this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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This will be an unpopular opinion, but I think reddit is mostly in the right with these API pricing changes. It makes no sense from a business perspective to allow other apps to freely profit off their services. They only fucked up with the arbitrarily short timeline which Huffman has no reasoning for and the poor communication throughout the whole process. Even Apollo dev said he was fine with them charging if he had had more time to make the transition.
I think charging to use the API is fine, but it was definitely overpriced to the point that it was obvious they wanted to nuke TPAs. They need all that sweet user data to sell to others, and they can't get to that with TPAs.
I mean user data can very much be completely inferred from API calls. It's not about the user data itself, it's about being able to say to advertisers "all our users will see your ads".
Even if you think the pricing is fine, the time window the apps get to make changes is way too short. They kept asking when would we have to start paying, and the answer always been in the distance future. Now they have 30 days to get the funding for a huge amount of users.
Monetising API access isn't bad, but at a reasonable rate.
The Snoo Platform hiked the rate up to the unaffordable is just insane.
It at least goes to show, once again, that when building on top of other services, those services can fuck you over at any time, for any reason.
I would agree, if Reddit were a service provided by Reddit for customers. But it’s not. It’s a social network where most of the value of the site is generated by the users contributing content. No users, no value. They have tens of thousands of moderators donating countless hours of free work to the site, too. So if we leave the morality to the side for a moment and just put on our business hats, if Huffman pisses off the community too much, he loses critical mass and a large value proposition for the site. He is betting that no major exodus will occur and he can continue turning the screws.