There’s a real non-negligible cost to Reddit hosting the content.
The bottom line is there’s solutions here.
- High volume API users pay up and subsidize the cost of everyone else
OR
- All Reddit users pay a monthly 9.99 subscription and the API stays the same.
OR
- A not-for-profit let’s say Internet Archive takes ownership and begs the Reddit community for donations (ie. Wikipedia)
The bottom line is they'll happily pull the rug from under those 3rd party devs if it means they can pump their numbers for their IPO.
Small cost x moderate usage = moderate cost Small cost x overthetop usage = overthetop cost
What they should do is really hammer the LLMs.
I think this is more about the IPO and inflating figures.
- Everyone will just run web scrapers increasing the load on reddit's servers even more
An API actually REDUCES load and lets you manage it.
Please answer the question:
How is Reddit supposed to make money with increased load and demand for its content?
Please answer the question:
How is reddit supposed to prevent scraping when it is legal to do so, and they have incentive to appear in search engines? Considering that scraping is legal and WILL happen, why not opt to reduce the load by offering an API?
The infrastructure they provide is easily replicable at almost no cost (really it's just the bandwidth that costs any money at all). The community curation and moderation is done by volunteers. The content is all from the users. Reddit Inc is providing almost none of the value, and is just benefiting from network effects. People go there because people go there.
The real meat and potatoes is plain old text with Reddit style markup.