

Unfortunately the developer of the Apollo app already got a call, and apps will need to pay. That's then the end of reddit on mobile for me. The official app is unusable and had annoying behaviour in desperate attempts to boost engagement.

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...

> There was a quote in an article about how these changes would not affect Reddit apps, that was meant in reference to “apps on the Reddit platform”, as in embedded into the Reddit service itself, not mobile apps

> tl;dr: Paid API coming.

Paid I can deal with and Reddit are certainly entitled to some rev share for enabling the content - but - if this goes down the old EEE path through to extinguish third party as a way to force their interface and tools or nothing - then nothing is what it will be. Twitter's API history and present is a great example of how bad things could potentially get.

My thoughts exactly.

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