Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit's attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo's creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
I'm not super technical but can someone please explain why the third party apps can't just require each user to enter their own oauth token? That way all the API calls get tied to the users instead of the app and there's no cost. Am I misunderstanding something?
It's a good point, and could alleviate things a bit, but its not easy and still would have problems. The root of it is that there's a rate limit for normal accounts in the new data api, so you would quickly get a message saying you've done too much in one minute and basically stop working. This also assumes the app can move over to a user provided authentication within the time window of one month. Given many of the big apps use support servers thar help manage the api calls (such as apollo's), this can be a big ask depending on how it was coded, especially when they didn't need to in the past and have built up around the lack of a need for oath for a decade. There's also an education process to get users to request and wire in the oath (could be done well, but it would be much rougher than today).
Additionally, there is still the censorship of nsfw posts, which enforces a walled garden, so third party apps would always be inferior. This sets a precedent more so than a problem, because next up could be whole subreddits being omitted from the api because of future reason here.
Also there's legal concerns it might bring up like stated by andrew - https://radiation.party/comment/21117
I agree with all the responses but based on the Apollo post I think the average user was making something like 300 requests per day? Isn't the 100 per minute rate limit more than sufficient for the average user or am I missing something? Either way the timeline, NSFW restriction and everything else is just stupid so I fully agree on that. Was just not getting the pricing part. 😁
Apps are registered with a unique key per app, which devs have to get and use. Then, each app authenticates the specific user that is using the app.
Having users provide their own key would probably be considered circumventing the developer terms and open themselves up to a lawsuit
Not if the app went open source and each user was working on a dev version of the app.
RedReader is going to be like this somewhat going forward. Other developers of the app need their own API key, but QuantumBadger's version, the Fdroid and Google Play version will keep the same API key.
Yep, that's possible. An impassibly high barrier of entry for the average user, but technically possible.
I doubt that would be circumventing the developers terms of service since the user becomes the developer in that instance, but each user would need to register for paid API access which 99.9% of people wouldn't do.
Could be totally wrong about the terms, please lmk if I am.
You already got a good answer from @andrew@radiation.party
Another way to think of it is: Would Reddit really want to make an API Application Key for each user of their site when the point of the API change in the first place is to make Reddit profitable?
LIke, even if I could build an open source "Reddit App Whatever" from scratch when I got to use it I would need to request an Application Key from reddit.
Read about it here: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/wiki/OAuth2