‘Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,’ Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.
‘Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,’ Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.
I am disappointed that this article, in its apparent attempt to appear objective and neutral, didn’t do a very good job of explaining why people are so angry. I was hoping for more signal amplification to inform more people who may not yet know.
The first part of the article makes it sound like the point of the backlash is that Reddit will charge for the API at all, not the punishingly high rates or the very small window of time devs had to respond after pricing was finally communicated. It does ultimately say how much Apollo would have to pay to operate under that pricing structure, but the article seemed to be burying the lede a bit to me. It also conflates the 3rd party apps with big AI training use cases, which I think misses the point.
The article also really downplayed how unprofessional Steve has been, especially during the AMA, and how powerful the recording Christian released was in terms of causing the monumental backlash that is now happening. It didn’t really describe the magnitude of the backlash itself very well, either. It was mostly trusting readers to go look at the embedded links to understand what was actually going on, and the summary snips in the article don’t do much to encourage anyone to do so.
You can tell Reddit PR folks got their word in on this article.
On point 👍 If I may add, the arguments put forward by the Reddit team reeks of ‘welfare queen’ put forward by politicians to push austerity measures. If any one of them spoke English, they should read ‘social media’ and meditate on it for a moment. Social media without the social bit is largely a dud.
The article itself appears to be leaning on TC’s reputation in the hopes that the casual readers would not do their own independent verification. In other words, one business helping out another. Sadly, the article seems likely to achieve this goal. Does a good job of cheerleading Reddit’s move without coming across as such. Indie devs are forced to shoehorn accessibility features and self limit on the number of requests by the end of the month, or the door out is wide open. This is the point that the article is amplifying from what I can see.