Addressing the community about changes to our API
reddit.com
reddit.com
To be honest, I'm a bit thankful that they are finally doing this. Shutting down Apollo is making me realize I'm the frog in boiling water as they try to turn it into TikTok. With this move, they turned up the temperature a bit too fast, and this is my queue to jump out.
I guess it's a classic move out of the IPO playbook at this point to gain content and users via third party clients and then turn around and eliminate them by killing their API access entirely and/or making it prohibitively expensive.
Seems like a weird move by someone who's been at Reddit since the beginning and presumably understands its users well to me though.
We'll see how it works out for them...
It's a shame we're losing the biggest internet forum, but it's been on this trajectory for a long time anyway.
But that's what so great about reddit compared to the other big social media platforms: hard delineation by interest groups (subreddits).
Instagram, and any others (AFAIK) do not have anything like this feature. It's all just a jumbled mess of user-to-user connections.
I wouldn't say we're "losing the biggest internet forum" there. They can still make reddit more mainstream without old communities having to change much, right?
I won’t stand for it, and have just stopped using Reddit - mostly passively, but occasionally posting. Without a user-respective native client that follows system conventions and does not push garbage, the service is just not worth using.
Where are you getting that on reddit? I don't think I've ever seen content that's not normal posts in my subreddits. [Maybe it's been there the whole time but ad blocked away or something so I'm just never seeing it?]
I don't use r/popular, r/news, r/all, etc much if they're doing something different there.
I hate engagement.
imo, it like they're disorganizing the site to undermine and eventually cut out independent moderators, to avoid the business risk that is actively playing out.
I'm looking forward to that. back in the day it was "normal" to have topic related forums/communities. walled-garden-groups on social media and centralized solutions like reddit killed those, because they were easier to set up and manage. but the community was no longer really owned by someone from that community.
Venture capital is a hell of a drug.
Reddit says the API will cost less than a $1/month per user. [1]
Apollo says the API will cost $2.50/month per user. [2]
Moreover, Apollo claims that Reddit itself makes only $0.12/month per user, therefore the API charges are absurd. [2]
What are the correct numbers? These are numbers, not opinions.
EDIT: One issue...I suspect that Apollo users are significantly more active than the average Reddit MAU. Say, 4x more active. So the $0.12/month revenue estimate is like (for example) $0.50 per Apollo user.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
MAU are very different users compared to users making 200 reqs per day, and bring very different revenue.
Enough to account for an order of magnitude? IDK
reddit daily users (not MAU) are about 50m, which likely also don't generate 200res/d, and this difference is already order of magnitude.
Other "issue" from apollo side: he compares reddit API cost to his imgur API cost of $166 per 50m reqs, while forgetting that official imgur API costs $3k/50m.
I'm getting the impression that reddit isn't profitable not because of any fundamental issue, but because the leadership of the site have absolutely no idea what they're doing.
Sucks that I don't have popcorn at hand.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
Divorcing entirely from the subject of the strategy change, the decision to execute it in this manner seems incomprehensible unless they truly do want to completely drive away as many of the users who even know about this change as possible. Maybe we are so ignorant of Reddit's real user metrics that they consider almost everyone reading that AMA to be a money drain.
One could argue Huffman’s actions in this regard have been deeply unprofessional, as well as operating blatantly from a place of bad faith. Savvy negotiation is distinct from lying and pleading extortion.
> Say, 4x more active. So the $0.12/month revenue estimate is like (for example) $0.50 per Apollo user.
Numbers can very much be an opinion if you pull them out of thin air.
I just can't understand why they feel the need to keep publicly stating things that are either outright untrue or at least misleading. Just make an announcement to the effect of "this is the pricing, we have determined this is the best way to meet our financial goals" and shut the hell up. It's not hard!
The BS / gaslighting about precise numbers and the misrepresentation of what they've heard from developers is completely pointless.
I can only think of one reason: they’re panicking.
> It's reddit's ball, they can take it and go home any time they want.
While this is true, Reddit knows they are dependent on their users for their survival. That’s why they are panicking.
This is a somewhat cynical view, admittedly, but overall, many successful companies don't need to please "users" in the same way Reddit does. They obviously make some amount from advertisers, but they need users for advertisers to advertise too.
With Reddit the majority of the value to users is not created by Reddit but by the users themselves. The only real value that Reddit provides is a platform, and it's a platform that would be fairly easy to replicate (from a technical point of view it's just a large scale CRUD app, nothing special, it's a solved problem).
The only real reason that users stick with Reddit is the network effect, but that is the biggest risk to their platform as well. If they manage to alienate enough of the most active part of their user base into moving to another platform, the same network effect with ensure the rest of them follows, taking all of the value that Reddit provides to their visitors with them, and as a result all of the value all those visitors provide to paying advertisers.
This is not as unlikely as you'd think, because only a small percentage of visitors to Reddit actively contribute.
They have made a habit of fumbling and bumbling their way through things like this, and I don't think this is an exceptional circumstance.
thus they have a reputation as platform gods, and now they put up that reputation as bargaining chip, it's the classic "trust us, we care about you", and now it seems they really don't.
so now they owe an explanation to users, teams, and in general to anyone who they directly or indirectly hurt.
Just like if you ask a surgeon for opinion his opinion will lean towards surgery, because that’s what he knows.
The only reason Reddit is worth anything is because its community produces content for free to it.
Reddit doesn't have to do anything, but it also doesn't have to be worth anything, either.
In reality, the value of a MAU varies a ton by geography (and other factors).
For Meta, in 2023, US and Canada traffic is worth $48/yr, while developing world traffic is $3.35/yr. A ~15x difference.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
The typical Apollo user is probably much higher value than the average Reddit user, so the opportunity cost is higher as well.
Is there an alternative? If your business is an app around someone elses API, as it is in this case, Tweetbot, etc - it seems super reasonable no?
Yea the API could change at any moment. So maybe don't over leverage yourself. Play it safe, knowing any day could be the apps last.. but beyond that "building your business around someone else's API" isn't bad here is it?
I'd happily do it if it was going to make some money. So i'm kinda unsure where the distinction is for that phrase. When is it not a good idea? Seems a better phrase would be one that includes knowing what type of business you have.
So its fine if you want beer money, but it wont be a career.
RSS is an API first, there is no CEO, there are no investors, the peasants tried to stage a revolt against it many times.
Everyone on HN should probably watch this clip from Aaron Swartz again. (who deserves blame for the creation of RSS and Reddit)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aaron_Swartz_-_The_N...
It is odd we are to stupid to understand while he explains things so wonderfully?
It makes sense from a risk mitigation perspective, but it doesn't sound like the reddit third party app devs were unaware or incorrectly weighing this. It sounded like they took on personal and financial risk to do something they wanted to do and add something to the world that they wanted to. Rather than foolish, I find it admirable to abandon profit and security for principles. Especially in the context of reddit being founded on principles. Regardless of what happens to the site and the shareholders: it is safe to say that the true reddit is already dead.
> Is there an alternative?
Scraping. They're joking on some subreddits about how reddit is about to see costs skyrocket when third-party tools start requesting and parsing whole pages instead of using a lightweight API.
It was even worse, from what I remember. It was half their number that outraged them.
If you’re a search company you shouldn’t build your business on the Google search API, if you’re a compute provider you shouldn’t build your business on the AWS API, if you’re a payment provider you shouldn’t build your business on the Stripe API, etc. So the pedantic version of the rule is like, don’t build your business on just repackaging another company’s API, I guess?
Game development is a bit of an exception to many “rules” of the software business, since creative and artistic expression are significant motivating factors substituting in for a portion of the usual profit motive, in a way you generally don’t see in other software (look for the phrase ‘labour of love’ for examples).
Game engines are also not quite APIs imo, they are more like (massive) libraries that you vendor (bundle with your game and install as dependency). This inures you against some issues with building on a third party API, but not all (e.g. price changes are still an issue, but at a different granularity: “licensing fees per game” rather than “usage fees per call”).
These minor caveats aside, your example is good and worth investigating. Off the top of my head, I believe big game development companies are indeed pretty diversified when it comes to game engines, reflecting the wisdom of not building on someone else’s API.
Riot Games uses their own engine for League of Legends, but uses Unreal for Valorant and Unity for Runeterra and Wild Rift.
Blizzard uses their own engine(s) for StarCraft/Warcraft/WoW/Overwatch/Diablo, but uses Unity for Hearthstone. They did license Unreal Engine at some point but I’m not sure if they have used it.
Activision uses their own engine (IW) for all of their Call of Duty games.
EA uses Unreal and Unity for a few games, but largely uses their own engine (Frostbite).
Ubisoft used to use Unreal for their Tom Clancy series (e.g. Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell) but in fact moved that series to their own engines (Ghost Recon is now on Ubi’s Anvil engine while The Division is on their Snowdrop engine), specifically citing concerns over control and licensing fees as the reason for the move. Their Assassin’s Creed series has always been on their Anvil engine. I believe Ubisoft has another handful of their own engines as well, not quite “one engine per game series” but maybe close to that - an extreme example where they aren’t even willing to build one department’s business on another department’s API!
Valve uses their own engine, Source, for their games. (They have worked with both Unity and Unreal, but I believe this was for their VR and console hardware?)
Nintendo also uses their own engines for their games. (Like Valve, they have worked with both Unreal and Unity for their Switch handheld hardware.)
Epic Games is the only big game developer I can think of that is not diversified, they use Unreal exclusively. Being as they are also the developers of Unreal engine, this isn’t a case of relying on a third party.
So overall I would say yes, even in game development it’s clear that companies go to significant expense to not rely on someone else’s gaming API, and with Ubisoft there’s at least one example of a company publicly learning this exact lesson.
Compare that to Reddit's adversarial history with its user base and the backlash they're getting now. It's completely possible to make money off Reddit without resorting to measures like these. I'm a better person today because of Reddit, which is something I can't say about any other social media. It deeply hurts my heart to see such a valuable and meaningful space possibly die due to just simple greed. That, to me, is a far greater loss than anything else mentioned in the threads about this impending disaster.
This is almost entirely a "management / PR debacle". A very easily avoidable debacle, I'm fairly sure, if they had simply brought in the right people or person (even) to help them through the process.
A number of Huffman's statements, seemingly tinged with bitterness / resentment and broadcasting a sense of "unfairness" (i.e., that third party apps have been profitable but Reddit itself has not), have been laughably unprofessional. And I'm not even writing about the tit-for-tat potentially libelous completely lacking in understanding of relevant LAWS crap.
This is not remotely 'C-suite' 'level' messaging / behavior. Particularly for a company that put in a target of $15 billion valuation back in 2021.
Honestly, I will say, I feel a little bad for Huffman, at this point. He's clearly out of his depth. I suspect there is some pressure that has shown up / backstory that created a sense of serious urgency starting some months ago, and the management team at Reddit figured they could handle this process &/ want(ed) to demonstrate competence. So, they have been forging ahead w/ trying to line everything up. Some have cited "ChatGPT", and, of course, there's always the rising interest rates being a potential issue ... nevertheless, they've created substantial bad sentiment among some of the most important users & devs at a particularly BAD time.
Of course, this may well not derail an IPO, the site too much, etc., in the short run. But, it's ludicrously bad management - examples more likely by the day to show up in future business courses. A SOCIAL MEDIA site bungling MESSAGING, possibly catastrophically, and pissing off some of the people MOST WILLING to contribute to financial health (almost certainly) and MOST INTERESTED in the site continuing to be viable!
They really ought to consider, if they haven't done so already, getting some small team of 'crisis PR' or 'management advisors' or something in, with expertise in the various areas they are clearly having massive issues with right now. Simply doing that, and having Huffman indicate (externally) a degree of 'stepping aside' so that things can be righted, could defuse some of the serious negative sentiment they have now generated.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
(Also an archive link here, just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20230609180814/https://old.reddi...)
Some people just never cease to surprise you.
Nothing I've seen from Reddit the last years have been particularly impressive, they even used some third party company for their chat functionality which I don't think many users wanted or used. At least the uptime seems to have improved.
I have no clue if that's what's going on, but I've seen it many many times
https://old.reddit.com/user/spez
EDIT: links for replies from other reddit officials:
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
Going into a user's profile for their comments is a paradigm older than Reddit.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/145bxmi/c...
There really aren't many answers though, unfortunately. Only 12 answers from u/spez in a sea of 14k+ comments...
It wasn't much of an AMA IMO. Mostly very short answers and I don't see any new insights here.
Fourteen. He replied to fourteen comments. In the space of four hours.
It's not often that you see a platform implode in real time.
1. They're not backing down at all, and even explicitly mention that Apollo/RIF/Sync will be going down because of this.
2. It looks like they are backtracking a bit on the moderation tools that use the API. This makes sense as otherwise Reddit would have been a cesspool, but a lot of moderators do use tools like Apollo, so it will be interesting to see what happens to the quality bar over time.
3. Removing NSFW content from the API is interesting - I wonder if the main app will still have access to this?
Regulatory pressure to perform age verification is real.
But Reddit already requires users to be logged in and their account to have gone to the website and clicked on an explicit toggle in order to access NSFW content.
When (and sadly inevitably if) Reddit requires age verification to access adult content, then it will be on a per account basis - and hence the toggle would not be enabled without it. So at that point the status quo still fulfils the regulatory requirement the account has checked age. It is not clear at all to anyone who thinks about it for a second why third party clients would change anything here.
2. I think it'll go down regardless. Mod tools is one thing, but I would really like to know the percentage of mods who use third-party Reddit apps like Apollo, RIF, etc. I wonder how many will leave the platform. If so we can expect more power-hungry mods, or Reddit having to pay for their own moderation.
3. Reddit says NSFW content is staying within the main app, but I can see it going away soon. A popular Reddit image hoster banned and deleted all NSFW content which already broke a lot of the posts in NSFW subreddits. And with Reddit now having investors and needing to attract more expensive advertisers, I can see them scrubbing NSFW content in full to become a more attractive ad platform. Especially since that's really going to be the way they make the bulk of their money.
This is the problem here: these people already started to delete their content and will withdraw their tools in three weeks. Time is up and the CEO doesn't even acknowledge the massive problems this change causes for moderation tools. His post should've been an about face but no.
So, no it won't be 20-30% immediately, might be so small it doesn't even register beyond normal day to day variance. But it will be 90%+ in a year.
Such a silly justification, as if children are using the API to find porn, which is so difficult otherwise.
Yes they are.
> which is so difficult otherwise.
No, it's not.
What evidence do you have?
Or it would if there were any 3rd party developers left.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first step towards removing all the pornography off Reddit entirely, for good reason as much of it is very extreme and not something children should be looking at at all really. And even more of it is degrading to women, depicting them just as holes to fuck. It was worse in the past too, with so-called "jailbait" subreddits and pornographic images of dead women, which were only removed after a considerable amount of pressure on the admins. Really makes one wonder what their priorities are.
If the goal was to remove porn, then just enforce higher moderation standards. Removing porn from the API doesn't give the impression of "we want to make the site safer to use", it's communicating "if you want your smut, use the official app so we can blast you with ads".
I have my own qualms with the "protect the children" argument that everyone hides behind for their distaste of porn and this is why; it's never about protecting children; it's about controlling other people. If you view reddit's motivation as driving people towards to the official app where they can be monetized, then these actions make the most sense. If you delude yourself into think they are doing this to protect children, then why are they acting so inefficiently? Reddit already has precedence for banning crude subreddits.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_he...
> NSFW
> Regulatory environment around NSFW is changing rapidly and aggressively.
> The challenge is regulators and lawmakers (those who fine and sue), who don’t care about 3rd party apps and don’t understand them. They’ll come after us, not the 3rd party apps. Lawmakers don’t look at NSFW with nuance.
> We have work to do on our platform around age-gating and related stuff to be able to keep that content – we will fight for it. Sex is universal.
> I acknowledge it was a tight timeline. For what it’s worth, we are continuing to chat with many of the developers who still want to work with us.
This is his worst answer, yet. A complete lack of respect for the developers of the affected apps, as well as their users.
I’m genuinely shocked that he’s so willing to admit to the incompetence of Reddit’s decision-makers and their complete disconnect with the situation on the ground.
> Apologies for the delay. We are responding now. > > If others have apps they would like to be considered for the paid API tier, please reach out here and select “This is a partnership request.”
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
These don’t read as prepared answers to me.
I mean the post has 14,000 comments and it's only been live for 2 hours...
Reddit's UI is just not good at that use case or threads with that amount of comments.
If there’s a crisis PR person there, they’ve faked it until they made it.
> We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
The problem is that they're fucking it all up.
I don't personally think it can, and because there's zero proof available, all we have to go off of is the overall trustworthiness of the speaker, and the context to which they are speaking, ie, they're proven to be untrustworthy and they're in a situation where they need to save face.
- Steve continuing to drag Christian's credibility and doubling down on the claim that Christian says "one thing to us while saying something completely different externally," and offering no evidence a day after having that exact claim blow up in his face.
- An admin insisting "We have programs in place to support our largest communities" and immediately getting replies by top 1% subreddit mods (ie ELI5) who tried those programs and said the admins they "adopted" hardly participated and didn't seem to understand the basic functionality of the mod tools. No further replies from reddit there.
- Steve copy and pasting a comment verbatim from his planning document in reply to a blind user and accidentally leaving the "A:" as in "answer" on it before stealth-editing it and getting caught by the users. No further replies from Steve there.
This is absolutely wild. I hope we get a detailed post-mortem on this AMA as a masterclass in poor public relations and devrel. It's so densely catastrophic. It's like a fractal of compounding mistakes reaching back to the foundation they laid when these changes were first announced. I didn't link the individual comments since they're all conveniently indexed at the top of the thread.
And they have confirmed they are 100% bought into the plan that accessibility at Reddit at this time consists of the administration promising updates sometime in the future, and the expectation 3rd party developers will work "non commercially" to maintain alternatives in the meantime.
At this point I have to wonder if this really is an intentional strategy to ensure the sort of users reacting negatively to these changes are driven away from the site as completely as possible as part of Reddit's ongoing macro shift. The fumbling is so thorough it looks purposeful.
It's absurd he's even pretending that these developers are leaving because they "don't want to work with us." Selig posted so many receipts of him going above and beyond to play well with reddit, and never even had any qualms with the idea of paying for API usage. Steve Huffman pretending that we didn't see all of this is so spineless and pathetic. Everyone at reddit should be embarrassed to work for him.
I hope their IPO tanks.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
u/spez is likely violating the Canadian libel laws...
Edit - Note this is not civil libel, this is the criminal code.
He's violating Canadian CRIMINAL code now!
Who cares?
I'm not being flippant: what jurisdiction - especially criminal - does Canada have here?
Let's review the facts: Spez is an American citizen in the United States - a country famous for its Freedom of Speech. Good luck to anyone who wants to make the case that because he may have been slanderous to a Canadian citizen he should be extradited to face Canadian courts.
Though Reddit is an American company, and I'm not sure what the rules are for cross-region lawsuits.
I'm no fan of spez or what Reddit is doing, but it seems like the Apollo guy made some not clear messaging as well. He's only human, I probably would have made the same mistake, but it gives plenty of leeway for spez's comments.
Reddit explicitly doesn't care if Apollo dies, they have already done their calculus there, but they don't seem to be in any significant risk of libel.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
"His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him."
IMO, investors should ensure that a CEO can pass a 100 level undergrad PR class before handing them millions of dollars.
this part is up to debate. I would also consider "joke" with $10m sticker to go away quiet as a threat, which looks like didn't go through and apollo dev backed up.
its regular bs sugar coating, like you know someone is cheating, and he knows he is cheating but doesn't admit, but you don't have proof and you say "oh it was miscommunication" for the sake of continuing cooperation.
looks like we are in disagreement about this part.
> Apollo dev: How did you take that, sorry? Could you elaborate?
> spez: Oh, like, cause you were like "hey, if you want this, if you want this to go away, like [unintelligeble]..."
> Apollo dev: Oh, I said if you want Apollo to go quiet, like I would say it's quite loud in terms of its API use..."
> spez: Oh, okay, got it. Got it, sorry. That's a complete misinterpretation on my part. I apologize immediately [...]
Would you expect spez to still consider it a threat given both the literal content of what he says, and the tone it was said in? I see no way your interpretation makes sense.
Update on your updated comment: > and the tone it was said in? I see no way your interpretation makes sense.
Looks like we are again in disagreement about this.
sorry, this doesn't make sense to me.
I answered this already, it could be sugarcoating. Sorry, this discussion is low quality to my taste and I have no interest in continuing. Good bye.
Yesterday he wrote,
> Why doesn't Reddit just buy Apollo and other third-party apps?
> This was a very common comment across the topics: "If Apollo has an apparent opportunity cost of $20 million per year, why not just buy them and other third-party apps, as they did with Alien Blue?"
> I believe it's a fair question. If these apps apparently cost so much, an easy solution that would likely make everyone happy would be to simply buy these apps out. So I brought that up to them during a call on May 31st where I was suggesting a variety of potential solutions
And he linked to a comment,
https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_w...
spez is free to release counter-evidence, the Apollo dev has given his approval for anything to be released. Him not doing it means we just have the Apollo devs recording to go off - and that is very, very clearly referring to what he is claiming it's referring to.
Apollo dev said the call was 24hrs before June 1st. So he asked reddit for 10 million dollars right before he made this post:
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
He had previously made 2 other posts about it before on Apr 18-19, so that's what he meant by "quiet down". Reddit refused to pay him $10 million and so he went the opposite of "quiet", he made a post telling his story and it blew up.
For the next week when mods were taking their subs private, the Apollo dev didn't disclose to any of them that he'd asked for 10 million to "have Apollo quiet down." If some reddit employee hadn't asked him about it Mastodon, he would never have told anyone about that.
If I'm missing something you're alluding to in the beginning I'd appreciate an explicit explanation :)
Christian only released the recording to dispute the claim from spez that he threatened Reddit with blackmail (quite a serious claim imo)
I can't imagine doing business with Reddit after their CEO outright lied to try to tarnish another developers reputation.
...What are the odds of Reddit being the next Facebook instead of the next MySpace? It has to be astronomically low.
CEOs will only stop being giant twats when being a giant twat inevitably leads you to personal ruin.
> Please feel free to give examples where I said something differently in public versus what I said to you. I give you full permission.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
[1] http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
Christian suggests that if Apollo is costing reddit $20m/year, they could just buy it for $10m as a win/win for everyone
Reddit interprets his referring to "going quiet" as some sort of extortion/blackmail
Christian clarifies, everyone apologizes for the misunderstanding and the conversation moves on
Weeks later, Reddit admins publicly accuse him of blackmail
Christian releases his statement and a snippet of a call recording
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing_issues#Perform... [1]: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...
Weeks later, after Christian announced to his community the most likely impact on the app of the upcoming API changes and a summary of his conversations with Reddit.
Reading this comment makes me wonder if Steve genuinely believes the ongoing outrage from Reddit's community is somehow to any extent Christian's fault. "Look, it was a threat after all. He's doing what we thought he would and what he said he wouldn't do."
More people use Reddit because of Apollo because the experience is so much better than their own app. They should take advantage of that by coming up with a mutually beneficial solution instead of killing it. They would make a lot more revenue by requiring that Apollo display ads than killing it and losing some percentage of users or traffic in the process. Are they that confident that all of the Apollo users are just going to switch to their own app on July 1st? (they won't)
I understand why the status-quo isn't sustainable. Reddit has to figure out how to be profitable eventually, but this seems like a tone deaf way to try to get there which probably won't have the intended result.
Twitter basically became a Nazi rally and they're still going to clear a billion dollars in revenue this year.
Libel is actually quite illegal. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What? No it didn't. If you're seeing that sort of content on Twitter it must be because you're following those sort of people.
And Elon himself has been retweeting and responding favorably to racist content for a while. It's obvious there is an attempt on his part to normalize this stuff on the platform. He's basically a redpilled troll at this point.
It was never going to be anything other than a disaster, but this is just chucking fuel on the fire.
I am curious really here about Huffman's behaviour. He may be quite incompetent (I'm judging that primarily based on the observation that changes in the web site and app sit somewhere between willful negligence and active sabotage in terms of what they have done to the user experience). But it still doesn't explain some of the completely nonsensical aspects of his decisions.
I feel like there's something behind the scenes here. For example, Huffman has been told he has until September to make money or he's fired and Reddit is being sold for parts to "big LLM". Probably because there's a concrete offer on the table by some private equity or something like that which dwarfs anything they could conceivably make another way.
Possibly, in an alternative (similar) theory, they have a concrete offer from a player (say OpenAI) for LLM access that would make them profitable forever, but it requires exclusivity, and these API changes are designed to get 3rd party usage down to a level that would comply with that agreement.
In any of these cases he's bound by confidentially not to talk about it so he's stuck with doing what seem like crazy non-sensical things in public to achieve these outcomes.
Another bad look is the series potshots taken at 3rd party developers: "His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place", "We’re continuing to work with folks who want to work with us. For what it’s worth, this includes many of the apps that haven’t been taking the spotlight this week.", "Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable."
Spoken by a dude about to make bank on IPO, comparing his profits to little indie devs who he just put out of business.
I do wonder, when will Reddit abolish its RSS feeds? That was actually one of the first signs of the apocalypse at Twitter, back in 2012.
For those not closely following the Reddit killing off third party clients via API price gouging drama, this is one of the Reddit co-founders and its current CEO u/spez (Steve Huffman) doing a live AMA.
But only time will tell whether this actually hold.
This could also be used as a NSFW flag.
Enough people use 3rd party apps that this would also cover the high fees that they wish you could charge to LLMs. Which, due to LinkedIn vs. HiQ -- they're just going to scrape publicly anyways. I build anti-captcha systems for bot scraping, it's trivially easy to bypass bot protection...there's no way around this without making logging in and agreeing to ToS necessary just to view comments.
Hell they could even still include advertisements that come through the API as native posts and would not only be difficult to filter, but also be against API ToS to filter out. Yeah they wouldn't be as precisely-targeted but I mean, if someone is on a niche subreddit, how much more targeting do you need when you're already getting subscription fees from the same user you'd be showing additional ads to.
Point is, they can still be extremely greedy while not kneecapping 3rd party clients that don't suck like their app does.
Two problems with this from their perspective:
- It cedes control of the user experience to third party apps, forgoing potential monetization "opportunities" (aggressively pushing NFT avatars, etc) and possibility of keeping users perpetually sucked in TikTok-style
- It greatly reduces the amount of data that can be harvested
Clearly, they value these things more than the do keeping around "core reddit" (chronological list of posts) users who only care for the base product, even if they contribute disproportionally relative to average users.
Which the paying subscriber is paying to avoid.
Regardless of the AI/ML play on the data - I suspect they just aren't willing to lose the user signals.
Frankly - it's a good way to provide more compelling numbers around advertising effectiveness and impact, and it lets them tap into that information to generate more effective campaigns.
I think reddit's advertising success depends a lot on being able to help companies approach the userbase effectively (and charge money for that service). Otherwise... it's a really tight position - because companies will just do an end run around paid services by generating their own organic looking content and posting it directly to the site (Why pay reddit for an ad for these boots... I can just generate some posts on r/buyitforlife and then bring it up in the comments)
Those are certainly strong signals, and yes - they can probably capture that data through api interactions.
That's not what they're after. They're after - how long did the user view X, which item did they pause on, what did they hover over, how long do they scroll, etc...
I'd be willing to bet good money the reason one of the complaints against Apollo was them being "inefficient" is a result of basically exactly the following conversation between product/engineering:
---
Product: Can't we just capture exactly what the user is doing through the API?
Engineering: Sort of - we have some idea, but clients tend to load comments/posts in batches. We don't know exactly which one the user is looking at, or for how long.
Product: So the client is pulling more information than it needs? And that's causing us problems with our analytics?
Engineering: umm ... We can capture that data if the user is on the official client.
Steve has finally said in his AMA today, that Reddit has to be a sustainable business to survive! Very true, and that alone is justification for making radical change that people may hate. Yet, he has been so resistant to saying it that it seems like he didn’t want to admit it to himself either… and so the decisions he’s made haven’t been founded in an embrace of that idea but rather in a desperate attempt to avoid it.
Any competent business leader in charge of Reddit would understand that the reason Reddit only spends 100m/year on salaries is because they receive hundreds of millions in free labor from the small minority of Reddit power users who are fundamental to its success… any competent business leader would squeeze the 99% of users who have never delivered a single contribution to Reddit… and yet, Steve decided to target the smallest minority who actually matter to reddit’s future.
Putting YouTube style unskippable video ads into the official Reddit app would have pissed off zero power users and 10xed revenue.
Question is... Does it matter? Will it drive the users that create content away?
If the answer is no, it the embarrassment is meaningless.
Confirmation that these changes are at least partially due to LLM training using Reddit data, which many have speculated to be the case.
Edit: oh wait, maybe I misunderstood. Do they mean PER APP? I read it as PER USER. If it is per app that’s ridiculous.
[0]: https://developers.reddit.com/waitlist
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
It would have been a reasonable compromise to cut off API access to users who don't have Reddit Gold, but that's off the table, because it doesn't juice the numbers for the IPO the right way.
>Premium Enterprise API / Third-party apps
>Effective July 1, 2023, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app).
>Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect.
>For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
This types of generalization irks me everytime. "typical user send 20 emails every month, surely if you want to send more than 20 emails you will happily pay for it".
I think their expectation on Reddit's end is that these third-party apps "should" be charging a subscription fee to every single user that uses them, of something like $12/year, and passing most of that on to Reddit; where the heavy users will be negative-margin to retain, but where this doesn't matter because the users who don't use Reddit much will be subsidizing them. Like insurance.
Which is also terribly broken, for classical insurance-economics reasons: just like healthy people generally don't care about getting health insurance unless they're forced to do so, people who don't use Reddit much certainly won't be willing to pay $12/year for it. So it'll only be those power users interested in paying; and so the average usage among that group will be much higher; and so you'll need to charge them quite a bit more than $12/year... and they probably won't be willing to pay that.
And if this is somehow true then it doesn’t really paint a positive picture of Reddit’s business.
And this is about API calls, not user engagement. I can’t imagine that the difference between people who post and those who don’t, in terms of API usage, to be significant based only on how many API calls it takes to post a comment.
The median user of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or whatever else, uses the app for on average ~five minutes a day. They just "check" it to see if there's anything interesting; they find that there's not; and then they close it. Or, they just decide to open one such app when waiting for a bus, and scroll until their bus gets there; then they open a different app while waiting for their lunch order to be made, then close that one when they get their lunch; etc.
Most people who "use" social media, are not addicted to social media, or even engaged with social media. They just barely use social media.
This group of people is why every single MAU figure is considered to be heavily inflated. All you have to do is open the app for a minute once a month and suddenly you're an "active user" for that month. Every social network has far, far fewer "actually active" users than they try to make it seem.
> And this is about API calls, not user engagement.
If you aren't aware: engagement drives linger time. The same people who create accounts, etc. are the people who spend hours on the app. People who just "poke their nose in" but don't engage almost always spend less time on the app. Degree of engagement with an app, can be used as a very reliable proxy (by third-party analysis firms who don't have access to actual usage-time data) for likelihood to spend more time using a given app.
I'm guessing the money Reddit will make from monetizing their API will much more than outweigh the losses.
Reddit has Lemmy, maybe, but they seem in a less mature place than Mastodon was when Twitter fumbled.
Naysay Mastodon all you want, but i think it gained a fair bit of traction from Twitter's event. Best of all, it's not trying to be Twitter. I'm looking for that with Reddit, currently.
You underestimate the staying power of a network.
Actually now that I think about it, I would argue that the limited beta (and weird invite program) of GMail slowed its adoption as well.
Once you cross the trust thermocline,[0] collapse is sudden and virtually irreversible.
[0] https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-bi...
Fact is, they dont have the critical mass Reddit does, and never will until it is actually dead, not "dying" like it has been for half a decade.
Perhaps that is the better way forward than the aggregated approach of Reddit, going back to the old-school approach of separate forums with their own websites.
Yeah, this would be great if users move and the right entities sponsor it. Again, HN is a good example, as YC seems to have the right incentives to keep this place nice.
The problem with Voat and many of the others was that they either started in response to Reddit changes that most users didn't care about and that of those that did care the majority favored the changes, or if they already existed they were small enough that the people who left Reddit for them due to those Reddit change quickly became the overwhelming majority of their users.
Voat, for example either started because or got the majority of its users because Reddit got rid of /r/coontown and similar racist subreddits and got rid of a bunch of child sex subreddits. Those quickly reformed on Voat.
People did make Voat groups for mainstream things like movies and science, and some people tried to make those decent alternatives to say /r/movies and /r/science but it did't work. Any decent discussion on /v/movies or /v/science you could also find on /r/movies or /r/science. But on /v/movies or /v/science you'd also have a bunch of the racist and antisemite discussions too which weren't on /r/movies or /r/science.
For example see this Voat discussion of season 2 of The Mandalorian from /v/movies [1]. Here's an example from /v/science [2].
This time has a chance to be different because this time it won't be the dregs of Reddit leaving. It will mostly be decent people leaving. Those who remain might actually miss them instead of being happy they are gone, and so might consider actually following.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201225021055/https://voat.co/v...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20201223123156/https://voat.co/v...
Was there some brief moment in time where there was any quality content on voat? why else would anyone volunteer to say they tried that platform and found it compelling :|
That is insane, it is like a screenshot of the old notorious white supremacist boards from the 00s. Yeah no wonder that reddit alternative didn't have a meteoric rise to popularity.
TBH, it seems like Discord is a natural alternative for many reddit communities, many of which already have one. And it tends to be more strictly moderated in my experience.
I fear Discord replacing Reddit, as its so siloed off and insular. There literally could not be an effort to "backup" Discord like this post if (and when) the decline begins.
Frankly I think this might be a worse PR move than what Elon did when he did this with Twitter's API.
Is it someone in panic over a potential large impact on the IPO? I dont even think it would have that much of an effect if he hadn't gone on the platform to make the problem worse.
Insincere, lazy, and easily proven wrong on several fronts, this has absolutely made things worse. There are several major subs on the fence now joining the blackout due to this performance.
What were they hoping to achieve here? Seriously?
Basically, why is Apollo paying Reddit for my Reddit usage, when I don't even pay Reddit for my Reddit usage?
I've personally quit Reddit as of this debacle because it made me realise how much I used it everyday and this was a good enough excuse to look elsewhere.
Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.
(Okay, so apparently client ID isn't user ID, but app ID. Explains a lot.)
They likely have power users greatly pulling that mean up that, in all cases, should probably be capped.
EDIT: Ooof, people dislike this thought. Has the Apollo dev spoken out about their approach? I'll be the first to admit I haven't seen reddit's entire debacle, but thought I was reasonably following the play by play.
The reddit post is what I was referencing by looking at mean vs. median/99%
I hadn't heard anything about the "Free Data API" limit of 100 qpm before this either, so I assume the issues is that the free API is filtered and does not include any "mature content".
> Effective July 5, 2023, we will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed. This change will not impact any moderator bots or extensions. In our conversations with moderators and developers, we heard two areas of feedback we plan to address.
0: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
> since he says that "over 90% of apps" make rates at requests within the free limit.
>90% of apps are people that played around with the API a bit for fun or run a small hobby-bot or something. Of course those stay below the limit (and for many of those, 100 qpm is indeed quite generous). It's also entirely irrelevant to the small number of apps that non-dev end users use.
You may be right, the reddit post has been edited multiple times. I assumed when it referenced OAuth that it was per end user, but it does seem that "client_id" is global to the application. I wish I could find any place else that lays out the details on the limit besides just this one reddit post...
Currently, it says the limit is "100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication"
And it's pretty shitty if he's including every single toy project within the "90% of apps".
https://reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_e...
And in the meantime, users are also upvoting posts, commenting, scrolling, and doing other things that cut into the API quota
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
https://rdrama.net/post/177376/spez-arrives-to-take-his-flog...
Is there no merit to this?
That Reddit have decided to end free access to their APIs isn't itself an issue.
The way they're doing it, and the significant departure from the decade and a half long de-facto agreement that a large body of the user base believe themselves to be party trading user generated content and user sourced moderation in exchange for platform access does seem to have missed the mark though.
It doesn't take much creative thought to conceive of a scheme whereby the paid Reddit Gold includes API access, for example. Which should be a bit like a YouTube Premium or Spotify Premium kind of deal - direct contribution as alternative to advertising to achieve per user monetization.
It's not even a stretch to partner with third party apps and let them collect the user payments as an alternative to requiring users to pay for the app and Reddit Gold separately.
But the very short notice period and seemingly unpalatable pricing, together with some of the reported questionable comments and actions from Reddit, don't come across as reasonable from any rational perspective.
Obviously it's hard to compete on infrastructure cost with an actual cloud provider, but I still think two orders of magnitude should be enough that an entity the size of Reddit can offer a much more reasonable price than that.
They could also optimise their API layer to better match the needs of 3rd party apps if the pure number of calls is the issue.
I don't think Reddit can be profitable. What business model is there that can work? Almost anything that generates revenue harms the user experience. Users will only tolerate so much. If they try to extract value with ads or paywalls, they lose the users.
If they please the users, how can they make money from that? The amount users are willing to pay is not enough.
I think the only way for it to carry on is without capitalism. They need to operate more like a Wikipedia or an archive.org. Put the profit motive aside and exist for and by the users.
Oh well...
The problem is that they are charging so much for it that it will kill all of the third party apps, which is likely one of reddits main goals with the change.
And you think that Reddit handled this appropriately, to the point where you would "support" them? So you support the libel, alienating your userbase, moderators, and 3rd party developers, and straight up lying to the community?
Not even getting into the actual API changes and how badly they were introduced, this whole thing was an exercise in how to permanently alienate their most vocal and engaged users. It's truly masterclass in what not to do in a PR crisis.
Gotta love that you didn't dare reply to the actual meat of my comment, either.
I wouldn't be surprised if every single app shut down after this fiasco. I'm sure it's their fault too, though. Couldn't possibly be the giant corporation who doesn't know how to do basic PR and communications.
Those apps are basically browsers. Applications to browse Reddit, right?
Why not use the "html over http" API which every other browser also uses?
Yes, you would have to harden the code a bit so it gracefully deals with the structure of the html changing sometimes. And you would have to update the parser from time to time. But is that such a big problem?
Also: When using the API, how is the free API limit not enough? In TFA it says "100 queries per minute per OAuth client id". That is per user, right? Why does it take more than 100 API requests per minute to use reddit?
Nope, not even close.
You are behind a firewall designed to cut out bots, and now need to bypass or handle anti-bot CAPTCHA. Again, bad.
You want to provide push notifications, but that requires background polling on a server. Yep, that's pretty bad, since it multiplies the effort AND erases the "basically just a browser" part in one swoop. Now you need to probably pass user credentials to your backend (bad) and scrape on the server, bypassing Cloudflare/etc in a headless manner (bad.)
Reddit shuts down old.reddit.com and cuts off access to NSFW and "edgy" or perhaps just small subreddits except when logged in on official apps. Now you need to scrape from either official iOS/Android APIs where the keys could go invalid at any time, or the JS desktop site which is all JS and XHRs everywhere. The only way to make your app truly behave like the real thing is to carefully set up an actual browser engine and hide evidence that you're using automation, which is a lot harder than you might imagine. Yep, you guessed it. Very, very bad.
For that last thing, Twitch's "integrity check" mechanism is a great illustration of just how user hostile things will quickly become. Twitch integrity check won't even pass for real browsers half the time. It hates Linux users. This is the future you get.
No, it's per app.