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They're either entirely incompetent or they're intentionally driving away 3rd party apps. I can't see any other alternative than that.

It's pretty obviously the latter, the decision to kill access to NSFW posts via the API while the official apps will (AFAICT) still be able to access them means that 3rd party apps will be on the back foot even if they pay, for no good reason Reddit has been able to articulate.

NSFW on Reddit isn't just porn, the tag is used in the literal sense of "your boss wouldn't approve" or as a content warning for violence, heavy subjects, etc.

e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/search?q=nsfw%3Ayes&restr...

This explains the API changes themselves, but not the leadership team's behavior throughout the process. Holding this AMA didn't do anything productive for that objective but resulted in even more foot-in-mouth, now with even more attention than before.

Reddit's leadership had the potential headline "3rd party developer claims tiff with reddit administration in post" and took it upon themselves to upgrade it to what's here.

Yeah, I don't think people truly appreciate how valuable the data collected by mobile apps is for selling to marketers and advertising (which can't be blocked anywhere nearly as easily as it can be via browsers.)

There's a reason everyone pushes you to install their app; they want all that sweet, sweet time/network/location data and the ability to drive traffic to whatever degree they want via notifications.

I believe notifications also allow them to wake their app and collect data at that point in time, which they couldn't ordinarily do because iOS and Android have much more restrictions on background activity?

The two options aren't mutually exclusive, though. It's both, IMO.

> or they're intentionally driving away 3rd party apps

This doesn't seem to make sense. If Reddit wanted to kill 3rd party apps, they would just disable public API access entirely. The reaction would be basically the same it seems.

I think they want to collect a few huge checks from large orgs that want to scrape Reddit for their own analysis while also killing 3rd party client access.

That could be, although I would expect a typical "Call us for a quote" thing if that was the goal.

Maybe they're hoping that future LLM trainers will cough up the crazy prices?

Another reason a lot of users like to use third-party apps and old.reddit.com is to avoid all of the "Coins"/"rewards" and NFT avatars that litter the page these days and make it a distracting experience to try and read comments and posts (which should be front-and-center).

LLMs are so valuable that these fees are must be this high to keep them in check.

The fundamental problem is they’re not differentiating pricing between data scrapers and user apps.

Heck, they don’t even need to display ads in 3rd party apps. Just let me subscribe to Reddits API directly. Let me pay for my monthly usage.

LLMs will just scrape the website like they do with the rest of the internet. For Alphabet, Microsoft and some others they don't even need to do that as they already have everything stored for search results.

Just append .json to any Reddit URL and you'll get a full dump of that page, we'll see if they get rid of this feature as well. Way easier than scraping.

I'm pretty sure Reddit can figure out how to sell API access to LLMs, and how to differentiate that from my 'API access' because I happen to use Reddit through a mobile app.

This seems easy, you have limits per client per user.

There are a bunch a ways around that.

> I for the life of me can't figure out why they are charging so much money for the API.

The claim (made by several mods) is that they are spending > $10m annually on the API once you include eng effort, and they want a return on the opportunity cost, not just the pure compute cost.

Additionally, they've run reddit so shockingly incompetently that they appear to have separate, better APIs that they only allow their internal apps to use. So when they complain about the inefficiency of use of the available APIs, keep that in mind...

Clearly, however, they just don't want other frontends. See eg them moving to measuring API calls on a per-app basis, rather than on a per-app per-user basis. It's dumb, imo, to not just say so.

And like everything reddit does, this was done wildly incompetently. I'd ask how they could possibly have not thought through the impacts on accessible frontends, or mod tools (which itself demonstrates the fractal incompetence of reddit: why do mods have to build or buy their own tools?), but... well, reddit.

NB: so fractally incompetent that they apparently can't even measure api usage and share that with API users in real or near-real time. Like... how. Just how.

> allows the developer some discretion on how the ads can be formatted visually

this is absolutely the opposite of what they would want. Brands have very tight control over display advertising and would have to approve it everywhere

I'm thinking more about how it flows in the feeds, not arbitrary control. The nuance is a little hard for me to explain, but basically I just imagine they could do a better job highlighting this is an ad!. Current Reddit default approach makes ads seem like they're from a normal user or its a subreddit.

I should've clarified

because they want to push people to the first party app to boost userbase and data collection before IPO, it's all more money in their pockets because they're looking at cashing out in the short term and don't care much about the long term

in the immediacy people are still going to use reddit either way because there's no easy and popular alternative, just like twitter held on to most users despite all the noise

> I for the life of me can't figure out why they are charging so much money for the API

They are discontinuing the API, except for a small number of customers willing (maybe) to pay their price for the API.

I don't think this materially changes anything I posited though.

unfortunately all of these options kill the community, really.