Whatever their intent, it's definitely a failure on the PR front.
It’s quite obviously not the case given the numbers involved, but it’s completely implausible when you add that NSFW content will be removed from the API entirely, and that third party client will not be allowed to be ad-supported.
Wow. I didn't know about that. That would prevent browsing /r/cigars via API calls. Because every post in /r/cigars is marked as NSFW. Why? I'll give you one guess. https://old.reddit.com/r/cigars/comments/ubu6b2/why_is_rciga...
According to the Apollo dev's recounting of the call this is "sexually explicit content only, not normal posts marked NSFW for non-sexual reasons".
I assume there's a flag at the subreddit level or something, because Narwhal doesn't show the "cheeky narwhal" on /r/cigars (something it does on NSFW subs). I don't know how they'll handle SFW subreddits where NSFW is used for both spoilers and dodgy content though. That's assuming they even care.
I think they probably all should be marked NSFW but it is weird.
The obvious suggestion is multiple tags (drugs, sex, violence, gore etc.). But actually that's a really bad idea because it's a slippery slope of censorship - each flavor of the month bad thing gets banned over a decade or so until there's nothing left to ban.
Respectfully, I think you've lost the plot here. The problem isn't labeling. The problem is overreaching in the first place. And the problem is an inconsistent application of that labeling.
-Children of tobacco users are more likely to be tobacco users (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5084564/)
-People who watch TV/movies with characters who use tobacco are more likely to be tobacco users (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2770193/)
-People who are friends with tobacco users are more likely to be tobacco users (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3691293/)
-People who see tobacco use on social media are more likely to be tobacco users and, critically, have an increased susceptibility to tobacco even if they are non-users (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35816331/)
The reality is that tobacco use disorder is a socially transmitted disease, and one of the best ways to prevent it's spread is to protect people from viewing tobacco use. By making it so that you have to opt-in to seeing posts about tobacco on their platform, Reddit is helping people avoid tobacco-related content.
You're also really really really missing the broader point here. By what metric should something on reddit be "opt in"? There are some things that are obvious that we all tend to agree in, and those fall into the useful mental model of "would you look at this at work?" But r/cigars does not fit into that model, yet it is still labeled as such. That means there is some other model being used to force users to opt into "sensitive" content. So what the fuck is it and why doesn't it apply to marijuana? Or fast food? Or one of a number of other unhealthy things for you?
And how many of your links apply to cigars? When was the last time you saw a 15 year old smoking a Padron? Fucking never buddy. It's a non-issue. It might play if it were cigarettes or some other trendy thing, but that's not the case here.
However, I have seen children smoking cigars (albeit cheap ones). Evidence suggests that they are doing so because they are imitating their parents or characters in the media.
Tobacco use disorder is on track to kill a billion people by the end of the century. 20% of men die from it. Hiding tobacco use from people who don't have tobacco use disorder is one of the best tools we have to prevent the spread, and I'll gladly voice my support for any measure to do that - even if it isn't applied in the most consistent/fair way.
Basically, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3D8670smTI
Everyone I work with is old enough to drink or smoke, so posting about cigars or beers could be appropriate but also could not be.
Tldr NSFW != age controls
People get super weird about this. Like, "this is an artistic nude, how dare you condemn it as NSFW."
I can however find official documentation that backs up what the admins are saying. The new Data API terms says they no long allow commercial use of their APIs and might implement a cost pr. request. It links to the Data API docs that says 60 req. pr. minute are free as long as it is non-commercial. I would think unofficial reddit apps goes under the non-commercial clause.
To me it looks to be a complete overreaction by the Reddit community because of a miscommunication on parts of a single developer and the Reddit orgs too slow reaction to stop it from spreading.
I don't think that will get a moderately used app very far. These limits would most likely be per API key and not per user
The numbers he posted seem to add up.
If it were a complete overreaction, all it would take is a single reddit admin going "he misunderstood, actually it's going to be x".
why is this assumed? In my assessment, Reddit is offering a quite reasonable charge per API call. If this will somehow cause a third-party app to ride up $20M in costs, it behooves them to optimize. As far as I can see, Apollo caches an absurd amount of data pre load which is not a mandatory advantage any app needs to offer
This also kills off apps like 'removeddit' that sheds light on rampant moderator abuse - it will be even _harder_ to see what the moderators have been up to behind the scenes after this, which is an aspect of the narrative that reddit has been trying to get a handle on for quite a while now.
I wonder how much third party apps are being caught up in this other issue.
Biggest parties have already mined the data, which is enough for models for long time.
Unless you want the model to find some specific comment yesterday.
By allowing LLMs low cost or free access to their users data companies like Reddit are essentially helping companies like OpenAI choke their traffic.
Over time as people realise it’s quicker to ask ChatGPT a question than it is to post a question on reddit they will start losing content also.
Also think about the difficulty of policing content generated by swarms of LLM bots with API access for PR campaigns.
I am just wondering, where is the limit, since in that case the model might not be trained anymore and instead it is used for similar purpose than search engine. I guess Bing is already doing this, without Reddit API.
I just asked Chat GPT this very question and it didn't mention the Fenrir. It mentioned the other contender (MODE) but it failed to differentiate it from all the other offerings i.e it has the ability to connect a SATA SSD and hold the entire Sega Saturn library on the device.
The cases LLM will need this data in is compiling together more modern useful human knowledge as our knowledge base grows. Information in existing LLMs could shift. This is sort of the issue even academic textbooks deal with when publishing what is considered foundational knowledge: sometimes we discover something new that makes it either not quite correct or invalid.
These are the sort of obvious failures and disconnects that should become apparent if training lags behind. LLM services interested in revenue without plans for continuously updating training data are somewhat betting that not too much will change from most end users perspectives for awhile and for some use cases that might be true but the limits of training data over time for public instances of GPT for example have already hindered some.
Much of prompting, from my anecdata, needs to take that into consideration as one of the base constraints (does this model even have up-to-date information it could query and dump something useful from). To some degree those training limits also help expose "hallucinations" or interpolation/extrapolation attempts of LLM models. If I know it doesn't have this information in the training set and test the system against it, I can observe how well it interpolates, extrapolates, and is transparent about when that's happening. For example if I ask existing models about new syntaxes and structures introduced in Java 21, most should return something back like it doesn't exist, it lacks that newer information, or something to that effect. If instead it starts producing code samples that it couldn't possibly have knowledge of, then I know it's passing back garbage. If it's being continually updated at some frequency, I'm no longer so sure and it may actually be providing new useful information.
So I think they are thinking that and I don't think they're wrong.
Yes, the data is valuable for product recommendations, but not at the price they are asking. And if they ever block traditional scraping then all those "append reddit to google" searches will be gone too. Google is not going to pay them either.
The problem goes away if the apps charge for a subscription, which covers their API access.
And require something like a public key to access the API so you can track requests coming from multiple hosts.
Then any rate of access above that of a power user can be charged for appropriately. And make it so that activating API access is something that can't be automated so people can't create thousands of API dummy accounts.
The problem here is that many users are behind CGNAT, meaning many end users share a single IPv4. Unfortunately the days of counting distinct users by their IP(v4) are over.
Unless they put 100% of content behind a login-gate, it's currently legal* to scrape and use for derivative works, as long as you have the money and the chutzpah to deal with lawsuits that may or may not come.
- https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2022/12/hello-youve-be...
"I didn't mean to" is a very weak defense.
They would have to come up with a very hard to understand reason behind it though.
Even napkin math shows their numbers to be undefensible and malicious. The very obvious reason behind them is to kill 3rd parties and force people into the official app.
The apollo dev for iOS said 50 million queries was 166$ on imgur which is owned by the same company as reddit and has higher server costs due to images being more expensive to host. Reddit is asking for 12,000 for that many queries.
166 < 12000 and that 2 orders of magnitude are incomprehensible in terms of any technical reason to serve some comments and text posts...
imgur costs $3k per 50m requests: https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
Citing the specific piece of text
> For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.
Or he is just not truthful, we can't check.
Now I get not every platform users spend the same, and notoriously Apple users can be charged more (see doordash and uber being caught with charging more to those users). I however doubt that reddit users, notoriously hard to monetise, are somehow 20x more valuable than any other user in any other social media that is ad revenue based...
Whether you believe the apollo cretaor on his imgur pricing, or you beieve him or not on any other part of his post. The numbers very much point towards malicious pricing. And they are, in so far as they are presented, indefensible.
he gets traffic and potential Ads views from reddit, and can't monetize it well enough. Sounds also not like reddit's problem.
> The numbers very much point towards malicious pricing. And they are, in so far as they are presented, indefensible.
this is pure handwaving without any supporting evidence. Counter-example has been provided: imgur charges similar price on standard plans.
> Counter-example has been provided: imgur charges similar price on standard plans.
Imgur presents 1/4 of the price for a more expensive hosting option. Even if you refuse to ignore his own quoted price, Reddit still comes off insanely overpriced.
How did you arrive to 12c and $2.5? Also, is it expensive? Okta for example charges $2 just for sign in: https://www.okta.com/pricing/
> more expensive hosting option.
this is again your speculations without any evidence. Reddit is much more complicated product with img and video hosting.
You could just read the link of what was sent to you, idk might help with having an actual conversation.
here is the relevant text.
> the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month
> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
> So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. These own numbers they've given are also seemingly inline with industry estimates as well
In other words the expected price for reddit per user is 12 cents but their pricing model for APIs is retaliatory at 20x that price.
> Also, is it expensive?
Charging 20x what you make yourself, and again 4 times more than a similar offering?
> Reddit is much more complicated product with img and video hosting.
No it fucking isn't. 90% of reddit is text by volume and most of it is super short tokens too. Reddit is so uncomplicated you can make it a 1st year uni proyect to make a backend and front end with nested comments and a text post saved in a db.
it is so uncomplicated most of its work behind the scenes for the apst 6 years has been on monetisation, such as the new ads, the nfts, the reddit premium, the reddit awards etc. thats where all dev time has gone, because the actual website itself is uncomplicated
I think you comparing very different users: power users with 344 reqs per day, many of who are moderator, and some monthly user who visited reddit once a month.
Internet says reddit has 50m daily users, I think you should compare that number.
Also, for 344 reqs we would need to trust apollo dev words, which I don't from obvious reasons.
> No it fucking isn't.
sorry, dont want to comment your unsupported claims anymore.
That number was corroborated by Reddit themselves.[1] There is no reason to assume malice on the side of Apollo. Regardless, $2/user is still a ridiculous ask for a social media site. That is $24/year/user. If you divide Facebook's entire expenditure for 2022 (where they pissed away billions on metaverse), and divide that by their MAU, you get a cost of $21/year/user. You really think Reddit's cost per user is higher than Facebook+Instagram+Whatsapp+Metaverse combined? The number just isn't realistic.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...
Ok, and it says other apps do 2.5x times less than that.
> There is no reason to assume malice on the side of Apollo.
There are very strong reasons: guy is trying to protect his business, he uses discounted imgur numbers as basis and doesn't mention standard plan numbers, so he is working hard to distort facts.
> Regardless, $2/user is still a ridiculous ask for a social media site
Its hyper active user given 345 daily requests, not just your regular user with few monthly visits.
For example 345 reqs * 1% CTR * 10c per click will give you $10 of monthly Ads revenue if you put one Ad on each page.
They also have less than 2.5 the number of users. Counting the total is a very silly way to pretend the usage is high...
> There are very strong reasons: guy is trying to protect his business, he uses discounted imgur numbers as basis and doesn't mention standard plan numbers, so he is working hard to distort facts.
Those are not strong reasons. He uses the current best availeble data he has, which is comparable API plans he is working with.
He is very, very generous when calculating Reddit revenue. When they published their 100 million revenue quarter Fidelity valued their investment in reddit at 100million, they now value it at 60 which is a 40% drop since then.
Despite this, Christian considers their quarterly revenue 2x what it was at their peak, and adds 150 million on top to round the number to 600 mill annual. Most industry estimates do not go past 350. He borderline doubled their revenue for his napkin calculations.
So no, there are no strong reasons to believe he was lying about his math when he goes out of his way to be unexplainably kind to reddits revenue numbers.
> Its hyper active user given 345 daily requests, not just your regular user with few monthly visits.
Depending on how the api is set up you can have. 1 request for the front page, 1 request for the post itself, 1 request for the top 100 comments. scroll a bit, anoher request for the next 100 comments.
That is 4 requests for 1 user by checking one post and seeing a bit of what the conversation is. 34 requests a day is about 10 posts and some frontpage/sub scrolling. That is pretty light use for someone who uses Reddit daily, and its basically patheitc use for Mods who have to put in hundreds of monthly free hours at keeping communities civil.
> For example 345 reqs * 1% CTR * 10c
You have 0 chance of getting those rates on reddit, for a number of reasons.
One is that many reqs are on posts with no ads embbeded. two is that 1% ctr is high for reddit. and 3 is because reddit has awful conversion metrics and you are not getting 10c per click.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
They have tried soo hard to increase ARPU and so far they havent cracked past 0.6$ when industry leaders fly past 7$ per user.
So reddit is losing fuck all from those 345 requests, and instead is gonna lose a huge hosts of mods, which will make the site more toxic, harder to advertise and crater their ARPU again making Fidelitys 40% loss since 2018 look like child's play.
You're looking at the wrong product, $2/user/month is for their Workforce Identity Cloud, so auth for employees, not end users.
For a comparable market segment, Auth0 (acquired by Okta) which serves the B2C market charges significantly less [1]. Taking the B2C Professional plan at 1000 MAU which has the highest pricing per user due to lack of volume discounts costs $240/month for 1000 users ($0.24/user/month). Scaling up to the limit of publicly available pricing, at 10000 users Auth0 will only charge $0.15/user/month.
and what is the difference in context of this discussion?
4x is not much lower given difference in capital investments and complexity of product
Reddit is owned by advanced publications which is a huge media conglomerate. Sort of. They have the largest stake in reddit. Reddit spun off of conde nast a few years ago.
imgur is owned by medialab who also own things like kik and worldstar.
How many of the complainers are actually watching the ads? It's trivial to block ads on YouTube; just install uBO, or use an app like Revanced.