this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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I'll stand by the idea that people were not mad about the API going paid, they were just disgusted by the way spez managed the whole situation. This was a PR nightmare from the beginning and his competence as a CEO should be questioned after all this is done.
Management, certainly. Some specific bits, though, that may or may not fall under that umbrella:
Comparatively high price tag.
Short lead-in time to the change.
Shambolic communication with devs, mods, and users at large.
Most users, I would wager, would have been fine with Reddit making money off of their data. That’s the tacit contract most of the internet runs on— you provide me a space and a framework, I allow you to monetise what I do there. It’s when those monetisation decisions start to hurt my experience being there that problems arise.
For me, what is much, much worse is the dismissal of such a large outpouring of discontent from the community. People are willing to put up with a lot they don’t like so long as they feel heard.
We felt heard by the mods, and heard by each other, but Huffman, the face and voice of the company, offered instead minimisation, condescension, and calumny.
That's because Huffman doesn't believe that ongoing community is his ticket to millions. He believes selling data to ai learning programs is. They don't need continuing users for that when they're sitting on almost two decades of content.
Just look at the actual actions of the admins. They're removing mods for privatizing subs. They're restoring erased content. They're shadow banning comments critical of the system. They're forcefully reverting changes to sub rules.
They aren't trying to get 20 million from the likes of a 500k/year company like Apollo, they're trying to get 20 million from billionaire companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. that are maybe more willing to shell out that kind of money for an emerging technology. Killing third party apps wasn't their goal, it was just an incredibly unpopular but necessary side effect because those apps use the same api that ai learning programs do.
The problem with this theory is that they could have done two tiered pricing. Reddit could have charged TPA developers one price and the LLM trainers a much higher price for API access. In fact, I believe that is exactly what Reddit is doing, they just haven't been public about what they are trying to charge the LLMs. The Verge asked Spez about whether the LLM folks are biting on this and what that price would be, he just responded that they are "in talks."
If Reddit didn't want to kill TPAs, they also could have given them a year or so to figure out their business models, rather than the 30 days they were given. Hell, Reddit could have backed down at any point and extended the time period for implementing charges.
If Spez thinks he's going to make money off LLMs, I think he's delusional. The OpenAIs, Googles, and Metas out there have already used the Reddit data to train their models. That ship has sailed. The focus in the LLM world now is making better models, more compact models, refining their answers and making them more accurate, etc. The days of throwing vast amounts of random data at these models is probably over. For GPT 5, OpenAI is probably not looking to spend 50 million on new Reddit comments. Instead they will spend that to hire experts to revise GPT 4s outputs and use that as training data.
Plus, scraping exists. No need to pay for API access if it can scrape what is publically available
Plus, storage exists. No need to pay for API access to scrape if you already scraped to your own storage once already.
I don’t think it’s all over personally. The AIs will need to know any future changes to coding languages and similar things where parts are deprecated etc
The english articulation language part is over though.