The really really sad thing is, Reddit could have done a half decent job and made a fair bit of money, but they decided on stupidity instead.
Sure, it would have upset some people a bit, but... Not by anywhere close to the same degree.
Alright, we're sorry, but use of the API is going to have to start costing money for some kinds of uses.
First off, people that just want to scrape everything get the following access, and a much higher rate limit, but it's going to cost $x.
Moderator tools will always be free, but the API will require that the tool be associated with a moderator, and it will only permit access to subs that the user is a moderator for.
Community bots will generally be free, subject to the following restrictions.
And 3rd party clients will be charged a minimal amount, calculated to be roughly equal to what we are making from similar users on the official clients, to make up for lost ad revenue. Alternate options involving profit sharing may be viable, contact X for details.
By accepting the API agreement, you agree that use of the wrong class of API usage (for example, using the community bot or 3rd party client classes for data scraping) will be billed, retroactively, at $X * 10.
There. That's really not that hard. And people would have been much less upset at that, at least as long as the fees were actually as described, and not based on, say, how much they would like to make per user.
You'd probably want a free tier for 3rd party clients for users of specific account types. If the user is paying for Reddit Premium, maybe 3rd party clients don't get charged for API usage for that user account. Or if the user is a moderator for a given subreddit, API usage for that user on that subreddit is also free. With an API that the client can use to check the status of such things. If they were smart, they would also have a process for users with disabilities to have their accounts exempted from fees. That last one is hard, because you need a verification process, but it would get them a lot of good will.
Again... This shouldn't be hard. And it would have turned into a viable revenue stream!
Hell, flatly disclose that the 3rd party cost is 30% more than the average cost of using the standard client, to support the effort required to maintain the API. (Largely bullshit, but it makes those users more valuable than those that use the official client, while not being expensive enough to make it impossible for anyone to offer a 3rd party client at an even remotely sane cost.)
Yes, this would have very sadly been the end of free 3rd party clients... But I for one would have been... Okay with paying a small amount per month/year through the app store for a client that didn't suck.
Instead, Reddit decided that committing suicide was the better path forward.
Or, like, I dunno… maybe explore pivoting the monetization model towards selling publicly available and scrapeable user conversations as training data for ML, since ML as a discipline is exploding now?
To be blunt, despite my dislike of companies using my data for that sort of thing, I did give Reddit shittons of comments over nearly a decade, so that’s on me. It has been available for public scraping pretty much since the inception of the platform. Spez could have worked with actual engineers and legal experts to figure out a legal, sustainable way to update the ToS and API to reflect that new monetization model, with honestly minimal disruption to any user.
But no - they wanted the quick cash grab instead of a sustainable long-term investment, because late stage capitalism, and now we’re here.
oh. well, there's artemis that in private alpha at the moment. should be out in a few weeks i hope. Plus kbin is a PWA, so you can add it to your home screen.
Plato's cave. If all you have ever experienced is a shit app, then the shit app seems fine to most people. Others will recognize its faults but not how bad it is because they think that the only alternative is to have no app.
I got distracted by the post about the person’s boyfriend putting laundry detergent in their dishwasher. I guess that does mean RIF is better, since only one post is visible on the other one.
I don’t know if this is related to the migration (or even new), but ever since I stopped using Reddit it’s started sending me notifications about posts that have nothing to do with me. I’ve disabled them since but I don’t recall getting such notifications when I was using Reddit.
Just wow. Never knew it was that bad. I've been browsing with adblock since forever and quit Reddit immediately when RIF stopped working. Wouldn't be able to tolerate that official shit one minute.
This ad is bad, but them being just masked as a normal post did grind my gears even more. Reading half way through the title until i figure that it’s just an ad is something i can’t accept.
Shit like this is why I switched to a third party app a while ago. I used to have the official app on my phone because iOS and everything I remembered seeing as far as 3PAs went was all for Android before I heard of Apollo. But the fact that I was seeing “posts” like this every three-or-so posts, and the fact that they were all over the comments as well was just way too much.
It’s exactly why I will not go back. I have like three niche subreddits saved that have no real equivalent in the Fediverse and I’ll only check in on occasion. Through Old.Reddit. With a browser that has an ad blocker built in.
so true it’s awful you can’t tell posts from ads from what your subscribed too. all for what. I started using reddit with Apollo and it has to be the best app that I’ve chose/chosen to use(probably very close to a human guide lines compliment app too so many options and tweaks). to lose it over money grab ego bolstering is just the nail in the coffin for reddit to me. to think it used to be this place to be exposed to new ideas and topics anf by the way if you have any technical, personal, or financial question you can find some good literal information with a little effort for that too. just a shame our societies fr profit mentality.
I was thinking about asking them what alternatives they tried, but in the end decided it was not worth the effort.
It was either an AI, or I already knew the answer.
It's a common attitude, not just with reddit or phone apps, but just things in general. "I don't have a problem with it, so why would anyone else?"
I remember when Arkham Knight came out, and it was a complete mess on PC. But it worked for enough people that anyone who talked about what a shitty port it was got shouted down.
A common problem I have with layouts, where there's a common trend of leaving giant swathes of white space on either side of the content (in desktop aspect ratios, at least). Like with the new redesign of wikipedia, or even most fediverse sites. But many (if not most) people don't really have a problem with it. I've even heard people talk about "having to move their head back and forth" to see content on the website. As though they're incapable of moving their eyes in their sockets...
But that's my own personal rant. In general, people are often hard-pressed to empathize with others these days. Not just in their use of social applications, but of most things in their lives.
Newspapers use every ounce of space they can, they don't leave giant swathes of it bare. It's not like there's extra articles sitting along the side of the page... it's just blank.
In fact, there's often more white space on the sides of novel pages, depending on how they're printed.
I feel your rant, I really do.
You have no idea how disappointed I was after the Wikipedia redesign until I found the full width button in the bottom corner.
Most sites are optimized for mobile and are completely asinine looking on a monitor.
Especially text heavy sites where even a single sentence is broken into 2 or more lines, meanwhile 70% of the screen is empty.
And it's not like it's hard to implement a button like Wikipedia did, web designers just don't give a crap.
I payed for a full monitor, let me use the full monitor!
I didn't know about the button at the bottom, I ended up going into the settings and changing the theme back to the previous one.
I do like the more dynamic index, I may have to check that out. I'm not entirely opposed to new designs (much as I might bitch about change), it just gets frustrating when things are designed for a specific subset of people with no options to tailor your own experience.
I had few enough complaints regarding the first-party app that I never sought an alternative. I don't know if it's because I had Premium or because I have a network ad blocker, but I never saw ads in the app. Most of my browsing was on the desktop. If the app had been my sole access to Reddit, its flaws might have bothered me more.
I actually only ever used the official Reddit app. I wasn't really aware of 3rd party apps before all this API stuff kicked off. (I'm genuinely not an AI!)
It is full of 'promoted' posts and presumably the other apps were better but that ship has sailed. But maybe people are saying they're happy with the official app because like me they were uneducated about the alternatives on offer and they're just used to it now.
I'd often see posts complaining about the default app, mostly about how the video player never worked or how things took forever to load.
Most people in the comments seemed to assume there was just no possible alternative. I was happy to extoll the virtues of 3rd party apps, though I doubt I had much of an audience.
Good riddance to askreddit. Page after page of “what tv show should be brought back?” with every top comment being Firefly, as if the people answering have no idea there was a movie that killed off half of the characters.
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