Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

The point was - figure out what you need to charge instead of complaining you can't profit off someone else's resources.

Reddit, Twitter et all don't owe you anything. They do not make money via read-access API calls - they lose money. It's super simple...

Only a fool would build a business around a free service with no escape plan.

My long time reddit account got permabanned because I argued with the mod of a popular subreddit (I disagreed with him about the localization of a Japanese game, really trivial stuff). It was a veteran, seasoned account with lots of awards, karma, and "reddit coins" ($hundreds of dollars worth). The permaban message said I could use my other reddit accounts as long as I followed the rules on them. As soon as I tried using my other veteran Reddit accounts, *all* my accounts were immediately banned for "ban evasion". Poof.

I tried to appeal but when you're permabanned you are limited to only using a small appeal form with 250 characters maximum. I tried to bypass this by linking to a google doc. Nobody visited my google doc and yet reddit said they "reviewed my appeal" and "will not be lifting the permaban".

I'm not a troll, I never harassed anyone, used slurs, called for violence, etc. My only offense was arguing with a powercrazed mod (hated by most of his own subreddit), and my Reddit accounts are all wiped. When I try to create a new account, they get permabanned too after a day or so, so I gotta give reddit's "platform integrity" team some credit, merely using a VPN isn't sufficient. I just wish they'd treat customers who've given them hundreds of dollars the courtesy of a phone call or a human review. I really hate how some big tech companies feel they're totally above providing any level of customer support. Reddit isn't alone here. I can't even get refunded by my CC company because the coins were purchased over 6 months ago.

At least I still have HN.

It doesn't matter. It is their service and the API terms are subject to change at any time. So either the API gets blocked for third-party clients, or you purchase access for a high price.

Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse and TikTok have decided to ban third-party apps. Twitter and Reddit decided to charge for it.

In this case with the developer of the third party Reddit client, unless he is making enough to cover the API costs, then it make no sense to build on someone else's API with little to no revenue. That is the risk.

It is no different to TapBots (creators of TweetBot) doing the same mistake.

It does seem fair to charge third parties approximately the same in ad revenue that you would have gotten from the same users on a first party app.

Then the third party app can choose between adding their own ads, or charging a subscription.

I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase.

Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM clients.

Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be developing its own first-party language model, and any other model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay these much higher rates.

Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are losing.