Do You Think There Would Have Been a Large Protest if Steve Huffman Just Said We're Charging to Use the API to Increase Revenue?

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.

BrooklynMan, (edited )
@BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml avatar

The app devs, including Selig, often, said they were perfectly fine and found it quite reasonable that Reddit wanted to charge for API access-- they even looked forward to it because the y believed it would. open up access to previously walled-off parts of the API such as chat, polls, and other features only available in the native app and the website. This was public info, and users also looked forward to this.

The problem came with both he outrageous pricing and the absurd 30-day timeframe. Then, further with spez's refusal to be flexible by listening to the reasonable complaints of the devs, slanderous accusations against Selig, profound and entitled disrespect towards the mods, and shitshow parade which started with his mind-boggling AMA and then continuing by taking interviews with any news agency that would talk to him, further spreading the lies, slander, disrespect, and disinformation-- ending by praising the king turd of tech: Elon Musk.

THAT is what provoked the outrage, protests, and overall "uprising". THAT is what is killing Reddit.

keeb420,

yeah. the protest was small but reddits response has been great and has lead to where we are at today. like you said it wasnt really the pricing but how reddit went about it and afterwards. hell if he had announced that their intention was to kill off third party apps but was more transparent about it and wasnt acting like an elon musk there might not have been any protest at all.

arquebus_x,

Once Selig announced that he could not keep Apollo going after June 30, I was done with Reddit. That was days before Huffman said anything publicly - even before the AMA in which he pasted prefab answers to 14 questions.

themadcodger,
themadcodger avatar

Same. Different app, but it was the same day. Once I realized my app would die, reddit was dead to me. I came to kbin a bit earlier than others but it was super dead in the beginning.

therealpygon,

I'm strongly of the opinion that instead of killing Apollo, Selig should featureflag most of the features, scale it back, implement ActivityPub quickly and a guided process to get started. Just killing Apollo gives Spez exactly what he wants, especially with the amount of algorithm rigging they are doing to block ActivityPub/Lemmy/Kbin info from making it into Top and Popular.

techno156,

Spez is going to get what he wants either way, really. He just wants third-party app activity gone from Reddit, and Apollo moving over to ActivtyPub is just more of the same, even if the app itself is around.

Personally, I think that dropping Apollo might make more sense. It was designed as a Reddit Reader, so instead of cramming new app functionality into it, it would make sense to just split it off into its own app.

A lot of ActivityPub/Lemmy/Kbin features are natively supported, so he wouldn't need to keep paying for things like Imgur API access, unlike with Reddit where third-party image hosting is the only way to do image hosting, without using the official app.

Plus, after the recent shenanigans from everything, he probably deserves a break, for a while, at least.

deirdresm,

FWIW, I don't think it's spez who's asking for that; he's simply the conveyor of the message.

I'm pretty sure this is a finance constraint imposed by underwriters/financers of the IPO, who want to see all the revenue with reddit and not with third parties. (I also think Twitter's similar move was at the behest of $ people since Elon borrowed money to buy the company.)

someguy3, (edited )

What this is really about and people are just starting to realize is: the interests of the shareholders and CEO who want to get rich is not compatible with a volunteer created, volunteer run, and volunteer modded site. People aren't eager to do unpaid work just so the CEO can get rich. This API stuff is just exposing it.

mer_mer,

The weird thing is that they ARE compatible. They could have charged slightly more per user than they make on the official app and everything would have been fine. This move reduced shareholder value and user value.

NeoSniper,

Why not slightly less? That would make more sense to me.

MagicShel,

A user on a third party app isn't as valuable to the company. They miss out of all the valuable spying and tracking they can do by installing their own software on your phone. Plus just the presence of this party apps means you can't demands extra permissions on your own app and tell users to deal or suck it (in nice PR speak). So it makes sense to charge TP apps more for reducing the "value" of a given user.

Charging less is basically subsidizing third party apps out of your own pocket - which was exactly the complaint in the first place. Although it would've been better to gradually ramp up prices to less-subsidized and eventually to a profitable partnership.

usualsuspect191,

The counter-argument is that the users that gravitate towards those apps are less valuable anyways (we were the first to jump ship for e.g.) so a discounted rate just to keep them around and contributing/adding value for the "whales" on the official app.

maskapony,

Reddit makes $350m a year in advertising revenue, it is in theory a fantastically successful business that could make plenty of profit for its shareholders.

The problem is solely down to them raising more and more capital the latest at a $10B valuation. Because of this they need to increase the revenue even further to try and justify the inflated valuation and that is what has led to the latest situation.

MxM111,
MxM111 avatar

I am sure they could use less drastic ways to rise revenue, clearly without spreading lies about Apollo creator and alienating moderators. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things. And than there is very wrong, Reddit way to do things.

kingthrillgore,
kingthrillgore avatar

What really told me that reddit was squandering its revenue sources was when they shuttered redditgifts two years ago. Maybe there were issues behind the scenes, but they had commissions from the storefront and from elves, and something reddit has never been particularly good at: Good publicity. And instead of figuring out how to make it profitable, they just killed it.

They didn't even bother to answer questions why.

It was at that moment I knew the current leadership was rudderless, and now everyone's finally come around to it.

someguy3, (edited )

A slight profit is compatible, I think we all get that you can't run at a loss. But it's no longer "look at this neat thing we can do with everyone". They're not building goodwill with the unpaid creators and mods. Everything they've said and done is oozing with "Get back to work you unpaid peasant! We need to IPO and get rich!" They've shown nothing but disdain towards users, mods, and developers.

Tyrannosauralisk,

The other thing is that they've just handled things so incredibly badly. Limited communication largely directed at third-party media sites, erratic rules changes and enforcement, doubling down with heavy-handed admin actions.

I think that even beyond a need for profit they lost sight of why they have substantial value in the first place. The majority of their value came from their community which made "the front page of the internet" a pretty honest claim. Their software isn't worth billions, but the front page of the internet sure is. They should have had a substantial community engagement department specifically to kiss ass and build relationships with mods (and users via AMAs) so that open lines of communication existed - and they probably should have taken control over key things like inserting an employee as top mod of the top 50 subs (make it standard practice for hitting top 50, offer cool extra services like a visit to HQ and such for the mods so its like they "win" rather than "reddit seizes control" even if that's what it is).

Instead they stayed way too hands-off and basically treated their community as an afterthought. The poor communication made me feel disrespected as a user, so I can only imagine what its like for the mods who put far more time and effort in and are in the direct line of fire of erratic admin actions. I mean, this isn't even hard. Just make a vague corporate statement that you're "very sorry" about all the "confusion" and you'll be "putting changes on hold an re-evaluating while you work with various parties to come up with solutions". You make some token concessions and then do 80% of what you were gonna do anyway, 1-2 months later. Its dishonest and shitty but it's not rocket science to take some of the fuel away from the fire. Like, do they even have a PR department or... did they completely forget that the community even mattered?

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

If Reddit has an employee on staff as a mod that can approve posts, then they lose safe harbor protections. Anything that mod approves is considered representative of Reddit, giving them editorial control and causing them to be handled more strictly. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/1856011.html

Further, if Reddit gave bonuses to mods, then mods would be considered unpaid employees. Any kind of "swag" or quid pro quo for being a mod of a big subreddit increases the chances that those moderators will be considered unpaid employees by the Department of Labor. AOL famously got in big trouble for giving free/discounted internet access to their volunteer moderators. https://casetext.com/case/hallissey-v-america-online-inc-sdny-2002 (Settled in 2009 for $15 million in back pay.)

Combining the two is terrible news for Reddit and would make their business model absolutely unsustainable. Every mod would be an employee and every post would be representative of Reddit as a company. If a mod approves a link to copyrighted material, then Reddit could be sued.

patchw3rk,
patchw3rk avatar

I'm not entirely sure why Reddit was going to charge outlandish fees for the third-party APIs. Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it. It's really a combination of pushing them out of the market and then being a smug little bitch that really nailed it in the coffin for a lot of people.

deong,

They don’t want the developers to pay anything. They want the developers gone so that all the users are monetizeable through ads.

Infraspace,
Infraspace avatar

The outright lies about blackmail didn't help.

s_s, (edited )
@s_s@lemmy.one avatar

Every user they lose they'll replace with 10 bots.

This isn't about longterm thinking, this is a push to control how many "users" they can put on their IPO docs. Steve and the current board (VC monies) are going to cash out and what happens to Reddit after the IPO is the least of their worries.

Every fewer third-party app is one fewer datum that they are lying about the number of real, fleshy users. This has nothing to do with AI training or APIs or even this summer's ad revenue; this is about legitimizing bot activity to pump up the numbers.

Facebook, twitter and google have been selling ad "impressions" to people of questionable realness for decades at this point.

tikitaki,
tikitaki avatar

i don't think they were trying to make money off of the API changes. like others are saying, it has to do with AI and they figured they might as well take the chance and knock out 3rd party in the same swoop so that they can funnel more people onto the official app

they can data harvest much better that way

QHC,
QHC avatar

AI has nothing to do with it other than a convenient, topical scapegoat.

SpaceCadet2000,
SpaceCadet2000 avatar

It would have been perfectly possible to charge a different rate for AI harvesting than for Reddit Apps.

tikitaki,
tikitaki avatar

of course, but they wanted to kill 3rd party apps without explicitly saying "we're killing 3rd party apps"

this way they can (or at least they thought they could have) had plausible deniability saying stuff like "we tried to work with them" and this is essentially what they tried in the first couple of days

Aggy,

I feel like AI being the reason doesn't hold up particularly well from a technical standpoint. From my searching, web-scraping is completely legal. It'd be slower, but a massive dataset is still very collectable.

Plus building a web-scraper is so easy now. Funny enough, generative AI like chat gpt can get you like 95% of the way there in just a few minutes.

Though, none of the reasons they've stated so far seem to hold up to scrutiny.

ZealousIdeaPool,

It's slower, but to use an API requires you to customize your system to use each different sites unique API. It would be a massive development undertaking, for such a small benefit that it would never pay off. For an LLM, you only need to read each page once, you just wait til a post is a month or so old, and essentially all discussion has stopped, and you will get everything you need. So "fast" isn't really a concern at all.

tikitaki,
tikitaki avatar

You can pull much more data much quicker through the API than some sort of HTML scraper. These LLMs need a lot of data and reddit is a big site.

QHC,
QHC avatar

Not only would it be legal and work, I am pretty sure web scraping is currently the preferred method!

I've never seen any evidence or even claim that OpenAI and similar efforts are using any particular API to gather data. It would make much more sense to build a general crawler bot and release it to the web at larger. Search engines like Google have been doing this for decades, so technology that is specifically engineered to use raw, unformatted data as the input would work better with a general scraper approach than integrating with what would have to be literally thousands of different APIs.

ZealousIdeaPool,

Looks like none of the apps are actually going to pay them, so he's not getting anything out of it.

But that is exactly what his goal was. If he really was interested in working with the 3PA devs, this would have been handled completely differently. The fact that it was handled as it was, with essentially zero engagement between the company and the community, and with essentially zero flexibility on the part of the company on the implementation, is pretty clear evidence that their goal all along was to drive the 3PA's out of business.

godless,

I used reddit 10x as much as Netflix, if not more. So I'd have been more than happy to pay the same price for all eternity to access the api.

Hell they could have given out individual api keys tied to usernames so that regardless of the app, you'd be fed input from the free tier (with ads & rate limiting) or pro tier (unlimited and no ads). That would also help to curb malicious bots and reduce the number of alts in the game.

But no, they chose the nuclear option and are now choking on the fallout. And Huffman's erratic and hostile response further down the line really sealed the coffin for me.

lanbanger,

/u/spez really is the fucktard in the pool here

godless,

Yep. And he didn't piss quietly into a corner of the pool, but decided to do so from the top of the diving tower during a heat wave.

ZealousIdeaPool,

And Huffman's erratic and hostile response further down the line really sealed the coffin for me.

Yep. Before the AMA, I was defending just doing the two day blackout, rather than, as many were suggesting, blacking out for a longer period. My reasoning was you can always escalate later if a compromise isn't reached. Then Spez opened his mouth, and I (and so many others) realized "this fucker has no interest in compromising" and totally changed my position. Since then, I support any and every form of protest that has been devised, including leaving the site for good (and mostly already) on June 30th.

godless,

Yep, he went down the deep end with no chance of ever restoring his public image. As an investor, that would make my skin crawl... They should sack him before the end of next week and revert all changes, hoping the exodus can still be stopped. Which I doubt, but there would be hope, at least.

RandoCalrandian,
RandoCalrandian avatar

Same. Only a select few communities I browse now, waiting for them to move on

static, (edited )
static avatar

Reddit killed internet fora. By being easier and cheaper, while making no profit.

If they suddenly do want to make profit?
The terms change, there are alternatives.

Tigbitties,
Tigbitties avatar

I agree. They built a better mouse trap and now they want to go back to the old one because they figured out they can sell cheese. The better mouse trap still exists.

MangoPenguin,
@MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

IMO the issue that people are upset about, and as a result all the publicity going on, is just related to how much they wanted to charge people for the API.

If they rolled out something reasonable for pricing, and allowed people to use their own individual API keys in third party apps, I think a few would have complained here and there, but otherwise it would have been fine.

lanbanger, (edited )

Let's not forget that they also nuked NSFW content on the API, which is at least 50% of the uproar. Nobody likes to mention it, but it's a big reason that a lot of people use Reddit.

OneRedFox,
@OneRedFox@beehaw.org avatar

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.

Brkdncr,

The ai people aren’t using api

kingthrillgore,
kingthrillgore avatar

They would have gone straight to scraping if they couldn't reach a deal. Sam Altman is on the board of reddit. He knows which way the wind blows there.

QHC,
QHC avatar

LLMs are already relying on web scraping and always have. They are getting data from the entire Internet, do people really think OpenAI is doing individual integrations with every single website throughout the Internet?! Are Google and Bing doing that, too?

It's complete FUD.

ZealousIdeaPool,

do people really think OpenAI is doing individual integrations with every single website throughout the Internet?! Are Google and Bing doing that, too?

This is such a great point that I hadn't even considered. These API changes will have exactly zero effect on LLM's and similar services.

maskapony,

There may be some complexity with legality here though. Obviously Google and other search engines already have most of Reddit's content indexed, but there are some legal arguments as to whether they can use the content to create derivative works.

If Reddit opens up its API and specifically allows AI companies to use the content to create LLMs and other AI tools then from a legal point of view they may find this much more preferable to facing potential legal action further down the road.

QHC,
QHC avatar

Reddit could reach the same agreement without an API, too. Legality isn't going to change because of the technical implementation.

SkepticElliptic,

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.

Skray,
Skray avatar

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat on the reddit board for years and was briefly CEO for 8 days.

lanbanger,

OpenAI is another dumpster fire waiting to happen, then.

soundasleep,
soundasleep avatar

Why else would they make access to OpenAI/ChatGPT/etc so cheap? So others can build businesses on the tech that get locked in before they jack up the price.

We've seen this rodeo plenty of times now.

bitsplease,

I don’t disagree with your saying that is why they’re doing it - but I wonder how well it will actually work out for them. Natural Language Prompting is hard to “lock in” someone on. Sure, the complex jobs with custom trained models are going to get locked in for sure - but the companies that are just adding “chat bots” to their apps? I don’t see the difficulty in migration.

I use OpenAI for one of my projects, and frankly there’s little that would keep me from being able to migrate to another service if one came along that gave a better value. An AI platform isn’t like an IaaS platform, there really isn’t a lot of platform-specific workflows involved, and prompts that work on one LLM should work just about as well on another.

Even for custom trained models, most training data is stored in json, and should be easy to feed into another LLM, though of course tweaking will be required

GonzoVeritas,
GonzoVeritas avatar

Spez knows he can create 'traffic' of user comments and answers with AI. He also knows he can use AI to moderate subreddits. He doesn't care about the quality of the site, just the numbers that get him his payday. He'll burn it to the ground and cash-out, leaving a mess in his wake.

kingthrillgore,
kingthrillgore avatar

The widespread adoption of AI isn't to do anything better, its to do something worse than a human does, because people will buy close enough. The WGA is 100% right about AI, and I say this as an avid Midjourney user.

deirdresm,

Since spez said that one objection was that other people were making money where reddit wasn't, one thing I'd have been okay with is if the API worked only for those who were reddit premium. (To be open, I was already paying for the lowest tier of premium.)

ZealousIdeaPool,

Although this is a reasonable solution, it's also reasonable to just let the apps charge a subscription and pay the API fees, which is what the app devs planned. The only issue is that Reddit set their API fees so high that the app devs can't possibly charge enough to make it profitable, certainly not in the time frame they were given.

qazwsxedcrfv000,

The problem is more about Reddit not giving a fuxk to the users who have made the platform. They obviously know in advance what 3rd party apps and tools people have been using. If they are really keen on keeping the matter civil, Reddit could have granted them free or reasonable access but it prefers not to. I think this is pretty telling.

megopie,

Yah, no, a big part of this from the start was to force users on to their app. They want to go public and cash out but to do that they need to consolidate control of the platform. As it stands, users being able to customize their experience and choose how they interact with the sight through an open API undermines the companies ability to manipulate users experiences to suit the interests of investors and advertisers.

Getting rid of third party apps was always one of the central goals, not an accidental casualty, it was never going to be civil with that goal in mind.

MedicareForSome,

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.

ccx,

I call BS on that. Large-scale content scraping was already against the TOS to begin with. And you can't kill off slow stealth scraping without also blocking search engine crawlers. Or at least not without hurting the searchability.

lowleveldata,

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.

ExoMonk,

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.

Spellbind0127,
@Spellbind0127@mstdn.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    CapnJazzHandz,

    Check out Inoreader (plus Reeder for an A+ iPhone/Mac/iPad experience). I've found Inoreader to be by far the best RSS reader, and I've been using it for years now. It's UI is very slick and unassuming, but has a ridiculous number of settings and preferences if you really want to dial in your experience

    xtremeownage,

    FreshRSS is great, if you like self-hosting, and you like a web interface

    Parsnip8904,
    @Parsnip8904@beehaw.org avatar

    Feedr is nice on Android

    Ganbat,

    Lemmit.online is using Reddit's rss feeds to share the posts to the fediverse. Worth giving a look.

    bloop,

    I would be happy to pay a fair price to remove ads and gain access to 3rd party apps. They should just bake that into the Reddit Gold perks.

    valen,

    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.

    Mr4r,

    But then you’d be a premium user and in a demographic even more likely to spend money so you’d get “catered purchase opportunities” from advertisers that paid even more for your special eyes…

    shanghaibebop,

    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.

    BendyBee,

    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.

    TheElectroness,

    That IS what happened, in april.

    What happened this month is that the API users (aka 3rd party authors) expressed their dismay at trying to work with reddit's announced changes or getting any movement out of reddit that would allow them to continue.

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