this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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However: Getting through with their API changes will earn them more money/reduce costs in the long run, so it will return profitable for them anyway.
One of the reasons they are doing this is because of the large language models being implemented. These companies are using Reddit to train the models. The reason is because of the voting on replies. Where else can you get millions of questions being answered with actual humans saying how good a response is?
The big boys in the current AI space will definitely pay for the API. They'll likely pay a lot for it as well.
Why pay the bloated and gouging costs for API access when you can just write a web parser and scrape the site the old fashioned way?
Scrapers can easily be disabled. Reddit won't look the same obviously. But this isn't a real obstacle.
then the scrapers start using residential proxy botnets
Then you just force them to change the syntax repeatedly and scraping will break with regular occurrence. Scraping is extremely fragile and not easily adaptable without human effort which costs money.
There is no reason other apps need to be swept up in the same cost structure as LLM enterprises.
Exactly, the LLM excuse is just that, an excuse to purge 3rd party apps and push ads/get user data that is otherwise unavailable to them.
They may not need to. Already trained, already got the data that they need. Going forward they can just continue training with the input from
The users (all the folks talking to ChatGPT directly for example).
There are apps going to pay, also providing an API has been cost intensive for Reddit. It’s not as simple as you make it seem I‘m afraid.
I don’t think any apps are going to be able to afford to pay. They purposefully priced it too high to be viable. At the start there was a few who seemed to tentatively say they’d look in to it, but every app I’ve seen now has done the math a realized there’s just no way.
At least Pushshift made a deal with Reddit and other Accessibility apps are exempt from the payment. If their idea is to push third party apps off the market, that only supports the fact that API access is too expensive for Reddit to provide to said apps.
That's naive. Pushing 3rd party apps out isn't about the costs to reddit, it's the opportunity costs of not being able to mine data from users, and is likely being driven by Steve Huffingpaint in the hopes of driving up the IPO price before bailing on reddit with a golden parachute.
Current reddit admins don't give a shit about the long term health of the platform, and the fact that people believe their lies about costs instead of seeing that theyre playing the user base just like they did back with Pao.
The amount they're looking for does not line up with any reasonable cost estimates. It's not a number created based on cost. Based on spez's comments, it's clear he's upset some apps found out how to reliably make money from their users and is just shutting them down.
u/spez out here really grasping at straws
I don‘t like your tone so I‘ll refrain from further participation in this discussion. Bye
There's nothing wrong with their tone. Seems like you just don't like being questioned about your empirical claims that you've provided no supporting evidence for.
None afaik. Only one I heard about that was going to give it a go was Relay but in the end it doesn’t matter.
The dev tried so hard but couldn’t make it work.
https://www.teddit.net/r/RelayForReddit/comments/14c2eo6/where_is_everyone_going_to_go_when_relay_shuts/
Infinity is going to a paid subscription model
Yeah. I'd rather pay to support a kbin or lemmy instance. Especially if it were a cooperative or something like that.
Can you actually backup that "There are apps going to pay"? Because I've seen users say they'd pay, but no apps say the same.
And lol, if you think the API is cost intensive, you don't understand the costs inherent to alternatives to an API. It's much more cost efficient to provide an API that you can effectively limit and use minimal resources to respond to a query vs web scraping which is objectively more resource intensive (with the webpage overhead the API doesn't have) and doesn't have nearly as good rate limiting or the protections an API has.
I think Infinity is going to pay if someone subscribes. The description in the Play Store is:
Starting from July 1st, Reddit API will be pay-per-use for 3rd-party clients.
In order to survive this change, Infinity will become a subscription-only app after July 1st. Learn more: https://www.reddit.com/r/Infinity_For_Reddit/comments/147bhsg/the_future_of_infinity
It's required for you to update Infinity after July 1st. None of the previous versions (including this one) will work after July 1st. Due to a tight timeline, the update may not be available immediately on July 1st.
Apps using reddit's API (e.g. Apollo) don't display reddit's ads. Imagine you run a bar & serve free beer. You can do this with this one simple trick: constantly spamming ads on every TV (display panel) in your bar. Advertisers pay for the beer & your overheads.
Along comes a guy with a garden hose, sticks it in your keg, and starts siphoning your beer to the bar he built across the street. His place is much better than yours, the alcoholics don't have to watch ads to get drunk.
wat do?
Pretty sure app devs are not not_scraping out of concern for reddit. If they could, they would (I know I would).
I don't think your analogy works, and here's why.
In that analogy, Reddit provides the beer, but in reality it doesn't.
It owns the building, but what the customers are consuming are other customer's beers. It doesn't have to serve the beer, people being some on their way in.
And in that analogy, yeah, the third-party apps are not on premises, so they can't watch the ads that pay for the building...
But they brought more clients to the bar. They advertised the heck out of the bar, especially when it was growing, and they pump beer back in the bar. It costs Reddit in ad revenue and in facility maintenance (they built the pipes themselves), but they absolutely get back things through the pipes, it's just not straight money.
Reddit wasn't build by Reddit. They own the place, that's all.
OK, substitute "kegs" for "beer." Kegs (servers) & staff to run them costs, and reddit wants to stop subsidizing the bar across the street (3rd-party apps). Honestly see nothing wrong with that. Was cutting off the subsidies in this fashion a good business decision? Don't know, bad at money stuff.
Fairly certain RIF scrapes. That's why it grabs "pages" of content. Beyond that, most reasonable folks don't think the API needs to continue to be free. It's just ridiculously cost prohibitive. Many services offer APIs that cost money. It's just Reddit's costs aren't based in a reality dictated by cost. It's created to force large apps offline. We'll see how long infinity lasts. It'll likely cost significantly more than reddit premium. Wouldn't be surprised if it's 50% more.
So API not an issue?
Sure, 3rd party apps break reddit's business model.
In regards to business model, not really. They're literally changing their business model from the ground up. You can't "break" something that doesn't exist yet. They could have offered reasonable API costs. They did not. They could easily monetize third party apps. It's clear however that spez is just a jealous shithead. He's upset they made profit when he didn't and doesn't like that someone found a way to be profitable. Reddit could have offered the same features and app reliability. They did not.
Scraping is very easily blocked which is likely what they'll do if forced to do so. They are probably just including scraping clauses in their agreements. So RIF will have to adhere to those agreements because they'll probably have to accept them to even gain access. St that point it's a legal mire. If they want to avoid court, it could just be an arms war. Scraping is extremely easily broken and would constantly need updating. It's not cost effective from a developer point of view.
Reddit chooses not to provide an advertising interface to API users. The app devs don't even have the option of running Reddit ads.
This is not about ads. If it was, Reddit would provide an advertising mechanism and require use of it as part of the TOS for API access.
Yes, Infinity is going to pay for API access.
Which app developers have indicated they will pay the demanded rates?
At least Infinity is
There's no cost effective way for someone to make a useful app and pay the API costs. It's only possibly feasible to enterprises for LLM training. It's like Twitter's API cost. There's simply no cost effective business model for a publicly released app.