this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023

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Do You Think There Would Have Been a Large Protest if Steve Huffman Just Said We're Charging to Use the API to Increase Revenue? (beehaw.org)

submitted 2 years ago by curt@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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I've been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn't last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn't

To me, Reddit's sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I've never used.

If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I've only used Apollo so I can't speak to the other apps.

I can't blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn't make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They're going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO's are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That's how capitalism works.

In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can't stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn't have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn't been such an uproar. So I'm glad it went the way it did.

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[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

IMO the issue that people are upset about, and as a result all the publicity going on, is just related to how much they wanted to charge people for the API.

If they rolled out something reasonable for pricing, and allowed people to use their own individual API keys in third party apps on a free tier, I think a few would have complained here and there, but otherwise it would have been fine.

Obviously they need to make money to pay for costs of running things somehow, there's nothing wrong with that.

[–] andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

And how little time they were giving. And quite frankly, the incredible entitlement spez has shown in the wake of the incident. And honestly from the start as if reddit had cause to be frustrated OpenAI built something cool off of Reddit users' content. As if he built the whole of reddit and all its content without decades worth of free hours from users and mods alike.

He doesn't want to build a platform for communities. He and his company want personal enrichment he already feels entitled to. He's making that pretty clear. Otherwise, IPO tomorrow and use it as a cash infusion rather than a liquidity event.

[–] lanbanger@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Let's not forget that they also nuked NSFW content on the API, which is at least 50% of the uproar. Nobody likes to mention it, but it's a big reason that a lot of people use Reddit.

[–] bloop@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

I would be happy to pay a fair price to remove ads and gain access to 3rd party apps. They should just bake that into the Reddit Gold perks.

[–] Bobo_Palermo@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

Nobody is against them making money, but personally it was just the iicong omn the cake. The censorship was my biggest issue, then they started requiring emails, etc....losing my apps and then threatening mods was it.

[–] sajran@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

I definitely wouldn't be as upset as I am right now. I would consider paying to be able to continue to use the service.

However, right now, I wouldn't come back to Reddit even if they called of the whole thing and decided to leave free access to the API. I have zero trust in Reddit after all that happened. To be honest I'm kinda glad it all went down like this. At least we got to know their real colors.

[–] snowbell@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

Didn't reddit used to be profitable? I think we should start by asking what decisions they made that reduced their profitability. Is it the video player that nobody asked for? Deciding to self-host images? Developing an app that nobody wants to use? It seems to me like they put themselves in this position.

[–] static@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Reddit killed internet fora. By being easier and cheaper, while making no profit.

If they suddenly do want to make profit?
The terms change, there are alternatives.

[–] Tigbitties@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

I agree. They built a better mouse trap and now they want to go back to the old one because they figured out they can sell cheese. The better mouse trap still exists.

[–] fupuyifi@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Reddit needing to make $ to maintain the resources is understandable.

There were other ways to generate revenue without being greedy.
For example, users pay for awards like gold etc on Reddit. This concept could have expanded to a marketplace for 3PA stickers. If 3PA apps have stickers that they were pushing as additional revenue for the developers, Reddit could have stepped in and developed a marketplace to host and promote them for the developers as well. It would be a similar model to the Google Play and Apple App stores taking a commission for in app purchases. It doesn't have to be in the vicinity of 30% either. It's not a perfect example by any means, so don't flame me or the idea.

I deleted all of my accounts, posts and comments after the clusterfuck of an AMA. The interviews Huffman gave the following week to The Verge and other media sites totally reinforced my decision not to go back. I still go back to get some tech resources that I need but it's through alternative addresses so I don't add to their analytics stats.

[–] deong@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Stickers and Reddit gold are, by the wildest and most nonsensically optimistic estimates imaginable, not going to be even in the same state as the amount of revenue they’re looking for.

[–] fupuyifi@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Stickers or gimmicky items like that seem to be popular enough for Selig to spin it off as a separate business.
My comment was about Reddit’s inability to think of a smarter long term solution with the 3PA developers. Instead they went with a moonshot for a short term gain that reeks of arrogance, greed and stupidity.

[–] patchw3rk@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I'm not entirely sure why Reddit was going to charge outlandish fees for the third-party APIs. Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it. It's really a combination of pushing them out of the market and then being a smug little bitch that really nailed it in the coffin for a lot of people.

[–] ZealousIdeaPool@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it.

But that is exactly what his goal was. If he really was interested in working with the 3PA devs, this would have been handled completely differently. The fact that it was handled as it was, with essentially zero engagement between the company and the community, and with essentially zero flexibility on the part of the company on the implementation, is pretty clear evidence that their goal all along was to drive the 3PA's out of business.

[–] tikitaki@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

i don't think they were trying to make money off of the API changes. like others are saying, it has to do with AI and they figured they might as well take the chance and knock out 3rd party in the same swoop so that they can funnel more people onto the official app

they can data harvest much better that way

[–] Aggy@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I feel like AI being the reason doesn't hold up particularly well from a technical standpoint. From my searching, web-scraping is completely legal. It'd be slower, but a massive dataset is still very collectable.

Plus building a web-scraper is so easy now. Funny enough, generative AI like chat gpt can get you like 95% of the way there in just a few minutes.

Though, none of the reasons they've stated so far seem to hold up to scrutiny.

[–] ZealousIdeaPool@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's slower, but to use an API requires you to customize your system to use each different sites unique API. It would be a massive development undertaking, for such a small benefit that it would never pay off. For an LLM, you only need to read each page once, you just wait til a post is a month or so old, and essentially all discussion has stopped, and you will get everything you need. So "fast" isn't really a concern at all.

[–] tikitaki@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

You can pull much more data much quicker through the API than some sort of HTML scraper. These LLMs need a lot of data and reddit is a big site.

[–] QHC@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

AI has nothing to do with it other than a convenient, topical scapegoat.

[–] SpaceCadet2000@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It would have been perfectly possible to charge a different rate for AI harvesting than for Reddit Apps.

[–] tikitaki@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

of course, but they wanted to kill 3rd party apps without explicitly saying "we're killing 3rd party apps"

this way they can (or at least they thought they could have) had plausible deniability saying stuff like "we tried to work with them" and this is essentially what they tried in the first couple of days

[–] deong@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

They don’t want the developers to pay anything. They want the developers gone so that all the users are monetizeable through ads.

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[–] ArugulaZ@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Well, that might have helped, but Paint Hufferman decided to insult us all and treat us as useless, even parasitic freeloaders when WE are the ones who, in concert, built that goddamned site. He was never going to show any respect for us or what we've accomplished... to him, we're livestock. Fuck him with a hot lead pipe.

[–] Scio@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

That is exactly what he said. It's just not remotely what he intended. Bad faith etc.

[–] chinpokomon@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Two things would have done it for me. They could have offered a user token subscription that I could port to all my accounts. Sure there could be token sharing with that method, but for a "modest" user cost, I might have been tolerable of it. They would have had to open the third party apps at the same time, but it would have bought time. The second thing would have been extending advertising through the third party app. That might discourage users of the free third party app, but it would also have given time to readjust the market price. Maybe the compromise would be that the free app could still be free of Reddit ads, but it wouldn't be customizable or would be limited in the number of additional subreddits with certain ones that were fixed to those free accounts. The key in both cases would be to work at making Reddit still available to those third party apps via the API and not the way it was brought to those developers. Lose the third party support, lose the support of moderators who have learned to be efficient with their way of using the site, lose the site.

[–] Banzai51@midwest.social 1 points 2 years ago

At the current price he wants? Yes. Because it would still represent an attempt to kill off all third party apps. Reddit wants to look like the good guys in having a price structure, but it is a transparent bit of trickery. Because the whole thing isn't about API costs to Reddit, but gathering all the data to sell about its users and to push ads. Reddit is attempting an IPO. And shareholders will demand a path to profitability, unlike Silicon Valley investors.

Would honesty and transparency made the protests smaller? On some fronts yes. But many Reddit users would have been pissed with the model they want to use (facebook). So maybe the protests still would have been as widespread. But we could have skipped the whole, "Reddit CEO disrespecting unpaid mods and Reddit users" phase.

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