As the saying goes - never rely on someone else's platform for your livelihood. This was always bound to happen and it was just a matter of time. Reddit needs to eliminate all third party clients that block their ads and siphon potential ad revenue in order to be financially attractive to investors.
For the Redditors that laughed and criticized Twitter when they capped user counts in third party apps and raised their API usage fees, karma was waiting with patience to return the favor.
I view what Reddit did as an opportunity. Even though Mastodon was a spectacular failure, I could see a Reddit alternative that uses the federated model that Mastodon does.
If Reddit starts charging for its API like Twitter is doing, Reddit can expect a swift exodus of its most dedicated users and a decline in the quality of its content. Nobody wants to suffer a bad user experience, and nobody wants to pay for the privilege of contributing content to a for-profit company. In the long run, the only social networks that will have a durable future are the ones that allow alternative third-party clients. All of the others will inevitably devolve into a mess of low-quality content and increasingly intrusive advertising.
RedReader and other third-party clients made Reddit tolerable. Take that away, and many users will stop tolerating Reddit.
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.
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.
I have to say including Twitter — who wanted to kill of third party apps — to make Reddit seem more level headed is an interesting way of approaching it.
The gist is this: if I am the average user, not on Reddit Premium and using the native app with ads, the available numbers indicate Reddit earns $X on me. Their API pricing is at least $2X per user. So either they are seeing API users as cash cows, or they want to price them out.
And like I indicated, there’s a loting things Reddit could’ve done that would’ve led to less drama:
- Longer transition period
- Outright banning third party apps
- Include ads in the API
- Make API access part of Reddit Premium
To me it seems that every step of the way, Reddit made the most confusing and most rage inducing choice available to them. That’s either incompetence or malice.
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.
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)
I never understood why Reddit didn't simply acqui-hire one of the good 3rd party Reddit apps.
All of them are significantly better than their proprietary app.
Since most of these apps are single person efforts, a few million should be good enough right ? I can't see that putting a big dent into Reddit's pockets.
The third parties are incentivized to deliver a good user experience. Reddit has incentives that inevitably lead to the opposite. Any good app under Reddit's control would cease to be a good app.
It's not an accident that Twitter just went through this too. We're in a new era of too-big-to-be-disrupted enshittening.
Can you imagine how much engagement the platform gets as a result of his work?
Just saying, it's never fair to try and say any one party in this arrangement is just leeching off another.
Reddit provides a platform, Users provide the community, and third-party app developers make interaction between the other two easier. Third-party apps aren't even able to engage with certain reddit content because the API never exposed it, but people still choose them; That says a lot about how they feel about the official app, and the real value that third-party devs provide.
What's crazy to me is that Reddit could have easily achieved their goals by just investing in developing a really good native app that people want to use, thereby monetizing them while also building goodwill! This whole thing could be achieved and make them look -better-. But they are making stupid short-term decisions to be able to IPO and they chose the stick over the carrot.
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.
Probably best for reddit just entirely kill 3rd party API access and restrict the power of mods. Arguably they should have done that anyway like Twitter did rather than just set prices high to sort of get to that outcome anyway.
You can't change the behavior without fixing the incentives, you can't fix ad-model incentives by being a user within an ad company, the users should just accept that when operating in that space and try to operate in spaces where they can actual own the platform. If you build a company on some other company's owned API you're on borrowed time the moment keeping you around no longer benefits that company.
The percentage of people who use a third party app to read reddit is likely relatively small. They're also the most likely to be invested in the platform. Why make these users angry? Why even take the risk that some of your users might leave for another platform?
If the issue is displaying ads or gathering analytics you can deal with both of those without cutting off third party apps. If you are concerned that others are building big data tools or bots off your free API you can also just grandfather the existing popular clients as free or with a very large discount.
For that matter you can also just set different price tiers for API clients that are used interactively by real people to interact with subreddits vs anyone else.
The social media game is all about network effects. Putting up barriers to making reddit a core service is only a bad thing. What positive gain is reddit expecting from killing third party clients here? As I said ads and analytics can be handled by the license agreement. You can even require them to link a library you provide that does the ad displays and analytics by pulling code from your servers so if you really must have deep control of that experience you can.
Why should reddit have to freely support a third-party client that doesn't provide revenue for them?
The only reason is that the status quo is they have in the past freely supported these use cases, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable for commercial use API access to cost money.
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.
Nonsense. The API had clear terms of service that allowed for third party clients, and Reddit explicitly promoted and supported them in the past. The current Reddit app was even built on one such app (Alien Blue) that Reddit acquired.
For a platform hosting user generated content and with volunteer moderation having third party clients is usually a net positive despite the small loss in advertising revenue, purely because they have a very positive impact on content creation and curation. That keeps passive users coming to the site so they can be advertised to.
At some point after a platform matures there needs to be some additional monetisation of third party clients, especially as they begin to capture a larger share of users. It doesn’t have to result in the clients being killed off entirely.
Reddit is nothing without people voluntarily adding content to the site and good moderators voluntarily running subreddits. That’s especially true for special interest and high quality subs like AskHistorians.
To me this whole thing is about whether it's ok for a failing tech company that users depend on to pivot, and whether this applies to reddit currently. Failing would be any company that can't continue in its current direction. I think it's not ok to ruin a product or service people depend on for no reason. I also think Reddit is failing in a sense and has good reasons to do most of what they're doing. Perhaps what would make it ok with me is if they had made the API change in such a way that supported freemium business models for third party app developers. For instance accounts could be limited to 20 subreddits unless the app pays some amount per user that would be a fraction of a reasonable charge to the user. Like say 50 cents a month.
the real solution would have been to lock api access behind Reddit premium the user would have to pay and then allow users to enter the API key in a 3rd party app.
but reddit has burned so much good will that users aren't going to want to pay out of spite
It's all but guaranteed that if Reddit removes old Reddit and forces new Reddit on everyone third party web clients with ads that generate money for someone else will pop up and fill the gap.
For the Redditors that laughed and criticized Twitter when they capped user counts in third party apps and raised their API usage fees, karma was waiting with patience to return the favor.
I view what Reddit did as an opportunity. Even though Mastodon was a spectacular failure, I could see a Reddit alternative that uses the federated model that Mastodon does.
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