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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money. But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out."

From the AMA by Reddit's CEO 6 days ago[1]:

Mod Tools

We know many communities rely on tools like RES, ContextMod, Toolbox, etc., and these tools will continue to have free access to the Data API.

[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

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This entire thing started, as far as I recall, because the above was NOT being done. You're reading misinformation / misdirection.

And once it had gained momentum, it exploded into a power struggle with the owners of the site. It's now a pure tribal war: the mod tribe will not accept any compromise short of full rollback of the proposed changes, and Reddit cannot do that because - just like all major platforms - it cannot support adblocking alternate clients that are profitable while free riding on their infrastructure.

It's also very predictable who will win the war: whomever has the root keys of the servers and web domains. Major reddits like r/funny are providing very limited value in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of the content is viral, not locally produced. So if a user is a r/funny subscriber and that goes dark, just present him with content from r/humor for a few months, they will get to see the same viral memes and 95% of the users will never notice anything went wrong.

Mods vastly overestimate their power here and underestimate the number of lurkers that form the backbone of Reddit viewership and are indifferent to this issue.

The price reddit is charging for API access seems much higher than the value to Reddit of the ads that are being blocked by the client using that API.

I agree, they are clearly eying data access as a revenue source and company moat, and position themselves for the AI boom. But even a much smaller fee would have killed 3rd party clients, and they needed to do that anyway.

There is a very simple way out that reddit could take, similar to what spotify does: Third Party Apps continue being allowed, but API access requires the user's account to have reddit gold. People would be unhappy and complain, but the protest would end, Reddit would increase their revenue, third party app developers wouldn't have to pay, and people would accept it in the end.

This is not a fight over access fees, it's a fight for data. The fees are prohibitive deliberately, to guarantee nobody makes more money than Reddit out of user generated data.

How are the fees prohibitive?

From the same AMA linked above:

----

Free Data API

Effective July 1, 2023, the rate limits to use the Data API free of charge are:

100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication and 10 queries per minute if you are not using OAuth authentication.

Today, over 90% of apps fall into this category and can continue to access the Data API for free.

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).

----

So users are happy to pay, say, Netflix $15 a month, but are outraged when Reddit tries to charge heavy app users $1 a month?

1k API calls is nothing, and I severely doubt it costs them 24 cents to provide 1k API calls.

Besides, they're not charging "heavy app users". They're charging "the apps". They are ensuring that the only entities that would even be able to afford their API costs are large businesses. As much money as Selig was making from Apollo, even he was unable to continue offering the app under these terms. Do you want increased capitalistic control of the Internet? Because this is one further step down that road, that I fear we may already be too far down.

"1k API calls is nothing, and I severely doubt it costs them 24 cents to provide 1k API calls."

Whoever said anything about whether it cost Reddit 24 cents to provide 1k API calls?

This subthread is about whether what Reddit is charging for API calls is "prohibitive", not about what it cost Reddit.

"Besides, they're not charging "heavy app users". They're charging "the apps"."

They're charging whoever uses Reddit's API keys, and I don't understand why third-party app users can't just use their own API keys and pay for their own API usage.

"As much money as Selig was making from Apollo, even he was unable to continue offering the app under these terms."

Why couldn't he just pass the costs down to the users of his app? Or just ask them to use their own API keys?

> it's a fight for data.

It's a loser fight for reddit. If you show your data to user, in any form, it can be scrapped. period.

I take a different view in the sense that reddit has benefitted from the unpaid work of mods for 15+ years.

Mods have generally been either neutral or positive towards reddit as an entity in the past, now... I suspect a lot are asking themselves if continuing to be a mod is worth the effort, at least on reddit itself, I can imagine a lot of them are looking for alternatives or just thinking about giving up altogether.

If it was about the ads, then they'd tie the API access to the user account, and require a user to sub to Gold for the ability to use third-party clients, then ads wouldn't be necessary in the third-party clients. This just goes to show that advertising itself is out of control - either they make more money off ads than they do subscription revenue, or it's purely about control. Money and control are two sides of the exact same coin, so either way you look at it, this is pure greed.

> (users) will not accept any compromise short of full rollback of the proposed changes, and Reddit cannot do that because it can not support (servicing 3rd party clients)

To be clear, Reddit has had $350+ million dollars in yearly revenue for a few years now, primarily from premium subscriptions and ad revenue (ads that are not, in fact, always blocked by 3rd-party clients -- ads show up in reddit Sync Pro all the time)

They absolutely could roll back everything and be profitable. They're "struggling to profit" because the CEO is literally burning all the money trying to chase an IPO, not because there was ever any fundamental problem with Reddit's cost structure.

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