anonred

It is not. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/melvin-sokolsky-parker-train

Compare to the previous ToS: https://www.backblaze.com/company/policy/terms-of-service

Would you be willing to bet a token amount, say the current base cost of a Vision Pro ($3500), that in 48 months (giving you some buffer here) Apple has fully withdrawn support for the Vision line and does not release a new model? That’s the real test of confidence. I personally think you’re way off the mark and am willing to put money on the line. Are you?

Please don’t do this, it’ll just make it even harder for actual developers and moderators to use Reddit’s API if people start abusing it.

Do you have a source for the 30% manual mod actions claim?

> all monetization of api calls has to be done through Reddit and the API itself

How does this work with IAP and ads? Or do you mean that only Reddit Premium users should have access to third party apps? Because that would be much more expensive than the $2.50/mo that people are riled up about with the new API pricing.

It’s impressive what a determined, vocal minority can achieve with just a bit of drama. I hope this ends quickly so everyone else can get back to aimlessly doomscrolling on Reddit.

GP is saying Reddit could trivially skim 30% off of third party app revenue. How is checking app API traffic levels relevant? This is revenue that apps would get through IAP or ads, where Reddit has no visibility. Good luck enforcing any kind of revenue split contract with hundreds of hobbyist devs.

I also left Twitter when Tweetbot died, but only because I can’t use Twitter without a chronological timeline and keyword filtering. My impression is that third party Reddit apps had some nice quality of life features, but their main purpose wasn’t to literally alter the underlying content. Happy to be proven wrong though.

I’d love to see a source for “people that generate the bulk of the content on Reddit do rely on third party apps” because that seems categorically impossible when you consider the number of users able to post (i.e. subscribed) using these third party apps.

The number of users on these platforms has increased considerably. Orchestrating a “movement” consisting of hundreds of millions of people takes a really significant forcing function that affects everyone, not just a vocal minority.

So third-party devs would have to manually cut them a check every month? How would Reddit validate that they’re getting the correct amount? Multiply this logistical nightmare by hundreds of third party developers.

> The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average

Are you saying that most users who post content also use third-party apps, or that most third-party app users post content? There’s a big difference here.

Back of the napkin math: You have to pay to post with some third-party apps like Apollo which has 50k subscribers. Reddit has ~500M monthly users, so we’re looking at… 0.01% if every person subscribed to Apollo posts. Even with a 10x safety factor, there’s no way shutting down third-party apps has a meaningful effect on the volume of content posted to Reddit.

Hypothesis: Apple is a hardware company that also does software, and that ethos allows them to ship more complex products over much longer time scales than their competitors.

Christian interned for a summer at Apple. I don’t understand why he pushes this narrative given that Apollo is good enough to stand on its own without shady marketing tactics.

We don’t need a separate HN post for every subreddit that’s doing this.

I’d be willing to be the opposite given how hard Reddit is pushing this. But like you said, it’s impossible to tell without a separate category for third party apps.

Just being able to block spammy Stack Overflow clones from ever appearing in the results is worth the price of admission for me.

Third party apps are billed in aggregate each month. It’s up to them to decide how that’s split between users.

With the cost per request model, third party apps have more autonomy to dictate how much users pay per month.

Reddit Premium costs more per month ($7) than the expected cost per user for the API ($2). If third party apps can’t make it work with the request-based pricing model, limiting access to just premium users isn’t going to work any better.

Do you have a source for “a large portion of reddit contributors use 3rd party apps”? And what percent are we talking about here?

How do you plan on keeping FlingUp from turning into Voat?

This is probably what will end up happening and ironically is a worse result for third-party apps than the pricing model that’s causing a ruckus.

At a certain point Reddit might decide that it’s simpler and cheaper to pay an ops person $15/hr to manage a high-profile subreddit than deal with the unpredictability of volunteer moderators. That’s ultimately where this is heading.

That’s a great example of something that could be optimized without impacting the user experience. For example, just request the next page of posts when the user starts to reach the bottom. The reason for my confidence is that I’ve worked with Reddit’s API before and I know exactly where the pitfalls are.

Third party apps are just missing too many features that I use like chat, voting in polls, live threads, etc. No idea whether that’s Reddit’s fault or the dev’s, but it’s a deal breaker regardless.

It’s possible to make fewer requests without negatively impacting the user experience. For example, batching requests would result in a more responsive app.

His “defense” for using the API inefficiently is that the official app makes a similar amount requests as Apollo, ignoring whether those are actually API requests or just telemetry (as mentioned in the linked video). Apollo makes 3.5x more requests than other third party apps. That’s a lot.

Do any other large social media companies allow third party clients in the same unfettered capacity that people seem to be expecting from Reddit?