Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

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I agree, charging money for an app built atop a free service is sketchy and doesn't feel right. But how much are they actually making? HN only has a few 10's of thousands of DAUs, and HN's population is notoriously difficult to monetize. Still, it wouldn't bother me one bit if the HN policies changed to forbid such parasitic behavior.

The real story is that this is all a sideshow and low-value distraction compared to the commercial entities scraping the fuck out of HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and the Internet at large purely for their own gain without giving anything back to the data providers. The real parasites being the data-hungry LLM makers who drive zero external traffic and don't credit sources in any way.

I've actually taken all of my non-commercial websites offline for the first time in 22 years, because I don't wish to continue feeding this beast. I can't see any upside in continuing to donate to them.

Edit:

p.s. @dang: Your message was better with the burning bridges Reddit joke ;)

About parasitic behavior: I think if Reddit had said “in 6 months the API will no longer be free. An average user creating W posts, X comments, Y searches and Z votes will incur $1 in monthly API costs” then there would’ve been very little drama. 99% of people will be sympathetic to a company charging for a thing that costs them money to provide.

It’s the fact that Reddit is using this event to get rid of third party apps by charging ridiculous prices for the API, not honestly owning this decision and finally giving less than a month of transition before it comes into effect that has made all these people angry.

To represent the angry people as just freeloaders who demand to get stuff that costs money for free would be dishonest.

The new API price is not ridiculous. There's been misinformation about the pricing.

Here's the standard API prices of three websites:

(Price for 50 million API calls)

Imgur - $3,333

Reddit - $12,000

Twitter - $42,000

Twitter's API used to be free until Elon Musk recently started charging exorbitant prices for it.

Without a deeper understanding of what the nature of the API is, and how many requests are needed to service a given use case, the comparison doesn’t mean much.

The Apollo developer claimed that it would cost him on average $2.50 per user per month, to use the API.

That is pretty nuts for a free app, how many people would pay for that?

I have to say including Twitter — who wanted to kill of third party apps — to make Reddit seem more level headed is an interesting way of approaching it.

The gist is this: if I am the average user, not on Reddit Premium and using the native app with ads, the available numbers indicate Reddit earns $X on me. Their API pricing is at least $2X per user. So either they are seeing API users as cash cows, or they want to price them out.

And like I indicated, there’s a loting things Reddit could’ve done that would’ve led to less drama:

- Longer transition period - Outright banning third party apps - Include ads in the API - Make API access part of Reddit Premium

To me it seems that every step of the way, Reddit made the most confusing and most rage inducing choice available to them. That’s either incompetence or malice.

Why is charging money for the app sketchy? If users are willing to pay for the app then clearly it’s providing real value to them.

As long it’s clear to the user that they could get the experience for free by visiting the website I don’t see what the problem is.

With that said, I think it’s totally fair for HN to ask the app/user to pay for their API access too.

(responding to just the HN part here) - hopefully all so small as not to matter much. HN's lesser order of magnitude has advantages.

HN helped pg make $1B, so...

i guess that's called leverage

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