No one is upset because reddit wants to make the API paid. Several 3rd party apps were looking forward to working with reddit in this regard.

People are upset because:

- Reddit has been terrible and dishonest in their communication - Reddit is dropping Twitter-like pricing out of the blue - These prices seem to have the goal of killing 3rd party apps instead of merely being ‘realistic’ or ‘fair’, like Reddit is claiming - Reddit is dragging well respected devs through the mud and trying to make them look like the bad guys

I think that this is 10+ years of resentment on the part of Reddit's users against Reddit itself coming home to roost. The perception of Reddit's attitude to users for a long time now has been "well, we're making all these user-hostile changes, and we don't care what you think about it, peasant. You can just shut up and keep using old.reddit.com as long as we feel like giving you permission to do so, but one day that'll end too." I think for a lot of people this latest drama is just the last straw.

> Reddit is not profitable.

Seems like entirely through bad management. The choices made, from mostly serving links and text to hosting image and video which ballooned operating costs to expanding their workforce from 700 to 2000 while having no proyect worth putting that many people to work on.

> Reddit finally finds a way to possibly become profitable

Says who? Their API changes would not make them profitable. The changes, price and timeline show that the intent is to kill 3rd party ecosystem, not profitability.

> scumbags focused on profit?

Reddit is the only social media that has unpaid mods. Facebook pays people to keep conversation civil, reddit wants you to do that work for free while they release NFT profile pics.

people are not angry at reddit for wanting to be profitable, people are angry because there have been 10 years of mismanagement, 0 mod support, aggresive anti user choices and the few tools that people use to make the website not want to pluck your eyes out being pulled under them with 0 recourse

It's not what they're doing, for the most part, but the way they're doing it.

I don't think many people begrudge them to implementing a paid API to recoup the costs of third-party clients.

But they've set the price way too high, with practically no warning, defamed an app developer and then went "lalalala we can't hear you" when people, rightly, pushed back.

All while using dark patterns to push users to their (objectively awful) official web and mobile apps. Power users (especially mods) just can't use these to do what they need to do, Reddit doesn't care and now Reddit is - effectively - killing off 3rd party apps.

Being unprofitable and seeking profit does not entitle someone to bait and switch tactics. And that's simply what this is, just over a longer time-scale.

Bait and switch tactics are immoral and in some cases illegal.

Yes, companies should seek profitability, yes it's good for the infinite VC money to stop propping up unhealthy companies. No, unhealthy companies shouldn't seek to get to profitability by abusing their users.

> I know people are upset about the CEO being a twat, but that's a separate issue.

Is it separate? Given that he's being a twat to the specific person that originally raised the concerns

there's a very big difference between trying to become profitable and making a change that forces every 3rd party app to shutdown within 30 days because of an asinine price hike on their API

The transparency has been horseshit from spez and the other admin. As it's been pointed out, when Apple bought Dark Sky, 30 months were given to anyone using the API to adjust to the new landscape. These 3rd party apps that have been around longer than Reddit's app were given 30 days. And that doesn't even take into account the finger-pointing and immature behavior Spez threw at Christian (the Apollo app-maker)

this sounds like a bad faith argument.

Everyone knows what profit motive is, cost of doing business, etc. Assume you're talking to people who know what it takes to run a website, and start, first, with the numbers that have been calculated.

According to apollo app, to keep their 3rd party app running, reddit was requesting about $20 million dollars. If you go look at what apollo charges, it's significantly less than that.

Reddit's defense of that charge isnt: Apollo is taking our users, our ad revenue and we want that to be in-house, in our own app, etc. They're saying "this is the cost of the API".

Now, start there, and dial in your criticism to some actual details.

Really though, if you have such a primitive understanding of the situation as this, why comment to begin with?

Using restaurants as an example when there are companies all around the world that have achieved profitability as UberEats perpetually circles the drain is, frankly, dripping with irony.

There is something to be said about a site that gets 100% of it's content from it's users without payment, 99% of it's moderation from it's users without payment. Turning around and trying to charge those same users for a different view of that data.

I think you're missing the bigger picture here. The audience is not outraged because Reddit is trying to be profitable, it's their execution which has enraged the entire community. First, the time frame given to the 3P apps is basically something which seems like an attempt to weed the more popular ones as soon as possible, eg: Apollo, RIF, Sync. Second, the CEO is openly propagating misinformation and slandering the developers, particularly the creator of Apollo.

The devs are not asking for a free API forever, they just want Reddit to work with them and provide them with options - a sensible time frame and API pricing. Giving them a deadline of literally less than a month and an invoice of $20M doesn't show any goodwill at all on their part.

> Reddit finally finds a way to possibly become profitable and everyone calls them scumbags focused on profit?

If the numbers shared for the API costs is what it takes to be profitable, then it’s not a site that will be profitable and Reddit will go under.

This is not about making reddit profitable. It will not contribute to that goal. It will just kill everything that uses the API. The goal is control so that later changes can squeeze the community to death.

They're charging 3rd party apps 20x what reddit itself can make from a user. The goal is to kill the ecosystem and bring it back into the fold.

They even admitted as much when they said that they started thinking about this seriously when LLMs trained on reddit came out.

If they wanted to make reddit profitable they would charge 3rd party apps what they themselves make from users, and float that rate. Like that 3rd party apps cost nothing, even save them money in engineering.

Think about it this way: people are begging to do massive amounts of free work for reddit and their response is to banish all of those people.

This has nothing to do with profits from 3rd party apps.

There is daylight between "free" and "90% profit margin" that makes Reddit cost more than a premium streaming TV subscription.