Reddit will exempt accessibility-focused apps from unpopular API pricing changes | Hacker News Reader

Reddit will exempt accessibility-focused apps from unpopular API pricing changes

theverge.com

141 pointsthunderbong126 comments

Reddit really is desperate for this IPO isn't it. This pricing decision is a total debacle. They're clearly going to try and tell a story about how their data set is massively valuable for AI (it isn't) and that they've got it under lock and key (it's already been crawled by every major player in AI) so that they can get a totally unrealistic valuation at IPO. It makes sense, imagine how incredible it would be if you could get an Nvidia level multiple at IPO. Unfortunately in the process they're killing the actual product. They're trying to backtrack to try and paper over this but you really can't get past the fact that what they're doing is deliberately attacking their own users and community. So they're trying to go "err uhh well, if you're exclusively using the API for accessbility and not making any money"... alright, we'll let you fix our broken shitty site but only if you take a vow of poverty. The correct answer from any developer to this should be clear "Fuck you pay me.". The relationship between Reddit and it's community is very delicate, so it seems pretty silly for Reddit to decide to crash it into a wall shortly before their IPO. They might get the IPO pop they want - I doubt it, they're smashing the long term viability of the company.

> alright, we'll let you fix our broken s** site but only if you take a vow of poverty.

I'm so glad someone brought this up. Every conversation I've seen about Reddit's API pricing on HN has had at least one person asking, "well, how are they supposed to fund the site then?" And that's not Reddit-specific, it's a really common talking point whenever a property/platform starts cracking down on fan/volunteer work.

But that question never gets asked about the fan/volunteer work. It's interesting to look at what ventures we as a society think have an almost moral right to make money, and which ventures we almost think of as being morally obligated to not make money. Sometimes it's really arbitrary.

If 3rd-party accessibility services are important for accessing your service, those 3rd-party developers should be allowed to make money off of their stuff. Sometimes "non-commercial" clauses are appropriate for some projects/terms, but sometimes they get really abused and it's worth taking a step back in many situations and asking why they were included in the first place. Community-focused devs like to eat and have housing too.

Or like, don’t have a website that is a steaming pile of the jankiest JavaScript on the web. The damn site barely works and has crashed my browser more than every other site I visit combined. God help anybody with a screen reader.

The other story here is these apps all exist because Reddit the site is a joke from a technical standpoint. It’s just a disaster. The community is why people are there and the apps allow the communities to function.

This is also a good point. It's somewhat orthogonal to what I'm getting at, my point is more that even if Reddit wasn't in that position it would still be really weird and unreasonable for them to be pushing a non-commercial requirement.

But agreed that in addition to the "Open Source developers like to eat" thing, it's also very worthwhile to ask why Reddit isn't accessible to blind users already. Accessibility can be hard, but it's not that hard. It's not so hard that a company with 2000 employees (I guess less now) couldn't do it.

Blind accessibility shouldn't be the community's responsibility to fix; and there's an extra layer of absurdity in people fixing Reddit's horrible accessibility for them, for free, and Reddit responding with, "we've decided in our infinite generosity not to charge you money for the privilege of fixing our site. But God help us if we find out that anybody else is giving you money to do it..."

Totally, the root of all this is their site is garbage but has a great user base. If I were them I’d be terrified a moderately competent teenager could break that moat with a fast and performant site.

>But that question never gets asked about the fan/volunteer work. It's interesting to look at what ventures we as a society think have an almost moral right to make money, and which ventures we almost think of as being morally obligated to not make money. Sometimes it's really arbitrary.

I don't think there's anything interesting there at all. It's reddit's website, reddit's API, reddit's data. Their policy already says they can charge for API access and change prices at any time. It's not a matter of them having a "moral right to make money" but they do have a legal right to at least seek profits by setting their own prices.

I don't see anyone arguing that third party app developers shouldn't be able to seek profit by charging people money for their apps. But if they're going to do that, then they're accepting that they're in a market, and that it's not a free market if you choose to make yourself entirely reliant on a single provider. If you make a reddit app, and reddit increases their prices to a level that makes your operation unsustainable, well that's a risk you chose to make when you chose to tie your livelihood to a reddit app. Risk and reward.

I think what people are actually saying is not that they're "morally obligated to not make money" but that the "accessibility" sympathy card rings false when it comes from people pocketing tens of thousands of dollars a month.

There's really nothing arbitrary about it. It's not about "fan/volunteer" vs "platform".

Meh. There are moral arguments getting made around Reddit's "right to profit." We can talk about this purely in terms of legal capability, but that's not usually the context these conversations start in. And it's worth mentioning that it's also completely legal and acceptable in a free market for users to protest and boycott Reddit over the API pricing even if that means its harder for Reddit the company to make money and be sustainable. Mass protests aren't against Reddit TOS. And those user expectations about API access (wherever they come from) is part of the risk Reddit took on when they created a content platform; users have no legal obligation to make Reddit the company profitable.

I often see conversations about business practices bounce between "well then how do you expect the company to make money" and "that's just how Capitalism works, you can't blame them for doing what they're allowed to do." And it's useful to be conscious of when that transition happens and to ask ourselves what consequences we view as just natural outcomes of the market (hobby developers getting priced out of application development), and what outcomes we view as unacceptable problems that need solutions (AI companies scraping Reddit).

To be fair, often those arguments are coming from different people, I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But it's still worth thinking about which arguments tend to on average fall into which of those two buckets and why different kinds of free market activity often get talked about in one framing, but not usually in the other.

> but that the "accessibility" sympathy card rings false when it comes from people pocketing tens of thousands of dollars a month.

Much much more importantly though: I completely reject this reasoning, I think it's exactly the cognitive bias that I call out above. The reason to exempt accessibility tools from API pricing is because those tools benefit blind users. If the people making those tools can also pull in tens of thousands of dollars, then good. A developer making tens of thousands of dollars building that tool is still solving an accessibility problem for Reddit at no cost to Reddit -- and notably Reddit has no equivalent solution of its own to offer instead.

The people to have sympathy for in this conversation are low-vision/blind users. And it is not poverty that makes Open Source and/or community-maintained tools useful to those users.

Ask yourself: why exactly would a volunteer profiting off of an Open Source or community-maintained tool be worse? I would argue that there are expectations that we have of volunteers that are much harsher than the expectations we have for proprietary platforms. In many cases these volunteers release tools that are more Open than proprietary alternatives, that have better privacy, that are cheaper and/or free to use, and that overall respect users and preserve user-agency much better than the platforms they're building on. And yet, in addition to producing more respectful tools, people also expect them not to make money. Why?

It should be the opposite. I want people who are building Open Source tools to make more money than the platforms that aren't in touch with their community.

I don't see any evidence that people "expect them not to make money". Has anyone actually said that? I think the confusion is between the positive and negative meanings of "right". Neither party has the "right to make a profit" in the positive sense that society is obliged to structure itself in such a way that the eventual result is their making of a profit. Both parties have the "right to make a profit" in the negative sense that there are no legal restrictions in place that prevent their making of a profit per se.

In other words, they have the right to participate in commercial activity with the goal of making money, but they aren't entitled to success in that venture.

The confusion seems to be that Reddit is the entity making the decision here and they're the ones feeling the effects. Reddit has raised its prices. The response is "well it's a free market, they can do what they like, they've got the right to seek to make a profit". The apps have said they'll have to shut up shop as a result of the changes. The response is "well it's a free market, they aren't entitled to make a profit". There's no conflict here, it just looks like one on the surface if you aren't careful to distinguish between the right to make a profit and the right to seek a profit.

> I don't see any evidence that people "expect them not to make money". Has anyone actually said that?

I'm not sure I follow. Reddit has said they expect them to not make money. Reddit's API pricing is high enough that any small accessibility app or client that is not exempted from that pricing will have to close up shop.

Reddit is effectively saying that they expect these devs to either not make money or to stop developing the app. In practice, those are the only outcomes that are reasonably possible -- exemption from pricing or the apps going away. And its entirely within Reddit's control and up to Reddit's preference to decide which of those outcomes happen.

> but that the "accessibility" sympathy card rings false when it comes from people pocketing tens of thousands of dollars a month.

This too is what I'm calling out. What do you mean by "sympathy" here? Do you have sympathy for the app developers, or do you have sympathy towards the blind users? Because if that sympathy is directed towards the blind users (and I would argue that is who the sympathy should be directed towards), then whether the devs are making money should change nothing at all about how you feel about those tools.

My point is that the profitability of an accessibility tool is completely irrelevant to the conversation about whether or not it's good for Reddit to allow free access to the API for important accessibility tools. It's really weird for Reddit to have that criteria in its carve-out, and it's worth interrogating why they included it.

It's worth asking why Reddit said "okay, obviously for really important tools like blind accessibility apps, we're going to make sure that they can access the API unless they have some form of funding in which case, tough luck." Well wait a second, a blind accessibility app making money doesn't make it any less essential for blind users that the tool stick around. Nothing has changed, blind users still need the app. And because of how expensive the API changes are, Reddit demanding that people trying to serve the community make no money or get blocked via an API they can't possibly afford is basically the same thing as them saying, "we don't think that community accessibility tools should have sustainable funding."

Basically no community accessibility tool is going to be rich enough to afford these kinds of prices. If they're not exempted, they won't be able to exist.

And as you yourself said, there is a sympathy argument being made here. But importantly, the idea the devs could make a living off of their work helping the community suddenly made that argument ring false to you. Why? What changed about the way you felt about the developers, about the value of the app, about the position that blind users are currently in -- that made that sympathy suddenly feel unmerited? Okay money is in the equation, suddenly you felt like the sympathy argument no longer was appropriate. Dig into that -- who were you feeling sympathy towards, and why did you suddenly stop feeling that sympathy when there was money on the table?

----

> There's no conflict here, it just looks like one on the surface if you aren't careful to distinguish between the right to make a profit and the right to seek a profit.

I am not going to accuse you in particular of being inconsistent about this, that's not my intention at all. But you aren't the only person on HN, and short answer is: I disagree, a lot of comments I read about this are not making the distinction you describe (particularly comments that call people out for complaining about Reddit's policy).

Note that people are absolutely allowed in a free market to complain and verbally attack companies that make decisions that hurt the community regardless of whether the company is allowed to raise prices. Reddit has the right to seek a profit, and the community has the right to punish Reddit in the marketplace for trying to seek a profit in a certain way that the community deems to be harmful. This too is the free marketplace of ideas.

Again, I am not accusing you specifically of making this argument. But there are absolutely people on HN making the argument that critics of Reddit's policy have some kind of moral requirement to come up with a solution to Reddit's financial woes. The perspective you suggest is not usually typical of the conversation, and my top-level comment was discussing that normal disconnect. The typical comment I see is not distinguishing between right to make/seek a profit, it is specifically suggesting a right to make a profit in selective scenarios, and then clarifying that there is only a right to seek a profit when Open Source/community funding is introduced into the conversation.

Not saying that's what you are doing. But I completely disagree that the typical commentary around this subject is ideologically consistent.

> The relationship between Reddit and it's community is very delicate, so it seems pretty silly for Reddit to decide to crash it into a wall shortly before their IPO. They might get the IPO pop they want - I doubt it, they're smashing the long term viability of the company.

I'm guessing someone looked at the data and figured that losing x% of users is worth it if they can extract an extra y% profit from the remaining users. We'll shortly see if they are right!

If I was in their position, I would just restrict 3rd party app access to Reddit gold subscribers. You would probably lose less users that way, and extract at least some money from them. You'd need to figure out some heuristic to detect when people are "abusing" their reddit gold to scrape all data. And also work with 3rd party developers to reduce the number of API calls they make rather than just being condescending dicks [0].

If they did all that, they could probably even milk it a bit, something like: "We heard the community and we are listening!".

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...

There's a reason Digg has been mentioned so much around this story. Reddit ate Digg's lunch because Digg made bad decisions. Reddit is making the same flavor of bad decisions and their lunch will be promptly eaten by someone else. It's obviously a losing strategy. Everyone can see it except for the greedy execs seeing dollar signs rather than the real world.

If anyone else is like me, I'm just looking for the next community so that I can ditch reddit. I'm looking for a site that can maintain free speech,limit the bot noise,draw in real users and foster a real community spirit and attitude without selling out to corporatism, over moderation, and overall corrupt tendencies.

I’m trying out federated via lemmy (lemmy.ml, lemmy.one, self-host, whatever) which interoperates with mastodon etc. If somebody were to start a larger lemmy server and do Reddit scraping for even just the next couple days, it would probably gain traction pretty quickly. But also that sounds expensive for an enthusiast

https://raddle.me/f/lobby/155371/warning-lemmy-doesn-t-care-...

I guess it makes sense that the only people dedicated and motivated enough to actually build their own stuff in the modern world are neo-nazis and tankies.

I'm in the same boat, looking at lemmy and mastodon. I think the key will be to hit some critical mass quickly enough.

Are you willing to pay?

I paid for Apollo and would pay them regularly. I'd feel better about it if the money went to people with similar principles rather than soulless profit maximizers, which is what would happen if Apollo split off and offered a paid model.

100% agree, the challenge is that with Digg, we had reddit to flee to. I'm looking at lemmy, which seems similar in many ways, but is federated.

> If I was in their position, I would just restrict 3rd party app access to Reddit gold subscribers

I'm a Relay user, and was gold until I cancelled yesterday... will not be re-subscribing if things continue on their current trajectory

>alright, we'll let you fix our broken shitty site but only if you take a vow of poverty.

What a fantastic way to put it, thinking about it so much of the 3rd party tools for reddit are about fixing the site. Bots, because moderation tools aren't powerful enough for the job, RIF in the browser because even old.reddit is kinda crappy, and 3rd party mobile apps because the 1st party one is notoriously bad.

I wonder why people keep going to such a trash website, just leave it to die already.

Network effects. It's the same reason people are locked into twitter, even if they want to leave. They can't leave until the other people they depend on leave, and those people are in the same situation. A social network is a molecule, and your bonds will keep you from moving unless the entire molecule decides to move at the same time.

That's why Going Dark is an effective threat: it forces everyone to go somewhere else at the same time. Whether you want to exercise voice or exit, dealing with corporations requires organized, collective action.

But network effects work in reverse, colony collapse is real.

It's not a trash website, it's a trash company - it's a forum used by tens of millions of people regularly.

I am not looking forward to its demise, and I am sure there are many others looking on in horror at what they're doing to it.

Any community that isn't massive and doesn't get shown on the front page is most likely doing what the community members want. Things only go awry when it gets big enough that corporate starts to pay attention, or "normies" from the /all feed suddenly decide they are subject matter experts and have extremely important opinions.

Makes me wonder if their IPO will be a flop as a result. If you're a registered investor that would be part of the IPO, I would assume that you are looking at public discourse in addition to whatever IPO docs Reddit might give you. So what does it say about a company about to IPO that's telling you everything is ok on their whitepapers and docs but you look online and see a full blown revolt by their userbase.

I hope Reddit has a similar IPO experience that WeWork had, they deserve it.

It won't flop, but they won't hit their projections during the frothiest times of the market and their last funding round. The AI FOMO bull run just shows how much money there is on the sidelines desperate for anything to invest in with growth potential.

If the metrics look anything like this: https://backlinko.com/reddit-users they will get investors

I dont think the smoke and mirrors is going work any more...

Maybe, but it appears me we are seeing the business cycle return to first principles and things like user engagement, user growth, Daily Active Users, etc that were all used to cover up bad business models and non-profitability in the age of free money are over...

an IPO that does not have reddit turning an actual profit (not made up API Money in the future but actual revenue generated from actually selling something to actual clients in an actual market) will be a failure.

That's probably why they're scrambling....they missed the peak of the bubble

(2022 snapshot of) Reddit might be the last fully human-prepared dataset there will ever be. That might be their main value.

A beautiful thought, except that Attention Is All You Need came out in 2017. ChatGPT was when the hype cycle kicked off, but I guarantee there were LLM-generated comments on it before then, possibly from nation-state-funded propaganda mills - not to mention other, less sophisticated bots.

Yes, but the real human-like comments were possible only with ChatGPT and I doubt the startups that got GPT-4 early access in 2022 used it to generate Reddit comments. These days a self-hosted Vicuna-LLaMa-13B is good enough to write MBA essays so anything published in 2023 is a suspect.

You don't know that a nation state didn't make something ChatGPT level earlier.

I doubt it as I was in touch with OpenAI when they were making GPT-4 available last year to their preferred partners. Governments rely on these companies and lag in their capabilities these days.

> try and tell a story about how their data set is massively valuable for AI (it isn't)

How would it not be valuable?

It's valuable to train models. It's just not valuable to sell, as it can be accessed freely, and has been dumped multiple times already and used to train models.

It's been scraped already by every major player and likely will continue to be scraped because it has to be public in order for the site to function

A large chunk it's available online, on archive.org[1] and other places for more recent stuff.

[1] https://archive.org/details/2015_reddit_comments_corpus

It’s very valuable. I frequently find my myself adding “reddit” to my google searches looking for conversational information. Eg: trying to figure out what to do in Tokyo on a vacation or an honest review of a new product

it's not even like they need the API, they can get all the Reddit data simply by scraping, it's all crawlable by bing bot, if search indexes can index it, that same data can be extrapolated for ai training. you know who can't do that in a meaningful way?

apps that really matter to core Reddit users, they need the API and are the only ones hurt by this.

I think their data set is valuable, it's just freely available for anyone to scrape (or as you say, has already been scraped).

You can’t scrape it anymore. It’s really annoying because I was just scraping individual posts to save them and now I can’t.

What happens when you try?

Pretend you are a bing bot

It appears that this is just the Verge helping Reddit push PR because they (the Verge) did not bother contacting r/blind for information or the developers of the apps that they listed. It also appears that Reddit hasn’t done the same either.

===

Regarding the [June 7 article on The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-acc...), r/blind was not contacted for comment on the new development.

We have not had clarification on Reddit's definitions of "accessibility focused apps" or any process to determine apps that qualify.

There is no clarification on "non-comercial apps," given the current model of the apps listed by The Verge.

We have strong concerns that Reddit lacks expertise to consider the varying access needs of the blind and visually impaired community.

We have reached out Reddit for further comment.

We would also like to note that r/blind, u/rumster in particular, have continuously contacted Reddit over accessibility concerns, over the past 3 years, having received no substantive response.

r/blind

===

https://old.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/13zr8h2/_/jnbkjed

===

As added support, while the article mentions Luna, I would like to contribute that I have not been ccontacted in any way by Reddit whether that is in regards to this article, or the changes as a whole.

===

https://old.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/13zr8h2/_/jncxom1

Given just how awful Reddit's own UI is, one could argue _all_ third party clients are accessibility-focused.

100% agreed. My wife uses Apollo because it handles accessibility (particularly Dynamic Type) better than the official app.

If Apollo development stops because of exorbitant API pricing, allowing "accessibility focused" apps does fuck all for any of Apollo's blind users.

Accessibility should be part of all apps, but clearly that's not a priority for reddit or she wouldn't be having this problem in the first place. This insinuation by reddit that blind users should be corralled into some special "accessibility focused" app is just PR to cover the fact that they're trying to kill the most accessible reddit clients.

I had to scroll too far down for this, exactly what my first thought was. The web page and native app are just not that great once you've worked with Apollo and some of the other apps like baconreader come to mind.

If I use new reddit on mobile or iPad, the whole thing just crashes fairly quickly. It’s the only site that does that.

Without old.reddit I actually cannot use the site unless I confine it to a desktop perhaps.

This would be true even if they had a decent UI. They should allow people to innovate on top of their platform if they want to grow their user base.

Cutting off their own path to growth that tells me they're in cash-cow mode, so the business strategy is to auger their way into profitability by squeezing money from an ever-shrinking user base.

If that's the case, they should also be laying off people to juice margins... checks... yep.

Well, that was fun while it lasted. Are there any good reddit alternatives out there yet?

Reddit could have done zero development in the past decade and the website would be more usable today, not less

I don't agree, anecdotally there were a lot of people who bounced off the site because they didn't "get" the UX and even back then we had to fix the site using RIF. Now, was that difficulty a useful filter? Perhaps.

I actually agree with the GP comment.

The new UI brought in a bunch of people who turned the site into their personal little estate to lord over the serfs.

Example: I just got banned for 3 days because I reported someone for saying "politicians should all be burned alive." ... followed up by a week later reddit telling me they took action on that account because of the comment...

Example 2: I just got banned for 7 days because apparently "he's singing like he has a hand up his fa*ot ass" isn't homophobia and instead according to their message I'm

> Using Reddit’s reporting tools to spam, harass, bully, intimidate, abuse, or create a hostile environment

For context, the only way for these bans to be served is if the mod of the subreddit in which you reported that content reports you for "report abuse."

I think having the core website be a blank canvas and letting users choose their preferred interface is completely fine, Reddit was thriving long before the official app and "new reddit" came along. Third party mobile apps did very well and power users (that are responsible for a lot of content and moderation) were happy with RES

Reddit used to constantly break under load. It would throw up 503s at busy times every single day. The user interface was much better but the underlying technology was awful.

This is true, though it's still not perfect - I should have specified on the UI side I'm sure there's been a lot of valuable backend work

The way reddit seems to be unable to implement useful and complex new features leads me to wonder what their development practices are like.

It's like they can only create simple new things, but more complicated stuff is beyond them. Complex features like moderator tools, rate limiting, accessibility, a working video player, and a rich text editor.

Are they only hiring the cheapest least experienced developers? Too few devs, or too many managers?

Has reddit ever had a good reputation in the tech world? I'd rather work a pornhub than reddit and would take a pay cut to work at all of the other big social media companies than reddit. The engineering team seems terrible looking at the website and all its iterations, you'd have to work for people who had hosted all of those repulsive subreddits, the company itself seems very unstable. Probably moot would be more successful IPOing 4chan.

4chan was very close to making a loss for every single year m00t was running it. It actually still might be; the only revenue stream is a "4chan pass" that users are actively derided for purchasing and a few individually-funded ads.

Kind of gives me pre-aquisition Twitter vibes. Although I think Reddit is less bloated than Twitter was as an organization.

Hmmm… really makes you think, if you spend all day focused on the wrong things and hire based on your own biases you may not end up with a company full of A’s.

This is interesting. I wonder if this is future hope for accessibility and will be legislated by the Americans with Disability Act.

There’s already a portion called “section 508” [0] that requires software and web sites to be accessible, but it only applies to federal procurement.

An extension could be that apis are required for accessibility and that they apply to all businesses over a certain size.

While Section508 is designed for people with disabilities they affect all users since what helps screen readers also helps screen scrapers, etc. etc

[0] https://www.section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies/

I doubt it. There is nothing that states API is required for accessibility. There are common, easy to implement design tools to improve accessibility.

Look at the WCAG guidelines (https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/) for exactly what you should be doing (also for a look at what a truly accessible site looks like).

These are not difficult things to implement and do not require third party, or even first party apps to do. They can easily be integrated into any website.

It’s not a requirement now. I meant that there would be new legislation to expand ADA to cover API requirements.

APIs aren’t expensive to implement, but they reduce revenue since people bypass ads and weaken moats as data is more portable. Companies are choosing to drop and not build because of revenue, not cost.

So the problem with that is that (a) it requires a full update or amendments to the ADA, and (b) it requires legislators to understand what an API i and what it does.

For point (a): We went from 1990 to 2008 before the ADA was last amended. So, according to that precedent, we will be waiting until 2026 or so. I guess that's not too bad. But my money says it's 2040+ before we see that amended again.

For point (b): It feels like this one may be like asking if you can lick a rainbow.

I operate https://apewisdom.io/ I think that I can deal with the new pricing, but only at the condition that Reddit improves its current API, ideally adding websocket support, so that I don't have to pull a complete subreddit every x minutes.

Also currently you cannot get all the comments on a thread in one API call, it can take you hundreds to do it, because you can only do so by querying individually nested response when there are many. So it might cost you $1 already just to pull a daily thread under the current API system.

Also, you can only query the 500 last submissions (in new / best).

The Reddit API as it stands currently really sucks.

Reddit's ideal scenario would involve its users migrating to other platforms while preserving its archived content.

Its community was once thriving, but the mismanagement ruined it.

Despite reportedly having thousands of employees, Reddit's excessive hiring and ambitious expansion led to wasteful spending.

A platform with basic features like Reddit could easily be maintained by a team of fewer than 100 staff members and generate revenue through Google Ads.

I am certain that is not the narrative reddit is selling to potential investors because that is a narrative that does not maximize profit.

New Rule: We'll being kicking everyone hard in the jewels, every month!

Correction: ... *Except the blind

<everyone's OK now?>

This is great. Nobody likes the idea of excluding disabled people. But does it really get to the heart of the issue?

It's actually a pretty high bar for someone to decide to use anything besides the default client. More or less everyone using apps depending on these APIs has what, to them, was an important reason.

It's great this exemption addresses one of those important reasons, but it's just one of so many.

Are you telling me that Reddit’s accessibility is so bad that there exist popular third-party apps whose only purpose is to make Reddit more accessible?

Yes. RedditForBlind, Dystopia, and RedReader isn't really for accessibility but is the most accessible on Android, oh and Luna for Reddit.

And how do you differentiate it from the primary mission of every single other reddit app? It's the entire point of having apps...

There is no other site more dependant on its users for its success than Reddit. There is no other site with more militant users that Reddit. If they want to they can and will cause havoc. Do you want to invest in something with such a volatile and uncontrollable workforce? The Reddit management know how this will end, not well.

Based on how they've spent years ignoring what moderators ask for to help manage communities; I'm sure they don't give a shit as long as they can cash out.

I expect they are going to exempt a lot more than that. I have lost count of how many of the useful subreddits I belong to have already committed to going dark next week but it's a lot of them. This was a terrible judgement on Reddit's part and some kind of mea culpa from a higher-up followed by a rapid climb down looks inevitable if they don't want to be the next Twitter.

Most subs are going dark for 2 days, which is an inconvenience that will be soon forgotten.

The subs that try to stay dark permanently will have their mods replaced.

That kind of assumes there's an endless stream of quality moderators willing to work for free, just waiting for their turn.

> "quality moderators"

Reddit admins will just install the generic supermoderators that already "moderate" 300 default subs and call it a day. IPO line goes up, baby!

No, it correctly assumes there's an endless stream of people wanting to be moderators so they can wield the power that comes with that.

Whether that be by being a quality mod or by abusing it to silence people they disagree with is irrelevant.

It's not irrelevant. "Moderator" who uses their privileges only for abuse is not actually fulfilling the role of a moderator. Quality goes down the drain as a result.

any sub can remain private, and only allow posts from a select few, these subs could simply boot everybody and only let a small core team in and post regular updates so the sub is active, then Reddit can't just give it to someone else, not without an even bigger exodus. plus you can't just get a new mod team, especially for subs like askhistorians. They're very thorough, use many tools themselves that use the API to handle moderation and aggregate posts etc...

I mean, at this point they might as well call up Elon musk and ask advice on running a social network.

You're right they could keep the sub alive, but if they don't want to moderate anymore and their blackout failed to get the change they wanted, why would they bother?

They don't need to call Elon, there are plenty of far-right radical incubator subreddits they could ask for assistance that would give them the same advice.

Why doesn't Reddit just disable the ability to "go dark"?

The feature that mods are using is setting the subreddits to "private" (with no approved members). Disabling the ability to do this will break that function for people who use it, or look really petty.

Reddit could just disable this function on a specific moment, so that the feature cannot be used for coordinated strikes

Escalating open war against its users is not a very good idea for Reddit. Keep gaming that option out, and all the other responses and counterresponses.

Broadly, Reddit needs money to survive, and they need goodwill to get money. Burning $X of goodwill to make $10X dollars is kind of what they're trying to do now, but it's a very delicate move on their part. If you kind of build some simple mathematical models in your head it's not hard to see how delicate this move is, since "goodwill" is also people visiting. As large as the site is, it is not very many exponential processes from 90%+ losses. It is one of great perils of social sites in general, they can't help but transmit social contagions by their very design. There's quite a number of sites that have been wiped out by these forces (MySpace), and a larger number of sites that nominally still exist but are shadows of their former selves (Slashdot, Tumblr post-porn removal, Digg).

I suspect Reddit management is making a classic mistake and operating with a linear model of their options when in fact the situation is very non-linear because of the fact that goodwill feeds back on goodwill. It's only locally linear and they can leave the linear domain quickly and irreversibly.

To what end? The only thing it accomplishes is making them look petty.

Well the moderators could just strike in protest? Which would probably cause more issues

because they depend on free labors of people that are going dark for their business to function

I think Reddit will actually still run for quite a while without moderators as most egregious spam is caught by auto moderator rules (although set up by moderators).

I moderate a few subs and rarely do things manually.

So short term strikes won’t have much impact other than degraded quality.

Also, there’s already a process for “abandoned” subs where if subs aren’t moderated users can request mod access. So if mods go on strike, new users could request mod access.

For some of the larger subs I think this would actually be healthy as there are lots of subs with toxic mods but there is no way to oust them unless they choose to leave.

And then lose the moderators that make each sub Reddit work, they could do that, but then it would just turn into Voat eventually.

It would look even worse on their part, and there will probably still be a lot of people boycotting Reddit by their own volition regardless of how the site operates.

Reading through the list of concessions and explanations attributed to Steve Huffman that Reddit is currently sending to subreddit moderators, I saw a couple of things that struck as almost certainly untrue or at least exaggerated.

I don't think Reddit is approaching this in good faith.

But this wouldn’t make any difference for Apollo right?

Pretty much every sub I’m on has decided to strike for at least 2 days and there’s quite a weight behind indefinite

Yeah, I think they're just not saying indefinite because apparently that'd give reddit an excuse to just replace the mods using the excuse of inactivity.

A clever way of getting around this would be the mods posting every 30 days (I believe that was the cut-off for inactivity) so that Reddit has no valid excuse to replace them.

A private company is free to interpret their internal rules however they see fit. "Malicious compliance" isn't magic, reddit can replace whoever they want whenever they want and not be guilty of any crime.

Mostly they just don't care, because they probably expect most popular subreddits to just come back at some point. People will get bored.

Millions of people use reddit through the official app and DGAF that the UX is "bad" because we have spent the past 20 years gaslighting people into feeling like this is just how computers and things ARE

Well, this is weird. I'm totally blind, and I use Apollo precisely because it is accessible. So now what Reddit?

I love the accessibility of old.reddit.com it's the only way I browse the site, especially on my iPad. /sarcasm , but true.. can't imagine using the modern version.

Stupid question but I’m out of the loop here. What’s the main beef with the Reddit site and app? Is it just accessibility and moderation tools or something else?

I do use RES in desktop, but I mostly use it via the official mobile app these days. I used to miss old.Reddit.com but now I’m rather indifferent.

> Is it just accessibility and moderation tools or something else?

The information density and UX are terrible in new Reddit and the official app (in my opinion of course). I find them completely and utterly unusable. I just tried opening new Reddit and going to /r/all. I can see exactly 2 posts on my screen, compared to 14 on old Reddit. I tried clicking on something, it opens up in a narrow popover. Middle clicking to open it in a proper tab takes a lot longer than in old Reddit.

When it comes to the app, there are similar issues, it's just _so_ much slower than using RiF, the information density is abysmal, comment chains are painful for me to read and it uses _significantly_ more data than RiF. I'm guessing it preloads lots of assets in the background or something.

When they kill off 3rd party access, I will stop using it on my mobile. I already feel like I waste too much time on Reddit, ruining the experience will make it much easier to quit. If they ever kill old Reddit, then I guess I'll finally quit Reddit for good or make an extension that makes it look and work like the old version.

As a long time user, and moderator, I do everything via old.reddit (and the only additional thing is mod toolbox, which I could live without) on a proper computer. I just can't fathom any meaningful use of Reddit via a phone app. To me that's as insane as trying to read a novel on your phone or watch a movie.

Simply does not compute to me.

I watch movies, read novels, and even code on my phone but I refuse to use the reddit app. It's that bad.

I've done all these things on my phone, movie, novel, used Reddit, but not the site or the mobile app. I've tried many times thinking maybe it got better, it never did. I use relay and love it. it doesn't have chat but I don't ever use Reddit chat. I'm also not a mod.

Ha, I also access the site exclusively through the old web interface, but I do tons of moderation there via my phone, and might phrase it as, it’s as natural as reading a novel on my phone, or watching a movie.

My beef is more that Apollo is an all-time great iOS app. It’s a perfect execution of Apple’s design language and it lets me experience Reddit the way I want to.

New Reddit tries to be Facebook while old Reddit is, Reddit.

> As long as those apps are noncommercial

I feel like Apollo has always be ‘freemium’

Is anyone willing to make a noncommercial accessibility Reddit API that others can use?

For some reason reddit is terrible on Firefox for me (freezes). I have an i9/fiber. Chrome is fine.

Isn't this tacit admission that their pricing is meant to squeeze out third party apps?

Well I honestly don't care. The moment a service puts a paywalls around the API used to pull their public data they're already dead to me. No matter how many acts they decide to embark on to wash their dirty conscience.

If your service doesn't expose your data using an API or an open feed, then your service has already become irrelevant, period.

This whole drama is so absent logic, I can only conclude that Reddit is intentionally committing seppuku. After breaking every moral promise they've made with their users, they still can't control the narrative that their Billionaire overlords require of them. So they are breaking Reddit so bad, hoping nobody stays.

Since Twitter fired so much developers, started to price its APIs and monetize its blue marks there are two different reactions:

- The Venture Capitalists see these moves as the best thing that ever happened. A way top put employees (mostly the software developers) and users (that get things for free) in their place.

- The consumers and employees see that the value that Twitter provided is disappearing fast as much as employer as a platform.

Many VC backed companies, and other that do not, seem to be following Twitter trends. Let's see if they are right and they can lower salaries to employees and increase prices for consumers, or if they overestimated their capability to do so.

Reddit is just another example of this trend.

Just damage control at this point.

Not good enough.

Are there any disabilities involving bacon preference? What kind of features would enable the bacon-preferential spectrum community to participate more fully in the Reddit?

Nice. Maybe the general mobilization worked? Looks like a workaround to say "hey the well done apps -like Apollo- can still be used", or I have interpreted this announcement wrong?

My impression was that Apollo is NOT included in the free-tier access. IT seems to be addressing apps focused on accessability for blind users and the like, not general users of third-party apps.

It's going to get quite absurd. The apps for blind users might even make it difficult / impossible to be used by users with a vision. Otherwise, adding e.g. RIF features into a "reddit for blind people" would be an API payment circumvention.

The whole point of putting a price on the API -is- to kill Apollo and other standard third-party apps to get people on the official app full of ads.

Is Elon running this company? It's straight out of the Elon/Twitter playbook. Announce a new policy so horrid almost everyone is appalled. Wait a short period of time and then make a small/token exception for a sympathetic community and reap the media rewards. Wait a short time and then roll out former said horrid policy with less outrage because of fatigue and the newly muddied waters. Brilliantly evil.

I was thinking it was more of a Zuckerberg strategy. At various points in Facebook's early history, users would voice protest about new features, such as news feed. They pretty much ignored the feedback and let it keep growing beyond the size of the critics.

Reddit probably doesn't have as much growth as fb did of course.

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