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.
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.
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.
At this point of time though, it has grown to be less about that though, and how disrespectful Spaz is treating everyone. Even if he reversed his decision, who can trust the guy now?
He’s made it clear that even if you spent the last 10 years working on promoting your community making it successful, that he’ll happily ban your account and hijack your community, for a silent takeover. There are some serious shadow government vibes happening.
Given the way Spaz lied about the Apollo developer, even if API access was only $1 per month I wouldn’t pay anymore (because I don’t feel Spaz should have the money)
I understand that, but framing it as “reddit users are mad because reddit wants to charge for API access” paints reddit users as entitled, when what is actually happening is “reddit users are mad because reddit decided to charge for API access with only 30 days notice and set the prices so high that third party app developers would have to pay potentially millions of dollars per year in order to access it”.
There is a massive difference between those two statements. One makes reddit users look like a bunch of entitled assholes, and the other frames the situation correctly and truthfully.
I agree in many ways… Good or bad phrasing though, I think mostly everyone is on the same page. I also love the fact here that its easy to avoid toxic admins or communities, so we’re no longer controlled by whatever makes reddit profit (and admins can do what’s right instead)
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.
I used to use Tweetbot to read my Twitter feed. I would read the latest 100 tweets every day. When the plug got pulled on the app, I just stopped reading Twitter at all and don’t miss it. In the case of Apollo, I scroll through my feed for an hour or more if I’m bored with nothing else to do. I mostly looked at funny, wtf, and photos. It was mostly a waste of time, however entertaining it might be. So when Apollo shuts down, like you, I may not need Reddit as much as I thought.
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.
I suspect they have signed an exclusivity deal with some kind of third party to use the API. It could be for “AI” or it could be for more nefarious purposes.
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?
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.
In a nutshell:
Imagine if you own a nice Jaguar - keep it in your garage and let the neighbours borrow it to go to the shops. Now you need to do some maintenance, and make up for losses in your taxi service (which might cost $2 per km) so you wanna price this as a premium service. … so you could charge them $5 takeout fee plus $1 per km, or (if you’re greedy) just go for $5 per km.
What Reddit did is say ‘Fuck you, you want to use it, you pay $100 per km or fuck off - we don’t care’.
The amount of money Reddit makes for you getting advertisements is actually less than $1 per km… The same occurs with YouTube. If you actually click to donate, then you can pay enough to cover thousands of hours of advertisements in one small swipe.
What we need is MICROpayments spread across a wider user-base to balance the ad-supported platform, and then people will accept that small payments are better.
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.
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.
Hence why I pay for YouTube.
I have as blockers up the wazoo, but they provide a very solid service. I’m happy to pay to get something I value without ads.
Digital ads are a time tax on the poor and technologically illiterate.
Didn’t reddit used to be profitable? I think we should start by asking what decisions they made that reduced their profitability. Is it the video player that nobody asked for? Deciding to self-host images? Developing an app that nobody wants to use? It seems to me like they put themselves in this position.
Like others have said, there are multiple factors at play:
- The official reddit app sucks in terms of basic usability
- The offiical reddit app has poor accessibility
- The official website, while generally well optimised for mobile, keeps forcing users to use the reddit app - see point 1
- 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.
- Reddit are trying to grow their ad platform. Third party apps interfere with that. Reddit understandably wants to kill them off.
- 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.
Reddit isn’t an ad company, reddit is a sock puppet company. They are selling the ability to control the narrative.
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 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 of 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.
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.
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.”
