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Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

As you suggest, it's not binary.

Even if he's "right" what "Spez" has done here is pure idiocy.

Even if Reddit comes out of this largely unharmed, why did they even take the risk? Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time? What he's doing is simply bad from a strategical perspective.

But further, this event has put me off ever wanting to invest in Reddit post-IPO. "Spez" seems approaching conflict like a child in an argument with their parents might. Even if you like Reddit's product I don't know how anyone in their right mind would invest in a company where a child is calling all the shots. The dude edits comments to pwn people he doesn't like, he lies, he's comes off as arrogant and entitled. It's just so unprofessional.

If anyone else was in charge I'd have assumed they wanted the controversy.

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> Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time?

Might just be a rip-off-the-bandaid type of calculation. Maybe the response sucks now, but it'll resolve in a week or two (vs having smaller protests every time one of these incremental changes take effect). Similar to how people were really angry when companies had more than one round of layoffs.

btw not an endorsement of spez's actions; just trying to game out why he might be doing it this way.

That's an interesting idea - though it'd speak really poorly of Spez's qualities as a leader. There's a reason the gas station near has a much higher price over than two decades past while from week to week you'll never see anything more than a 20cent difference and often times see a bit of price lowering to break things up. This may be due to our hunter past or something else but humans are terrible at noticing large gradual changes - but suddenly double the price in front of us and we'll definitely notice.

> Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time?

I guess that the goal is not to kill all the 3rd party apps, but only those that make profit from the Reddit API (which doesn't include their advertising if I understand well). Now assuming that a progressive price increase would be put in place, I guess that these apps would simply offload the API tax to their user base with each new raise. As it has been mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, with an abrupt price raise in a very short time, the apps would not have enough treasury to be able to "buffer" the cost until the users pick the pace up - assuming users would, which is perhaps a more important (read: long term) worry.

It should be observed that the goal is not to kill off all 3rd party apps, since there are special exemptions for non commercial apps. I don't know if these exemptions are actually useable in practice, or if actually this is just a part of a larger scheme to get rid of all those apps while having a plausible line of deniability.

It is certainly sad for iOS users as Apollo seems to be their only option besides the web site, but I wonder why they did not see that coming miles away. Maybe they did expect a price to show up at some point, but not with such a magnitude.

The last guy like that got elected President, so…

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