It truly was a dumpster fire. A part of me did wish he would backtrack but he just doubled down.
It's telling that they're not even willing to work with the third-party Reddit apps. They could be true money makers for Reddit, or at the least, a way to minimize Reddit's losses.
Also, doubling down and deciding that the subreddits that will be going dark in protest mean nothing. He's said as much in the past that the moderators are expendable, though, so it would not be a surprise if Reddit administration or spez personally decides to usurp those mod teams.
I'm not sure I even care what he says at this point. The damage is done, his hand has been played, and we all know the type of person(s) he / they are and their end goal. Good riddance. I truly hope everyone comes this way, I can't lie, Reddit was my go-to for information that I could rely on and get honest feedback from the "public at large". The more I think about this the more I realize just how useful it was as a tool as much as it was for conversation.
I always felt that part of the allure of Reddit was that it was semi-anonymous. Now that I see they're taking the route of Facebook and the like I'm running for the door.
0% chance they go back to a free API. Maybe, just maybe they end up scaling back API pricing for third-party apps to something reasonable that would grant them the same revenue per user that they would get from the first-party app.
The other piece of this is that the API is also used to train AI on Reddit's data. For that application, given the colossal amount of venture capital going into AI right now, their API pricing isn't all that absurd. If Reddit were reasonable they would offer different pricing depending on what the API is going to be used for--but, then again, it's Reddit, so personally I'm throwing in my lot with FOSS.
I don't think that's likely to happen. Based on the AMA announcement, I'm guessing that - at most - there will be a few (temporary) concessions made to moderators and some (empty) promises to work on accessibility.
However what I feel is going to happen is that they’ll either ignore any questions about 3rd party apps / API pricing or delete them. They seem to see them as competition. (The official app is trash soooo)
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