Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase their revenue, they're doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened.
Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.
This is not about making reddit profitable. It will not contribute to that goal. It will just kill everything that uses the API. The goal is control so that later changes can squeeze the community to death.
They're charging 3rd party apps 20x what reddit itself can make from a user. The goal is to kill the ecosystem and bring it back into the fold.
They even admitted as much when they said that they started thinking about this seriously when LLMs trained on reddit came out.
If they wanted to make reddit profitable they would charge 3rd party apps what they themselves make from users, and float that rate. Like that 3rd party apps cost nothing, even save them money in engineering.
Think about it this way: people are begging to do massive amounts of free work for reddit and their response is to banish all of those people.
This has nothing to do with profits from 3rd party apps.
None of these clients filter ads. They just return the API results. Reddit could have in theory returned ads and blocked clients who didn't (or required them to pay some/more money). Instead, they decided to charge extortionate amounts, essentially causing 3rd party apps to be unable to afford them.
It's very obvious their aim isn't necessarily charging, they're more interested in getting rid of 3rd party clients so that people would be forced to use their horrendous app. As a company, they have a right to go towards that route, but they should just say that.
Killing off third party apps was the entire point of those stupidly high API fees.
This was always about control - having the only app, forcing users to use only that app, forcing them to accept the enshittification of the platform - but like many other platforms before it, it fails to remember that users can and have abandoned prior platforms.
Remember Digg? It used to be the top dog. Now it’s circling the drain of irrelevancy after the vast majority of its users just up and left. All that’s left of them is 75 employees and less than $5M in revenue a year. 5 Million. Even Linus Tech Tips is a bigger company, and he’s just a YouTuber.
Digg is Reddit’s future, if they continue to abuse their users.
This doesn't make sense. Make me, a user of their app and website who sees ads and other stuff pay money so that the API users can avoid them?
Reddit will lose a bunch of deadbeat users, who generate little to no income for the company but cost money to serve. In business, these are the sort of people you don't want.
Who do you think will spend hundreds of millions a year to replace Reddit so that deadbeat users can use it? There would be no money in serving those users and any attempt to serve them and monetize later will result in the same thing that is happening at Reddit. The days of VCs burning money for social networks seems to be over.
Also, Reddit is currently a multi-million dollar profitable company despite providing free API access to the developers who have made their site more usable for mobile users.
They just decided that they should have more money and they don't care about what they have to do to get it.
It looks like they'll be no more free access so every third party app will have to charge a subscription that goes to Reddit (monthly and with no costing provided yet)
If you watch the video you find that he has valid complaints, and he's not opposed to paying Reddit but thinks these terms are designed to sink 3rd party apps. Some highlighted points.
* The API access charges about 10x the price compared to the revenue per user they would expect if the users accessed reddit via web or official app.
* There was 30 days notice of the new pricing. He has many customers that pay per-year that he is going to lose money on until renewal.
* The price is too high. Compared to similar platforms that charge for API they are charging way more.
* An individual from the company called him out for having 'inefficient' code, which he took personally and mounted a good defense of his usage.
* The API is losing feature parity with the first party website/app.
* Reddit is itself building a bigger business on the backs of reddit users generating content. Many of those users use a 3rd party app. In fact, 3rd party apps were largely responsible for transitioning reddit into mobile usage. They seem to be overstepping their position in the ecosystem.
Think this all the way through - why did Reddit do these things? To attract more users and to generate revenue. As the OP said, what are you going to do to solve Reddit's income problem? This isn't a technical issue, the technical piece is straightforward and well-known.
They can't really push for advertising until they eliminate 3rd party API access to the content. That or they have to start charging a usage fee.
Which is interesting. One option they do have is to charge the user for using Reddit via an API, not the apps using the API. If you want to access Reddit via a 3rd party app then you'll have to pay for it - say something on the order of $1.99 per month or $19.99 for the year. I imagine they must have explored that option, so it makes me wonder why they abandoned it.
I love my 3rd party Reddit app, but when their business model is either 1) don’t show Reddit’s ads and instead show their own ads, or 2) charge a fee to remove all ads (including Reddit’s) - it does feel like it was just a matter of time before this happened.
Reddit should have said Reddit premium users can use 3rd party clients / unlimited API calls. Messaging something like: If you want no-ads you have to pay Reddit (not someone else), but if you feel their client is better feel free to use it. The landscape for 3rd party clients would probably still dry up (who wants to pay 2x subscription fees), but it would have been better PR.
First, Reddit's monetization is broken by design. It never made any sense to me why they would charge for reddit gold for an ad-free experience on their website and own mobile app but not on the API. Why would they let third party apps serve their own ads and let them charge to remove them? This would be simple to fix, both technically and in the API's ToS, just serve the same ads regardless of the client. People would be upset, but ultimately I feel it would be entirely fair. But no, it doesn't seem to be a solution considered.
Second, the LLM dataset issue is also attributed to the price hike. Again, I think it's fair if unpopular to charge premium for bulk data. Again, there are technical and ToS solutions for this. They could introduce exponential tiers for bulk data, restrictions on allowed usage, other things that make user-facing usage reasonable but bulk processing expensive, but then again, starting measuring api usage per client id and not per user goes against this point, just making the API extremely expensive for everyone anywhere to the point of being unusable.
Third, all points seem to lead to the fact that what they really want is to kill third party apps and hope a large part of those users move to their app, for what? More tracking, tighter grip, better engagement metrics? Not sure. Even the changes to the extremely hostile mobile site now forcing some users to download the app. Really, I'd figure they'd understand their userbase better than that and how a small fraction on content producers and a even smaller fraction of power users and moderators carry the site, and pissing them off is a really bad idea. But what do I know.
1. We DO want to make a ton of money off of this
2. We will make you pay for the API access but still block things like NSFW
3. Because we still want users to use our shitty app and site for ad revenue
4. We haven’t even thought of what parts of the API you will and will not get access to
5. We really wanted to frame all of this positively so we pretend it’s reasonable costs, as if API users would cost more than having those people use reddits own api on their website.
I guarantee they won’t offer any better service, just demand payment now, will continue to make their site shittier, but increase pricing year on year.
This is why I've been so curious as to exactly what Reddit is really trying to do with this api change. If the point of Reddit is to consume content then the content itself (and the amount of it consumed) is really their business model so all actions should support that vs. getting people to arbitrarily be on their site. If your business is content, it shouldn't matter if it's a third-party app or if it's on your main site. I just cannot figure out the long-term logic behind this move (ofc short-term it's about $$ and their IPO but this'll hurt their model in the long-run)
It's not what they're doing, for the most part, but the way they're doing it.
I don't think many people begrudge them to implementing a paid API to recoup the costs of third-party clients.
But they've set the price way too high, with practically no warning, defamed an app developer and then went "lalalala we can't hear you" when people, rightly, pushed back.
All while using dark patterns to push users to their (objectively awful) official web and mobile apps. Power users (especially mods) just can't use these to do what they need to do, Reddit doesn't care and now Reddit is - effectively - killing off 3rd party apps.
I haven’t seen many folks who are opposed to the API for apps being a paid service. Even the Apollo dev said they’re fine with paying. The problem is that Reddit’s pricing seems to be basically set high enough to effectively make developing third party apps impossible, and then their communication about the change has been dishonest.
The pricing makes it seem like Reddit wants to ban 3rd party clients without doing so outright.
can someone help me understand what's the core of the issue is? is it because they are now charging for APIs which used to be free? i hope that's the not the issue because that's not a sustainable business. third party apps can grow revenue using Reddit's contents and Reddit don't see a penny from them.
if the issue is the amount Reddit charge per call, why can't those third party apps charge their users more based on the API charge? the whole thing seems bit immature from both sides.
The issue isn't actually reddit charging for API access, its how much they're charging. $0.24c per 1000 api requests which for high volume apps isn't feasible.
why haven't they served ads via the API then? no one is stopping them.
they haven't done so because they have chosen not to. they are still choosing not to.
this is a calculated move by reddit to extract the highest amount of money possible from 3rd party app developers, and the users of these apps are who is going to suffer. reddit waited until API use was counted on by some portion of its users before they pulled this lever. it's predatory.
The official app collects far more data points to identify users for ad targeting than the third party clients do (check the permissions asked). They may have decided there's no way to effectively monetize third-party app users to the levelling of targeting that their ad platform requires, so these users will always be a cost center instead of a profit center.
Then again these users are likely to disproportionately be posters and commenters, the people who create free content that keeps the broader userbase engaged, or are moderators keeping the site running for zero compensation, so pissing them off seems ill advised.
Based on this thread [1], where an admin accuses 3rd party apps of being inefficient API consumers but refuses to explain why, it's clear Reddit just wants these apps gone and isn't interested in whether anyone is alienated or upset by it.
The looming IPO and showing as positive user monetization numbers as possible is undoubtedly the motivation for this, unfortunately goodwill with the userbase that has taken years to build is getting trashed in the process.
What an absolute shit show. Reddit is objectively in the wrong here. Like Christian says, I fully agree that Reddit should charge for API access. But this is ridiculous and is simply a transparent (likely successful) attempt to kill 3rd party apps and streamline the "brand."
Ultimately, this is symptomatic of trying to monetize a service that either a) isn't something people want to pay for, or b) monetizing it in a way that kills the spirit of the service. A common problem with the internet, sure, but also smacks of a complete lack of creativity on the part of the suits. If this were an issue of maintaining Reddit's longevity, they could find a way to have their cake and eat it too. No, this is a clear attempt to raise their value before their IPO, so that a few suits can jump ship when the value is at its highest, as we've seen time and time again. And they're too stupid to see that their efforts fly in the face of their obvious goal.
Reddit got popular for lots of reasons; a big one was that it was fun and still felt freewheeling in a way that the increasingly corporate internet wasn't. It was still anonymous (if you wanted it to be), weird, communal, much like the early internet that was seemingly disappearing before our eyes, and yet still decently mainstream albeit in a nerdy way.
Something changed when people started referring to it as "social media." I've always been confused by that label. It's "social," yes, and I guess it is indeed "media," but it's not "social media." It has little in common with Myspace or Facebook or Instagram. It has much more in common with internet forums, albeit with an IMO better interface (the tiered comments design is simple and brilliant, much easier to navigate and keep parallel conversations going than your standard in-line forum). We don't call forums "social media" -- that label is quite loaded and comes with a number of connotations.
But alas, they tried to monetize it via the same model that all other "social media" is monetized -- with ads, clamping down on the weird, etc.
This kills the Reddit. Remember Tumblr?
My prediction? Reddit is going to limp on, but as even more of shadow of its former self than it's already become. It will become the Facebook equivalent of this kind of "social media" -- a distinctly non-hip, safe, boring, corporate place, with an ever-aging user base. One day it will be sold for a comparatively measly fee to someone social media giant that doesn't even exist yet.
Those who long for the Reddit of old will go off to other places. I myself already spend most of my time on HN anyways -- it's basically everything I want from Reddit and none of what I don't. It's got the "old.reddit.com" interface, doesn't require a mobile app to use on a mobile browser, is information-dense, clean, fast. Content-wise HN and the tech-related subreddits I frequent have a huge amount of overlap both in terms of content and I presume users. For everything else...meh, I can take it or leave it. The hobby subreddits are great, the /r/all comment threads for huge events are great, but all that was the cherry on top, not the cake.
I'll probably just continue to mostly spend my time here, and check out, say, the various fediverse clones of Reddit. But just like Mastadon with Twitter, it'll be too fragmented to truly replace what everyone is jumping ship from.
It's sad, but I suppose this is the way of all things. It's new, it's fun, it matures, it's stable, then it decays. So it goes.
Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.
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