this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Do You Think There Would Have Been a Large Protest if Steve Huffman Just Said We're Charging to Use the API to Increase Revenue? (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago by curt@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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I've been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn't last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn't

To me, Reddit's sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I've never used.

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.

I can't blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn't make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They're going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO's are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That's how capitalism works.

In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can't stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn't have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn't been such an uproar. So I'm glad it went the way it did.

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[–] patchw3rk@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm not entirely sure why Reddit was going to charge outlandish fees for the third-party APIs. Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it. It's really a combination of pushing them out of the market and then being a smug little bitch that really nailed it in the coffin for a lot of people.

[–] Infraspace@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

The outright lies about blackmail didn't help.

[–] ZealousIdeaPool@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it.

But that is exactly what his goal was. If he really was interested in working with the 3PA devs, this would have been handled completely differently. The fact that it was handled as it was, with essentially zero engagement between the company and the community, and with essentially zero flexibility on the part of the company on the implementation, is pretty clear evidence that their goal all along was to drive the 3PA's out of business.

[–] tikitaki@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

i don't think they were trying to make money off of the API changes. like others are saying, it has to do with AI and they figured they might as well take the chance and knock out 3rd party in the same swoop so that they can funnel more people onto the official app

they can data harvest much better that way

[–] Aggy@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like AI being the reason doesn't hold up particularly well from a technical standpoint. From my searching, web-scraping is completely legal. It'd be slower, but a massive dataset is still very collectable.

Plus building a web-scraper is so easy now. Funny enough, generative AI like chat gpt can get you like 95% of the way there in just a few minutes.

Though, none of the reasons they've stated so far seem to hold up to scrutiny.

[–] ZealousIdeaPool@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's slower, but to use an API requires you to customize your system to use each different sites unique API. It would be a massive development undertaking, for such a small benefit that it would never pay off. For an LLM, you only need to read each page once, you just wait til a post is a month or so old, and essentially all discussion has stopped, and you will get everything you need. So "fast" isn't really a concern at all.

[–] tikitaki@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

You can pull much more data much quicker through the API than some sort of HTML scraper. These LLMs need a lot of data and reddit is a big site.

[–] QHC@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

AI has nothing to do with it other than a convenient, topical scapegoat.

[–] SpaceCadet2000@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would have been perfectly possible to charge a different rate for AI harvesting than for Reddit Apps.

[–] tikitaki@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

of course, but they wanted to kill 3rd party apps without explicitly saying "we're killing 3rd party apps"

this way they can (or at least they thought they could have) had plausible deniability saying stuff like "we tried to work with them" and this is essentially what they tried in the first couple of days

[–] deong@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

They don’t want the developers to pay anything. They want the developers gone so that all the users are monetizeable through ads.

[–] s_s@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Every user they lose they'll replace with 10 bots.

This isn't about longterm thinking, this is a push to control how many "users" they can put on their IPO docs. Steve and the current board (VC monies) are going to cash out and what happens to Reddit after the IPO is the least of their worries.

Every fewer third-party app is one fewer datum that they are lying about the number of real, fleshy users. This has nothing to do with AI training or APIs or anything but legitimizing bot activity to pump up the numbers.

Facebook and google have been selling ad "impressions" to people of questionable realness for decades at this point.