Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 1001 posts

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#731

Post by eru »

58x14 wrote: post #99

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…

If you want training data for an LLM and are actively talking to some data providers, you'd just ask for a dump, instead of making a billion small requests.

(You'd make the billion small requests, if you are doing this on the sly.)

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#732

Post by Willish42 »

gnulinux wrote: post #703

Question, is there a reddit data archive we can legally download before this API pricing goes in effect? I really wouldn't wanna lose all the data in reddit when inevitable reddit becomes obscure unknown internet history. It has tons of (imho) extremely important information.

I was curious about this too, and would expect this to be somewhere like kaggle. There's some good results in https://www.kaggle.com/search?q=reddit+date%3A90+datasetSize..., e.g. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/noahpersaud/reddit-submissio..., but nothing larger / more holistic or that includes comments AFAICT.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#733

Post by Willish42 »

Probably a dumb question, but wouldn't Reddit be very easy to scrape instead of using an API at these prices? I assume the various LLMs' datasets are based on web scraping similar to Google for content that doesn't have a public API.

Also, it seems to me that Reddit could gain some goodwill here by supporting the flagship competing client apps with a lower rate while still charging a higher price for those trying to leverage its data for ML, similar to how Google provides much of the funding for Mozilla despite being a competing browser.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#734

Post by rusticpenn »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #722
dom96 wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was precisely my first thought when I read this. For the price that Reddit will charge, Apollo's author could easily recreate Reddit and take advantage of Apollo's user base to seed that community.

Hiring a few hundred competent mods, plus management, can easily triple that figure, so it would likely need some serious backing.

Mods work for free on reddit

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#735

Post by StanislavPetrov »

Devasta wrote: post #643
gaudat wrote: post #480

I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language. About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market. Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and…

The tech isn't the challenge with something like Reddit, even the comically inept Reddit leadership could figure it out after all. The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted. Only if they have a solution for that can try going their own way.

>The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted.

The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all submissions and comments that conflict with the narrative being pushed by the establishment.

Hacker News is great because many of the comments are substantive, thought-provoking and don't read like State Department press releases or obvious corporate astroturfing.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#736

Post by gogopuppygogo »

gaudat wrote: post #480

I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language. About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market. Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and…

Reddit initially monetized using Adzerk. Apollo should do exactly what you are pitching and just use the same engine to sell ads.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#737

Post by farrarstan »

qball wrote: post #638
armchairhacker wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a good idea even without Reddit's monetization and potentially blocking NSFW content. To me it seems obvious. It's also something that's actually likely to succeed and within the community's control, unlike getting Reddit to change their stance. Like, there's nothing stopping this from developing right now. - "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users ar…

>the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care No, they're just flailing. The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity ; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subredd…

[dead]

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#738

Post by phendrenad2 »

hendersoon wrote: post #318
phendrenad2 wrote: post #272

Seems to me like they priced the API to cash in on the LLM training data gold rush, and as a side-effect it makes third-party user apps infeasible. Oops.

They priced the API for LLM training and killing third-party apps is just a great bonus. If they wanted to retain third-party apps while protecting their revenue stream they could have simply created a new free API including all the ads. They deliberately chose to kill these apps.

I think Hanlon's Razor applies here.

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#739

Post by rconti »

sph wrote: post #633
nocoiner wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really well stated. Sometimes out of morbid curiosity, I’ll read one of the /r/all posts on a topic where I know the discussion is going to be reductive and generally uninformed (the example that comes immediately to mind is anything involving the energy industry - there’s not much to find beyond “hurrr durr Exxon bad thorium good”), and every single time it’s the same type of self-satisfied navel-gazing comm…

Not only that, the posts themselves on /r/popular are mostly Facebook anger bait (/r/LeopardsAtMyFace, /r/IdiotsInCars, /r/whatcouldgowrong) or political anger bait: Reddit leans left so it's all "Look at what the right said." Reddit is one of the largest spreader of US political bullshit unto the rest of the world, turning kids into flag-weaving partisans and fostering a us vs them mentality. It's a low brow dismiss…

> It's a low brow dismissal, I know, but between the posts and the comments, Reddit has gone to total shit. Also to note that the average age has remained the same, so it's really hard to talk about anything serious when the majority are 18 yo US middle class white males.

I'm probably just showing my age, but one reason I could never get into Reddit is it always felt to me like teenagers rehashing the same old debates I had as a teenager on usenet/IRC/whatever. It was never the platform, or anything wrong with the users themselves. It's just that I aged out of the "spend all day arguing with random people on the internet about things" demographic. (Instead, I spend all day arguing with old friends on the internet about things).

Re: Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing

#740

Post by JustSomeNobody »

philistine wrote: post #580
Eji1700 wrote: post #418

Everyone saying their pricing is absurd had better get ready for the new wave of API pricing. Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze" where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half the customer base. Twitter was one of the first to give access to…

I don't disagree that it's one point of view, but I hardly believe both examples do not have a simpler explanation: both companies no longer want APIs for third-party clients. Elon wanted to turn it completely off and was probably convinced to ban the accounts of all the third-party clients and to try and harass the world's many weather services to pay 42,000$ a month. Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apol…

> Reddit has one credible third-party client: Apollo.

Ooof. I mean, if you're only an iOS user, maybe?

Post reply on HN