This is a rant post and I apologize but I had to talk about this. Most subs are coming back online and not saying ANYTHING about the next steps. Only a handful of subs are going indefinite. I checked the front page for the first time today after leaving the a couple hours before the day of the blackout and what do I see? Subs are up, and comments and upvotes are up to the general average before the blackout.
I checked r/gaming to see their recent post (WHICH HAS OVER 68k UPVOTES), and I see a comment with over 500 upvotes saying in a nutshell, “You guys need to calm down, they’re a company and need to make money”.
Along with a couple other comments saying similar things. Are you fucking serious? You can’t even have the fucking balls to say, “This is a company that has consistently screwed over its users and I need to take a stand and quit my addiction”? You’re just gonna sit and do nothing? Fuck you. You’re no fucking better than u/spez. You’re all a bunch of fucking hypocritical liars for shitting on spez and the admins while talking about how you’re “done” with Reddit and you won’t support this.
Go touch grass you fucking addicted cowards. I’m glad I made the switch to Lemmy if it means I don’t have to interact with dumbfucks like you.
The price isn’t even the main issue. It’s the timing. 1 month? That’s not a lot of time.
And with the price like it is, no dev is going to be able to pay that out of pocket.
I agree with both yeah. Personally I would have made different choices than the CEO has.
Have a more realistic planning for developers to adapt. Offer different types of api pricing models.
It all could have been handled more strategically, which makes him a poor CEO in my opinion
Reddit posted a chart showing the top abusers of the free API, with an implication that this was the reason they are now going to charge third party user apps for access.
However — according to Apollo, which has been pretty credible and is apparently the largest app, they aren’t even close to the excess usage levels shown
I expect those top-ten abusers of the free API, exceeding the limits by 40000% and whatnot are all LLMs sucking up text for training.
Reddit has been letting those project hoover up very valuable (given recent valuations of LLM/AI projects) textual discourse (authored by all of us of course) for free. They may feel a bit foolish, and they are realizing their worth, in terms of the value to LLM efforts.
SO, I think the pricing is related to what they believe the various AI projects can afford to pay.
It’s still an easy win for them to kill the third-party apps that they wish were gone, given the NSFW and in-app ads issues.
If reddit wanted to, they could create a seperate pricing tier for usage that passes through to individual humans, rather than to language machines. They are different use cases and absolutely have different value propositions in terms of potential revenue generation.
There are a multitude of reasons for making the API paid or rate limited, I don’t think the CEO went with the right approach. But it was due time at some point
Pretty much everyone, including the 3rd party apps, agrees with what you’ve said.
Reddit needs to monetize the API, and spez has really fucked this up.
Well, looking at all the comments in this post, not everyone agrees with that. i do think the Apollo dev is a king in how he has handled everything though
It’s because he fucking took the Elon approach for some reason. Like… great job man, ya blundered your way into a Twitter situation.