Technology

The thing that I've seen pretty consistently from both RIF and Apollo devs is that they're not disputing the fact that reddit needs to start making a profit. Nobody's (seriously) complaining about what was free becoming not free.

The fact is, if this was purely about money, they'd be willing to negotiate on price. The price they're asking is ~70x more than imgur, which hosts images WAAAAAY heavier to host than text, and links etc.

If it was solely about showing ads, they could have given 3PAs access to reddit ads via the api, and enforced showing them.

There are several ways this could have worked for everyone.

Reddit wanted to kill 3PAs. That's the only logical conclusion here. Hell, if they'd come out and said THAT, as well as fixing the problems with their own app first, I might even have been able see their side of it. I would still be pissed, but it'd be more understandable than this very blatant Twitter-esque death-by-pricing thing they're trying to do.

I haven't heard anyone say that they're upset because Reddit needed money. Actually I've heard more understanding people, they wanted Reddit to stay alive and were willing to possibly say yes to subscriptions/ad based content.

But spez completely shit the bed on the entire thing. Giving them the crazy high prices, the incredibly short deadline, hiding the pricing for those 2 months, then trying to blame it on AI, and just everything. Yes, if they had a level headed leader at the front of their corporation I could very well see myself preparing to pay a couple bucks a month to Reddit to get a good experience, they could get their "Residual Income".

Instead he had to go all megalomaniac and demand everyone bend to his will - and I left permanently.

If Reddit just charged the AI people for API access and left 3rd party apps alone I doubt anyone would have given a shit, but they had to go and two-birds-with-one-stone it. Then they insisted on digging their hole deeper by running their mouths and making the situation worse.

The controversy started when their API fees were astronomically high as to constructively end all 3rd party apps.

I think the real anger started when Steve Huffman lied about the Apollo developer and the dev started posting the recordings to prove that Huffman was lying through his teeth.

After that, Huffman stepped onto multiple rakes as he does a poor job of crisis management. They don’t know where the value from their product comes from.

The protest is not about the fact that they are charging for it. The protest is about the fact of how much they are charging for it. When compared to imgur the rates are absolutely insane.

I keep seeing this incorrectly reported and it drives me crazy. No developer is upset about Reddit charging for the API access. What they are upset about is the fact that Reddit has jacked the price of that API access up so high that no third party apps could ever afford to use it.

While essentially killing off 3rd party apps is disappointing, I could’ve understood and been willing to switch to the official app and maybe even pay monthly for no ads and more features.

What made me leave is how poorly Huffman and the company treated the developers, moderators, and users.

For developers:

• Reddit went back on their word about no API cost changes this year
• Lied about making the API cost reasonable
• Gave developers very little time to adjust
• Treated developers and their apps as freeloaders instead of as a source of growth for Reddit when they didn’t even have an app yet
• Blatantly slandered Apollo’s developer

For moderators:

• Reddit treated moderators as if their input didn’t matter despite providing free labor for the site
• Framed them as being power hungry for disagreeing and protesting Reddit’s decisions

For users:

• Reddit treated users as if their input didn’t matter despite Reddit being a user-generated content site
• Treated their contributions to the site as Reddit’s property, not their own
• Essentially said users are just a bunch of whiney babies who are powerless, have no willpower, and will visit the site no matter what we do

Also, even besides Huffman showing his true colors as being a total asshole, it just makes Reddit’s poor leadership SO evident. How do you become such a popular site with free content and free moderators, and still can’t make money? How do you manage to turn a great Reddit third-party app into a buggy mess of an official app? Why are you constantly prioritizing what you think users want instead of just listening to them? And now you essentially just told all of us: “fuck you, I own you and your content, and I am entitled to to make money off of you.”

What this is really about and people are just starting to realize is: the interests of the shareholders and CEO who want to get rich is not compatible with volunteer content and a volunteer modded site. People aren't eager to do unpaid work just so the CEO can get rich. This API stuff is just exposing it.

I think there's a lot they could have done better. They could have injected ads into the API feeds directly so they could still get revenue and make it part of the terms that a client can't remove them, and offer a paid version of the API that doesn't have ads. That could work with the clients who could then continue to offer a free ad supported version or a subscription that removes them with Reddit getting a cut. I would have been totally understanding of that and reddit could have gotten a ton of subscription revenue by leveraging the existing distribution channels.

They're a company, they have to pay the bills, I get that, but they went over the line with their deception, greed, and hunger for power. This wasn't just about making money, it's also about control. This was all just an underhanded move to kill 3rd party apps without outright banning them. They want total control so they can continue to make ui decisions that make then more money at the expense of the user experience with their users not having an alternative client to go to. They clearly don't have any respect for their users so why would I use them?

Notice how Reddit haven't engaged in any positive damage control at all? It's just been hit pieces against devs, an AMA with completely canned responses and unprecedented wide-spread hostile action against it's content creators/power users/mods?

Reddit is in full-blown sell out mode right now and nothing but money matters anymore. It's all down hill from here.

There would have been no outrage if Reddit valued its users. If they came out and said they were going to start charging (a reasonable amount) for API access but were giving developers until the end of the year to prepare no one would have batted an eye.

Most would probably migrate to the Reddit app for free. Some would just start paying to use the app of their choice and we’d have moved on.

Reddit showed their true colors which was a big f you to the free labor and free content producers of their platform.

I would’ve paid $5-$10 a month to Apollo had this all been handled professionally. Instead I’ve deleted Reddit , fired up an rss feed app and I’m also here now. There’s a handful of communities I haven’t found a suitable replacement for but I’ll live.

For me it wasn’t about the money, I pay for plenty of things in order to escape ads. The CEO all but came out and said that they don’t care about anything except money… That’s just business and I understand it, I don’t like it, but I understand it.

The issue I saw was Reddit made no attempt to understand the situation third party app devs were in, or to honestly work with the devs to find an equitable solution. That much has been clear before the CEO began to gaslight both the devs and the users about it.

Like others have said, there are multiple factors at play:

1. The official reddit app sucks in terms of basic usability
2. The offiical reddit app has poor accessibility
3. The official website, while generally well optimised for mobile, keeps forcing users to use the reddit app - see point 1
4. Reddit is trying to position themselves as an ad company (see here for one user's explanation), so it's in their benefit to get people using the mobile version where they can hoover up sensitive information for serving ads.
5. Reddit are trying to grow their ad platform. Third party apps interfere with that. Reddit understandably wants to kill them off.
6. Reddit are aware that people like third party apps and people don't like their official app.

Now, if Reddit had been honest and transparent throughout the entire process and just killed off the APIs without charging for it and gave the straightforward explanation, I think people would be sad as they are emotionally invested in their apps, and there would be some people who would go for good. But a lot more people would come back to Reddit - let alone seek alternatives like Lemmy, KBin, Tildes, etc.

What has happened is that the CEO has tried to make apps "the villain" and reddit the "poor little company" - sort of like DARVO but for 3rd party apps, so they could paint their official Reddit as the "wholesome" one.

Except the reddit community is large and pretty smart - technically and legally too. Receipts were kept, the CEO was exposed for his blatant lies, and then he has become incredibly unhinged and angry that things haven't gone his way, giving incredibly aggressive interviews. And the Reddit community notices, because whenever Reddit is in the news, it's very rarely for a good reason. The CEO was shown to be wearning no clothes after all.

I've seen Reddit go through drama, but never quite like this. It's quite incredible and astonishing how one person could fuck up a transition this badly. Spez has repeated that the Automod is going to be killed, but given the blatant lies that came before, it's no wonder why folks aren't trusting him on his word. He's made his bed, he has to lie in it.

The problem is more about Reddit not giving a fuxk to the users who have made the platform. They obviously know in advance what 3rd party apps and tools people have been using. If they are really keen on keeping the matter civil, Reddit could have granted them free or reasonable access but it prefers not to. I think this is pretty telling.

All the drama and pisspoor management by spez aside, ultimately the way I used reddit is through RiF. To me, that's reddit. I can't stand their official app and their official website is horrendous.

They forced my app to close down so I guess that's that.

I stopped using RiF and consequently reddit in protest. I held out hope this was a shitty negotiation tactic by Reddit and they'd eventually back off somewhat. But they've tripled down on it.

This forced me to reevaluate my relationship with the platform and I decided to check out Lemmy kbin and mastodon. I also checked out some old forums I frequented before reddit took over.

I reinstalled a newsreader and set up RSS feeds for my favorite things.

Basically, I'm realizing I don't need reddit as much as I thought I did. I actually have enjoyed the fediverse,beehaw in particular, more. I never used Twitter but mastodon has really great content and engagement as well.

I'm not saying I'd never go back to Reddit. I probably would if RiF somehow survived, but reddits lost its luster for me and I don't trust it anymore. So why waste time actively participating there so I can have the rug pulled from under me again?

Reddit may not see a mass exodus like Digg or Myspace, but it's been poisoned and over time the rot will set in and it will fester. This will be the moment people point to as the turning point.

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.

The initial spark definitely came from Reddit's clear backstabbing of 3rd party developers with the API change. There was no attempt to work with developers, just to remove them indirectly.

This being particularly bad when 3rd party developers were basically holding up most power-users, most moderators, and basically anybody who actually needed accessibility features (seems like Reddit's never heard of blind people by the way they made their app).

When you combine that with the catastrophic mishandling of the situation with that incredibly awkward AMA, the internal leaks, and the accusations towards Apollo Dev, it made it incredibly obvious that Reddit wasn't acting in good faith...

That's really what started the shit storm that's still raging now with the blackouts, subs and mods being blackmailed, subs converting to NSFW, the John Oliver stuff. It's all because of how badly Reddit mishandled the situation. It's almost like they forgot their website is mostly ran by the same volunteers they were screwing over.

However, I think you are right to an extent that if Reddit had taken the time to add accessibility and moderation features into their apps, and just improved the interface in general instead of just focusing on sucking the most money and telemetry out of their audience possible, then things would never have advanced as far as they did...

But I also think that's one mighty big "what if" because if they would have had the foresight to do any of that, they would've had the foresight to not mishandle everything else as badly as they did either.

I used to subscribe to Reddit for the ad-free experience when I was a mobile web user. They kept making mobile web worse and worse and didn’t listen to user feedback after a point and made it so unusable I unsubscribed then found Apollo after refusing apps for years. Only been on Apollo maybe a year and now they’re destroying that. I’ve tried their app and it is a battery hog (spyware is my guess), works like crap and has too few features that I want .

There’s a few communities that I will miss over there but other than that I’m very excited for the fediverse and hope meta and bots don’t kill this platform before it gets going.

It's not about the spoken message but just the "our way or the highway" attitude and blatant gaslighting. If I had wanted that I would have stayed with my ex.

I'm perfectly ok with paying to get rid of ads. I've had Reddit Premium. I use YT Premium. I have Spotify Premium (for free with my phoneplan). I pay for Twitch Turbo. All stuff I use a lot and for me worth the price to have them ad-free.

As of 3 weeks ago, I would've been willing to:

• Pay for reddit premium in order to use a third party app.
• Stuck around even without a third party app, using only the old.reddit interface for as long as that was going to work with Reddit Enhancement Suite.
• Allowed ads to get through my ad blocker on Reddit.
• Kept my old comment/link history accessible on the site.
• Continue to use reddit.

Now I'm basically unwilling to do any of those things. The interviews they gave up through the first 2 days of the blackout made me pledge not to actually pay reddit any money (and I've paid for gold from when it was first announced, as a "charter member," till when they decided to dramatically increase the price in exchange for a complicated "premium" offering).

And since then, the hamfisted way they've dealt with mods and protests are getting me to leave the site early, too, and going out of my way to delete my old comments and posts that actually added information to the site, plus deleting or otherwise breaking the URLs of my content that have been linked from anywhere on reddit (whether in a post by me or reposted by someone else).

I was upset to lose Apollo but hearing that they where going to exclude some apps for accessibility I thought to just move there. My main issue is ads. Just any alternative to avoid the ads on their app was gonna be good for me…. Then they started completely mishandeling the protest exercising their technical authority over the subs and content and i got to lemmy real quick.

If he'd announced that they were going to force the app developers to share ad revenue or charge users a reasonable monthly fee for ad-free access and share that with Reddit, I think the backlash would have been far less.

But that's not what Steve wants. He wants to get all the ad revenue AND be able to track user activity to sell to the data brokers/advertisers. This was never going to be a situation that we users found reasonable.

I would be just as disappointed as I am now. I am never using their dogshit app, ever. How they killed my beloved 3rd party app makes no difference at all. I'm gone just the same, and sabotaging the subreddits I mod just the same.

For me, it didn’t have to do with ads at all. It was about Reddit charging exorbitant fees for the APIs needed for tools required to make moderation fun enough to actually do, combined with his actions related to 3PA devs and moderators after the fact.

Reddit could have invested in their API and made it an ad distribution platform; instead they invested in NFTs and let the API system remain a mess.

That and the outright lies Huffman said about Christian!

I really don't think that 3rd party apps were anything but collateral damage. I think his real goal is to try and capitalize off of AI training.

He clearly saw these companies using reddit data to train AI for like no money and got upset.

I used the main Reddit app and was planning on going back after the protests were over but everything spez had done since then has made me uninstall the app

Obviously the details matter, and many things happened all at once.

For example, the original policy was going to force out all free open source clients, and that was later retracted, but the damage to the company's reputation was already done.

For example, clients for the visually impaired could have been set aside as a special case immediately, and they weren't, and as I understand it they still aren't.

For example, third-party clients that don't show ads could have been blocked without restricting third party clients that assist mods.

For example, the result of the blackout could have been some sort of sympathetic statement, but instead it was the hammer getting laid down, leading to even worse results.

So you're a question is whether the outcome would have been different if the administrators had acted differently, and of course the answer is yes. That being said, what we've learned is that the administrators do not value the mods or the end user. All of the above issues simply don't matter to them because they don't care.

You talked about capitalism as if it's inevitable, but you're wrong. The decision to try to make a lot of money was made, many other online services have made other decisions, and you don't get to excuse the actions of anyone in the administration on the grounds that it's just the natural consequence of capitalism.

Reddit could have avoided protests if they had said something like: "We're going to roll out a plan to start charging third party app developers to cover the cost of API access and/or lost ad revenue, as it is unsustainable for us to keep foregoing these funds. We're going to be super transparent about the process. We're going to apply a small mark-up (say, 10%) but we will allow devs ample time (>=1 year) to plan for this. And we will provide public support to help these developers work through this with us."

Of course, they would have to actually back up that talk with actions. A big part of the reason for the protests is how many blatant lies Reddit has made around this situation, including baseless accusations against the Apollo app, clearly false statements about their pricing plans and their plans to charge for API access during 2023, etc. So tbh at this point I don't trust anything Reddit says anyway. Show, don't tell.

What I actually want is to be able to pay Reddit or Google or whoever it is a fair amount of money, say the amount they'd make by showing me a reasonable number of ads, plus a bit more. Say 10% more. In exchange for making more money from me than they would with ads, they would let me use old.reddit.com, or a third party app and not show me any ads.

I get an ad free service, Reddit gets more money than they would have before.

I figure that the amount would be easily less than $10 per year.

They would have to show something like this: at the end of each month, they tell me that I consumed so much of Reddit. They would have shown an ad every 25 posts, at $0.0005 per ad impression. So my payment for the month will be $x.

If it wasn't for the amount being much higher than most other companies charge, and what it costs Reddit itself to do the same, and a 30-day timeframe with which to get around those changes on top of it, I think that they would have been much better received. The third-party app developers didn't any problems with paying for things like Imgur APIs, and would have happily paid up for Reddit's, if they had the time to implement it, and didn't have to deal with the exorbitant cost.

However, I do think that Spez made things much, much worse. If Reddit didn't make a discussion, and just put out the announcement, people would have shrugged, and moved on. His AMA, and everything else after was just throwing fuel onto the fire, which was further boosted by Reddit admins suddenly wading into the fray, something that they had not done previously, even rom the perspective of moderator tyranny. The previous response tended to always be "we're sorry to hear that, but you can just go and create your own community if you have an issue with them", unless the problem was bad enough it got press attention.

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 off 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.

If this had been handled differently, Huffman could have even won the support of redditors to help make the platform profitable.

I'm sure most reasonable people believe Reddit should be able to pay its bills so that we can have it as a resource. Spez just came out of the gate pissing everyone off and then doubled down at every opportunity to explain the move.

If their official app and "new" reddit layout ain't shit there won't be so many users using paid 3rd party apps to begin with. Fix your product instead of force killing competitors.

I used reddit 10x as much as Netflix, if not more. So I'd have been more than happy to pay the same price for all eternity to access the api.

Hell they could have given out individual api keys tied to usernames so that regardless of the app, you'd be fed input from the free tier (with ads & rate limiting) or pro tier (unlimited and no ads). That would also help to curb malicious bots and reduce the number of alts in the game.

But no, they chose the nuclear option and are now choking on the fallout. And Huffman's erratic and hostile response further down the line really sealed the coffin for me.