Probably an unpopular opinion....but I do get Reddit's perspective that these apps are profiting without sharing back to Reddit who bears the costs and built the community. I wonder what conversations were had to find an equitable point for both sides and what that looked like.
And so do the app devs -- at least Apollo and RiF have said so explicitly.
As I understand it, reddit announced that they would start charging for API in April. Everyone was concerned/interested but also agreed that reddit should get paid.
The issue is that the amount Reddit wants is 10x to 20x what would be 'typical' for API access like this. (I'm NOT an expert/informed on what normal pricing is, that's just what I've read in multiple sources)
The OTHER issue is that while the announcement of changes/charges was made in April, the (very high) pricing was just announced and there are only 30 days before it starts. That is definitely not enough time for developers to find revenue to cover the higher costs, write the code for app updates, test and deploy. 30 days is just not enough time to get it done.
Apollo seems to be taking the lead/brunt of the publicly visible controversy and has proposed that they could make the transition and pay the bill, IF it was half of what Reddit asks (so, 5-10x typical?) and they allow 90 days for apps to update/implement.
That seems like a pretty reasonable approach, I think.
However other factors that indicate that Reddit really just wants to kill all other apps is that outside apps will never be allowed access to nudity/NSFW content, and they are not allowed to run in-app advertising. Obviously a lot of users are interested in NSFW content and not many users prefer to pay for that app, most people tolerate the ads.
YET, Apollo thinks that they could make it work if given 90 days and a slightly more reasonable price. However spez (reddit CEO) has refused to reply or engage on that proposal.
Interesting....they probably have financial models showing how much more they'll make and assume very few folks will actually quit using Reddit. Time will tell, but know I am already enjoying Lemmy more than Reddit at this point.
Indeed, me too. The Jerboa app isn't a million miles away from RiF
If the content and comments here grow consistently and stay reasonably sane, I could see Lemmy obsoleting reddit.
One thing I wonder about is how much confusion will occur over sub names. On reddit, there's a r/worldnews. In Lemmy there could be hundreds of worldnews@(instance_name). Which is the best one?
Of course name collision happens all the time at reddit (eg worldpolitics/anime-titties) but I wonder how Lemmy will cope with the slightly more complicated and potentially confusing collision domains
I understand the multiple instances, but 100% agree name collisions across instances will be the biggest source of confusion. Will be curious how Lemmy tech stack and communities in general work to make this easy-ish for users.
Another moderately interesting point is that it seems like Apollo (pretty obviously the biggest 3rd party app in terms of API usage) isn't even in the top-ten of user/abusers of the API.
I take this from this paragraph
On May 31st Reddit posted a chart of large excess usage by some unlabeled API clients, and stated: "We reached out to the most impactful large scale applications in order to work out terms for access above our default rate limits via an enterprise tier
To be clear, Apollo was never contacted, and I've been told from someone internally that Apollo is indeed not one of the unlabeled API clients
The only time that Apollo was reached out to by Reddit in any capacity about usage was late last year when we received an email about a 6 minute period where Apollo's server API usage increased by 35% before lowering again. Despite 35% for 6 minutes being a comparatively small blip (the above post references clients that are over by 500000%), we responded within 2 minutes. We offered to jump on a call with Reddit engineers if they needed an answer ASAP, identified the issue within several hours and Reddit thanked us for the fast investigation
Here's the chart in question. It's pretty obvious that the top spot is an irresponsible party, but none none of these are the third party user apps that we are discussing -- Apollo wasn't one of them, so logically neither were any of the smaller apps.
My first thought: "oh, that guy is rich now", but then I started calculating. Around $40.000 per month seems like a lot, but he had to pay some services for API access (not the reddit one, if I understand it correctly, but others), and servers for push messages and stuff. And then, since he probably was self-employed I would add costs for insurances, maybe a mortgage, normal stuff. It might have been kinda decent, but he did not earn millions by now, even with the income of his other apps.
He probably is still rich (hell, he made more money in a year than I probably ever will in my life), but yeah probably not as much as some people may think.
He did estimate that if everyone asks for a refund, he'll have to pay out $250k, ouch.
Yeah, that’s a lot of money as well. His business might have paid quite well. Buuuut it comes with a risk, which he took, knowing his whole business relies on those APIs. Well shit, it turns out the deciders at Reddit are assholes. I don’t blame Reddit for charging for the service, I blame them for how they announce it. It’s just inhumane.
Apollo is a bit different; in my experience, apple product users are most used to subscription payment and non-free (both as in free lunch and in freedom) products. Good or bad, many other users are not used to that. Personally I would happily pay 50$ to buy a app to support the developer, but not a monthly subscription.
Also I personally prefer to use "properly open-sourced app" (have a readable organized repo instead of a zip dump of everything in the corner of the website just to comply with GPL). And these apps are harder to monetize.
Apollo itself is free. Apollo Pro is a one-time $5 purchase (minimum; you can pay more if you want) and adds a few useful features. Apollo Ultra was the $10/mo subscription that adds a few features that rely on an external server.
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