That's probably the end of me using Reddit on mobile, then.
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
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Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#452Wow, that price is insane. To me, that's pretty clearly a shot at any competitor apps for Reddit. Purely anti-competitive behavior here, which to me is silly. Let other apps pop up to better serve your users. At the end of the day, they are still your users and you might learn things from the other apps. Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.
> Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.
That's pretty much the definition of enshittification.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Which is honestly kind of stunning. Reddit is presumably much less than that, but they might be reasonably gunning for a number better than Pinterest, with an ARPU of ~$1.50[1]. To put the pricing post into the same context, we're talking $7.50 per Apollo user/quarter, which is closer to what Facebook makes per user than Pinterest.…
> Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that? My first though was that maybe 1% of users buy something in a given year, but that's $24k to acquire…
There are tons of businesses where $240+ is a great CAC.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#454The web went in the wrong direction when we abandoned the initial concepts of user agents, which was that the browser has the ultimate choice of what to render and how. That concept, transferred to today's world of apps would simply mean that any client like Apollo is essentially a browser locked on Reddit's website, parsing HTML (which has the role of an API) and rendering the content in a native interface. As long…
> Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly
It works the other way: with today's SPAs the API (that powers the frontend) is exposed for us to use directly, without going through the HTML - just use your browser's devtools to inspect the network/fetch/XHR requests and build your own client.
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On an related-but-unrelated note: I don't know why so many website companies aren't allowing users to pay to use their own client: it's win-win-win: the service operator gets new revenue to make-up for the lack of ads in third-party clients, it doesn't cost the operator anything (because their web-services and APIs are already going to be well-documented, right?), and makes the user/consumer-base happy because they can use a specialized client.
Where would Twitter be today if we could continue to use Tweetbot and other clients with our own single-user API-key or so?
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#455Fuck you, Reddit. A guy develops an app way better than your dogshit for FREE and now you want to charge him for API calls? Frankly you should be paying him, and it should be a lot of money!
Well, it is not for free, he earns quite a lot of money for it. He is not a philanthropist.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#456A party is the people experiencing it. The free red plastic cups of beer and ranch dip and chips are ancillary. Redditors are now perking their ears for the next person to yell "next party at my house!"
This is exactly what I'm doing. I was there for the digg migration, and this feels just like it.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#457These prices are being set by an industry-wide bottleneck around online human verification. The cost just shot up because of LLMs.
This is only a temporary reprieve for Reddit, Twitter, et.al. The LLMs are going to start simulating user agents and work around this. Well-intentioned alternative user agents like Apollo are collateral damage.
The root fix is a solution to online human verification. All these web products are just trying to hang a "Humans Only" sign on the door.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
in my opinion, a good middle ground would be to make third-party apps only usable if you're subscribed to Reddit Premium. That way you don't give the data freely, you could make each API keys provided to the user with limits that won't impact normal navigation but would cripple automated data capture, and you'd solve the issue where third-party apps aren't fed ads by sustaining the platform through subscription.
I remain shocked this wasn't Musk's approach with Twitter; make API access part of Twitter Blue.
Considering Twitter Blue isn't ad-free, not that surprised. I'd rather have ad-free paid option than what I get currently with Blue.
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#459Please Reddit, just let us use a web browser to access your web site. Users shouldn’t be forced so aggressively into using an ‘app’ - whether the official one or a 3rd-party app - when mobile web browsers are so very capable.
Have you tried using the 'old' reddit? Replacing 'www.' with 'old.' will move you over to the old style of reddit and will keep you there when clicking through links. https://old.reddit.com/r/all/
or you could log in and set your UI preferences to the old and then it's always that look. Stop lurking!
Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
#460They say that the free tier API for users will be 100 queries per minute. Why can't a third party app use each user's individual API queries for that user's app usage? Like you have the user OAuth with the app, and then the app uses that user's own user API access to query the API. 100 queries a minutes seems like it should be enough for most people.
Because they're also taking this opportunity to change rate limiting from client_id+user_id to just client_id. To stay inside the free tier, you get 1000 requests spread over 10 minutes (their current spike-smoothing behaviour) across your entire user base.
I'm not that great at APIs.
Is client_id something you have to register with reddit?
So you can't, for example have a client_id per user?
What if you as the app maker forced all your users who want to use your app to go register for their free personal client_id for their own personal API use, and then you have them give that client_id to the app along with their OAuth with they log in?
I am just trying to understand why a third party app can't just be a "software shell" that individual users can use to access reddit through their own personal free API limits as if they were just some individual accessing reddit through the API.