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It’s wild how quickly reddit went from being beloved despite some missteps to an absolute pariah on the internet.
There are lots of mistakes Reddit made that shows they aren’t trying.
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They could have given more advance notice for the API price increase. This would give apps more time to update their code to use fewer API calls. Many apps are subscription-based, so it would give them more time to update their subscription price.
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The price should have been based on Reddit’s actual costs, actual revenue, and actual profits. I.e., if it costs Reddit $0.10 per user per year and their revenue per user is $0.15 per user per year from ads, then the API price should have been $0.15-$0.25 per user per year. The actual pricing shows they made it artificially high to kill the 3rd party apps. (I don’t know what the actual numbers are.)
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Even if Reddit really did want to charge $5 per month for API users, the right way to do it is to start from a lower price and increase it 20%-50% per year until they get to their target price.
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If a user had Reddit premium, they should have been given extra API call tokens they can give to their 3rd party app.
I believe I read $0.24 per
5001000 API calls somewhere, which is insanely high.$12 per 50,000,000 calls is the figure Selig mentions.
Oops, I left out the letter ‘k’.
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I think Reddit’s CEO is making a fool out of himself by how he’s managing this situation. I think however that the solution is very simple and straightforward.
Let’s start: I can understand that Reddit has costs to operate the platform. I also get that they don’t want big companies to abuse the API to train ML models and profit of it. Fair game!
But why not offer a generous free tier for regular users? Say, every user gets 500 free API calls per day. Regular users stay within the free tier, while big companies can’t do anything meaningful with only 500 calls per day (so they end up paying money).
Seems pretty straightforward to me. Everyone happy! Many other companies offer generous free-tiers for exactly this reason. Am I missing something?
Am I missing something?
Yeah. They want to kill the third party apps so everyone has to use the ad-supported Reddit app.
It’s not clear why they don’t just serve ads in the API and require them to be displayed, or implement profit-sharing with 3rd party devs (as in, they pay reddit a portion of their income from ads/subscriptions). The only clear reasons would be for control and to pump up numbers for the IPO.
They’re likely more interested in control than revenue.
I still believe that the ML companies “argument” is just a giant smokescreen. Reason is simple: ML companies can, and probably always have, just scrape the website. Why build an integration for every API under the sun if you can just build a web crawler once and be done? There are even existing, free implementations available so that’s an absolute no-brainer.
It’s about killing independent clients, nothing else.
Actually when I think about it you are absolutely right. The ML argument is complete bullshit. I mean to train a ML algorithm an API is nice but scraping should do just as fine. I don’t know how complicated the Reddit API is but you essentially need just GET so I guess not that much. How much time would a development team need to switch the implementation from API to scrape? A week? We’re in corporate world so let’s say a month with all the corporate bs around. That’s still nothing
Maybe he’s so incompetent that he honestly doesn’t know that machine learning companies don’t need api access to do what they do
i wish i could give christian my support but i’ve completely nuked all my accounts on Reddit and don’t even go there if I can help it. poor guy - what the heck did he do to deserve this turn of events?
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Not to turn this into an infomercial, but that is a lot of money, and if you appreciate my work I also have a fun separate virtual pets app called Pixel Pals that it would mean a lot to me if you checked out and supported (I’ve got a cool update coming out this week!). If you’re looking for a more direct route, Apollo also has a tip jar at the top of Settings, and if that’s inaccessible, I also have a tipjar@apolloapp.io PayPal. Please only support/tip if you easily have the means, ultimately I’ll be fine.
