Oh, that sucks. I don't use Apollo, but I imagine that this mean's I'll eventually lose RIF, which is an excellent mobile client.
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
131–140 of 1001 posts
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#132Consuming an API is a tough business. Between Twitter arbitrarily blocking API access, and now both Twitter and Reddit now charging obscene rates. It's a death sentence for some really useful projects and reduces the total value of the ecosystem.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
well the problem with mobile apps is the alternatives are free. It's a bad business and why I didn't take my passion for mobile apps as a career.
The reddit ones won't be though, unless they scrape instead of use the api. I doubt that's viable for a consumer app though, Reddit will probably break your app constantly.
the official app isn't going to remain free?
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#134Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase their revenue, they're doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened. Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to thi…
> If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them. Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them. If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features. Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party c…
There's an obvious solution here, which is to stop participating on platforms that are ad-funded. Charging user subscriptions and fees to businesses should be sufficient to cover costs. If it's not, maybe it shouldn't exist.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#135Company that can’t make money desperately tries to gouge profit out of stuck users. There’s a playbook for this.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#136Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase their revenue, they're doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened. Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to thi…
> If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them. Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them. If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features. Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party c…
you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views
Except that's not what Reddit is doing here. They're charging 3rd party clients ~21X what they lose in ad views, pricing them completely out of the market.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#137Another subscription. Great. The reddit client I use is brilliant (relay for reddit pro), not sure what they're doing about this but I'm not using the official client and I only use reddit on my phone. I'm really sick of subscriptions though, I'd rather just pay up front and not have another subscription
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#138I think reddit is being naive by charging per API request. Do that, and application developers will try to reduce them - for example, caching popular subreddits or posts (ie. "this is /r/technology as it looked when we last crawled 15 minutes ago"). If Christian added a cache layer on his own server he could easily make the finances work. But... Thats in nobodies interest - Users end up with stale content, Reddit loo…
Does the API work that way now? The part on your own server used to only be for authentication and clients would then interact with reddit's servers directly. (Haven't done anything recently but used to maintain a moderation bot).
Currently clients talk direct to reddit's servers. But if reddit started billing for API requests, you can bet every appmaker would run a caching server to reduce the number of API requests.
Or they'd do some kind of peer-to-peer caching between clients.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#139I think reddit is being naive by charging per API request. Do that, and application developers will try to reduce them - for example, caching popular subreddits or posts (ie. "this is /r/technology as it looked when we last crawled 15 minutes ago"). If Christian added a cache layer on his own server he could easily make the finances work. But... Thats in nobodies interest - Users end up with stale content, Reddit loo…
Either Reddit is happy about the caching as you cost them less, or they're not happy about it and they just block your app if you do that.
Now, people could scrape the website or allow users to bring their own API keys, but then it becomes a cat and mouse game. And if you're trying to sell your app on any of the app stores, Reddit could likely get it taken down/take legal actions.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#140For what it’s worth, I literally just created my first HN account after seeing the Apollo dev’s post. Hope I don’t bring down y’all’s collective IQ by being here lol.