Update 3: Reddit effectively kills off third party apps | Hacker News Reader

Update 3: Reddit effectively kills off third party apps

old.reddit.com

91 pointsa_bored_husky23 comments

Recent and related:

Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 - May 2023 (1265 comments)

Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162235 - June 2023 (396 comments)

> They reiterated that their goal "isn't to kill 3rd party apps" -- in fact, they said they were "confused" by claims that they want to do that,

Honestly I am confused by their confusion. Are they receiving a different messaging internally, than that being sent out to end users and developers?

The left hand is acting like it doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

It could also be a smokescreen so they can backpedal if the results are bad enough.

They're trying to control the message.

I don't think Reddit intends to profit off their API, not in any significant way. The pricing is too harsh and will likely kill off most 3rdparty usage of the API.

This really feels like them trying to completely kill off the 3rdparty ecosystem, but do it in such a way that when it does actually happen, they can claim that it was all the 3rdparty developers faults because they had provided an API and everything.

Would it be possible for third party apps to have an API key input prompt, and users get their own individual API from Reddit? (that users would then probably subscribe to, but it is easier for a user to decide that $20 per month is worth it vs. an app developer paying that for all their users).

from the post, the author (creator of a Reddit client) suggests

> It's too early to know whether this will be a realistic option. From what I've seen, Reddit may be turning developer signups into a manual process where each user would need to message them and get approval. Also it's likely they'd crack down on this if they knew it was happening.

Pretty sure it was turned into a manual process shortly before this API change. A few weeks ago, I had gotten a message from a Reddit admin to sign up for dev API access in what seemed like a manual process. I assume I was messaged because I had signed up for API access many years ago.

Even if that is the case, why not track the number of requests each user makes though to the api and “Bill” their account monthly. Some caching can help fractionalize some of those request costs for popular content.

Even if that was implemented, it's quite a messy thing. For one, now the 3rdparty apps are a separate charge from being charged for reddit. When something breaks, and makes your paid for app unusable to access reddit, who do you blame? Reddit, or the app developer? There's also now the matter of all requests to reddit being made via 3rdparty apps requiring an API key that improves reddits tracking. No more anonymous access via 3rdparty apps, which at least for some of them was a selling feature.

It might be possible, but it will still increase the friction to using 3rdparty clients, and that's probably the whole point anyhow.

They're just lying.

Yep, very common deflection tactic. "I'm sorry but I'm very puzzled why you say I want X when in fact I have consistently said Y." (Where Y is something tangentially or completely unrelated to X.)

Keep in mind their CEO fraudulently impersonated Reddit users by logging into their accounts and posting as them, and Reddit was just fine with this.

They seem to be fully aware of what they're doing and what they're about.

Reddit is effectively dead to me if the third-party apps that make it bearable go away.

The few subs that I am in now are pretty low-quality overall, with most posts being either the same questions asked over and over by people who can't be bothered to read the sidebar or use the search feature, or image meme shitposts. I won't be missing much if I can no longer access them on my own terms.

I feel like Reddit is somehow jealous of the success of Facebook and Twitter for vapid content and is taking their best run at digging themselves down to the same level. Quantity over quality always wins on the modern Internet I guess.

(Edit: The fact that they don't even want their users browsing Reddit on a smartphone web browser should have been a giveaway that they were going to lock down their assets further eventually.)

thinking um "out loud". Looking at the reddit api, there isn't that much, once you ignore some of extra features like live, friends, flair etc...

It might an interesting idea to just have an api website and people can just plug in their own front ends and use it how they wish. apps more or less just switch their hostname.

other then trying to fund the infra for an api, it seems easy. clearly paying isn't an option and with all text there's no ads to show.

lemmy at a glance looks confusing, i don't want to join a bunch of mini reddits.

I've tried a couple of reddit alternatives, but all fall short. The one that was more or less ok was lobster.rs , but the founder/owner is kind of aggressive: It was funny how he got mad at some random tweet I made once, which actually I wrote "for" lobster.rs

I wouldn't be surprised if most reddit alternatively have tough communities. The web is so centralized on a few sites that if your pushed out to an alternative your likely a real outlier personality personality.

When reddit got big there were still a lot of smaller forum and other internet communities. People were part of alot

This is probably going to kill Libreddit, a light web front end for Reddit I'm a maintainer for. The first major FOSS project that I'm a major contributor for might be killed off :'(

[0]: https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit/

Is there any reason libreddit couldn't eventually become more like nitter, scraping web results from the site instead of using an official API?

It could, but that would be a cat-and-mouse game. (Rate limits, bot checks, cloudflare, etc) If it's not too tedious I'm definitely going to consider changing it to that.

I always assumed the internet was headed for a meta layer where browsers act to create a wiki like community on top of the content and users become a global out of band force that attach forums, edits, changes out of band. This would democratize any new site and content would be more valuable that user lockins.

With AI, this might be closer to possible. The trick is find reliable content to anchor to arbitrary configuration of pages.

No idea what the overall timeline would look like, but I don't see how Reddit's current trajectory leads to any play other than hiring mods for the top N subreddits (which they probably have reams of data showing are responsible for a huge percentage of their ad impressions) and making the rest read-only. A bunch of subreddits have already explicitly announced that they're shutting down if they can't use third-party apps to moderate, there have been many more general complaints about the inadequacy of the official moderation tools, and it seems like the company simply doesn't care.

Because killing off the ecosystem has gone so well for all the other social networks. They’re going to really run the company into the ground :/

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