this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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Nobody is paying for their api... And reducing cost? How? People will either leave or use scrapers/RSS to get their stuff idk how thats going to work out... Also reddit app has 3.stars on Google play most people will not download a tree stars app to begin with.
There are apps going to pay, also providing an API has been cost intensive for Reddit. It’s not as simple as you make it seem I‘m afraid.
Can you actually backup that "There are apps going to pay"? Because I've seen users say they'd pay, but no apps say the same.
And lol, if you think the API is cost intensive, you don't understand the costs inherent to alternatives to an API. It's much more cost efficient to provide an API that you can effectively limit and use minimal resources to respond to a query vs web scraping which is objectively more resource intensive (with the webpage overhead the API doesn't have) and doesn't have nearly as good rate limiting or the protections an API has.
Apps using reddit's API (e.g. Apollo) don't display reddit's ads. Imagine you run a bar & serve free beer. You can do this with this one simple trick: constantly spamming ads on every TV (display panel) in your bar. Advertisers pay for the beer & your overheads.
Along comes a guy with a garden hose, sticks it in your keg, and starts siphoning your beer to the bar he built across the street. His place is much better than yours, the alcoholics don't have to watch ads to get drunk.
wat do?
Pretty sure app devs are not not_scraping out of concern for reddit. If they could, they would (I know I would).
I don't think your analogy works, and here's why.
In that analogy, Reddit provides the beer, but in reality it doesn't.
It owns the building, but what the customers are consuming are other customer's beers. It doesn't have to serve the beer, people being some on their way in.
And in that analogy, yeah, the third-party apps are not on premises, so they can't watch the ads that pay for the building...
But they brought more clients to the bar. They advertised the heck out of the bar, especially when it was growing, and they pump beer back in the bar. It costs Reddit in ad revenue and in facility maintenance (they built the pipes themselves), but they absolutely get back things through the pipes, it's just not straight money.
Reddit wasn't build by Reddit. They own the place, that's all.
OK, substitute "kegs" for "beer." Kegs (servers) & staff to run them costs, and reddit wants to stop subsidizing the bar across the street (3rd-party apps). Honestly see nothing wrong with that. Was cutting off the subsidies in this fashion a good business decision? Don't know, bad at money stuff.
Fairly certain RIF scrapes. That's why it grabs "pages" of content. Beyond that, most reasonable folks don't think the API needs to continue to be free. It's just ridiculously cost prohibitive. Many services offer APIs that cost money. It's just Reddit's costs aren't based in a reality dictated by cost. It's created to force large apps offline. We'll see how long infinity lasts. It'll likely cost significantly more than reddit premium. Wouldn't be surprised if it's 50% more.
So API not an issue?
Sure, 3rd party apps break reddit's business model.
In regards to business model, not really. They're literally changing their business model from the ground up. You can't "break" something that doesn't exist yet. They could have offered reasonable API costs. They did not. They could easily monetize third party apps. It's clear however that spez is just a jealous shithead. He's upset they made profit when he didn't and doesn't like that someone found a way to be profitable. Reddit could have offered the same features and app reliability. They did not.
Scraping is very easily blocked which is likely what they'll do if forced to do so. They are probably just including scraping clauses in their agreements. So RIF will have to adhere to those agreements because they'll probably have to accept them to even gain access. St that point it's a legal mire. If they want to avoid court, it could just be an arms war. Scraping is extremely easily broken and would constantly need updating. It's not cost effective from a developer point of view.
Reddit chooses not to provide an advertising interface to API users. The app devs don't even have the option of running Reddit ads.
This is not about ads. If it was, Reddit would provide an advertising mechanism and require use of it as part of the TOS for API access.