Apollo had an optional safari extension that caught Reddit URLs and opened them in Apollo instead. It was great.
I would sell the app even if they reversed course. I wouldn’t trust they wouldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t trust they’d ruin me some other way.
If they had said “we’re doing this in 6 months” and then listened to the community, that’s different. But Spez burnt the bridge to the ground and poured toxic waste on it.
A Virginia law was signed into effect on May 12th that required commercial entities that distributed "material harmful to minors" to verify the age of the users or be exposed to civil penalties. That law goes into effect in 3 hours.
Additionally one of the API changes which also goes is into effect is that they won't serve NSFW content on the paid API. So even if you pay you only get half of Reddit.
Any NSFW stuff (due to laws, investments, advertisers, anything) had nothing to do with the API decision. They may have done them at the same time, but it wasn’t needed.
IANAL but I'll put down $100 that this law has nothing to do with reddit's API changes. First person to prove me wrong gets it. I'd like a quote from spez that says, paraphrased "If Virginia didn't pass the law we wouldn't have started charging for the API".
> Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up, but they’re also wiping out some beloved Reddit apps, and thousands of subreddits have gone dark for days in protest.
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They want to charge for what they believe the data is worth.
Not for usage, but value.
Counter argument: it’s not their data to charge for. And if they want to claim it is their data then they should be held accountable for the content therein.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t recoup costs for access to said data. You do after all pay taxes and get access to local libraries and archives. But they shouldn’t be extorting third-party developers.
They built a platform so that we could create communities and manage them how we want to.
We posted information. We created content. We exchanged ideas, had discussions, and we all helped each other.
I’m fine with them recouping their costs. I’m fine with them even making a bit off of it. However,
> I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.
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> For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.
My understanding is that Christian is grandfathered into an older plan on Imgur. Having said that, the Mega plan is $10,000 per month for 150,000,000 requests. If we use this pricing, 50,000,000 api calls is $3,333.34 (vs Reddit’s $12,000)
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
While "yes, that was April, the law wasn't signed until May", it passed 96-0 ( https://legiscan.com/VA/votes/SB1515/2023 ) in February and the recommendations from the Governor to change it was rejected on April 12th.
The timeline of when that switchover would happen was at the end of May when 3rd party developers said that they wouldn't be able to continue past June 30th.
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I don't believe that the change was "Virginia Law -> do all these things" but rather "these things are in motion... Virginia Law -> several of these things in motion must be done by July 1."
I do agree with you here - Virginia's mature content law probably had something to do with NSFW content in the API. The API pricing was just poor decision making occurring at the same time. (Apologies if my previous comment was a little unkind).
Two months before starting to charge $0.24 per 1,000 requests is nothing but unreasonable.
I wish Reddit had just plainly said, “We don’t want third party clients anymore.” This whole thing would’ve been cleaner. Still bad, but I don’t think it would’ve been nearly as ugly.
If they had presented the ridiculously high cost of API access to users it would have been more overtly user hostile. By targeting the app developers the surface area of who they were directly screwing was smaller (though they are of course actually screwing all the users of those apps anyway).
This also explains why reddit made all sorts of illogical arguments to make the app developers seem like the bad guys, to try to deflect blame away from them and to the app developers.
They were just super incompetent at doing that effectively, so it was incredibly transparent.
It would have been a much more logical change for everyone involved.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said 95% of iOS app users use the official app.
> You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo[…]
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...
Rate-limit unauthenticated requests per API key and authenticated requests per account. Problem solved. Turn $0.12/month users into $5.99/month users, and don't worry that the 3rd-party apps aren't showing ads - because Premium users don't get ads anyway.
> iOS has no user controls for this behavior
An iOS developer for JIRA taught me this when I submitted feedback that the JIRA app suddenly stopped intercepting links (probably because I had inadvertently long-pressed to open a link in safari, not knowing I was setting a preference by doing so)
I see why it’s useful. But I couldn’t find a way to turn it off so it was messing with my normal workflow.