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Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

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Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#81

Post by jabroni_salad »

ravenstine wrote: post #21
partiallypro wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/politics has leaked into virtually every subreddit.

The pandemic also ruined a lot of subreddits, especially ones for municipalities. Over 3 years of "OMG COVID" and "we ar liek literally in a pandemic" and "I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU DON'T SUPPORT MORE LOCKDOWNS" made me give up on a lot of subreddit communities, especially the Los Angeles one. But yeah, the metastasization of Reddit's broad politics also made things worse.

/r/iowa has actually improved but that's only because we are no longer first in the primaries. I hope south carolina has a plan to deal with astroturfing the likes of which they have never imagined.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#82

Post by judge2020 »

moneywoes wrote: post #77
judge2020 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. This approach mostly doesn't work because, for third-party client apps that don't go through the developer's own server, scrapers could snag those keys from the client. Scraping has always been a thing and I don't see a foolproof solution that allows good actors to use the product without bad actors getting to scrape content (not…

How would those api keys be exposed if it’s an app?

Decompiling apps even on iOS is not too hard, typically API keys would either be in resource files or exposed via strings in the binary itself.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#83

Post by narrowtux »

moneywoes wrote: post #77
judge2020 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. This approach mostly doesn't work because, for third-party client apps that don't go through the developer's own server, scrapers could snag those keys from the client. Scraping has always been a thing and I don't see a foolproof solution that allows good actors to use the product without bad actors getting to scrape content (not…

How would those api keys be exposed if it’s an app?

Inspecting the app's content or the network traffic.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#84

Post by idlewords »

I don't understand the point of a protest like this without some sort of concrete demand. If you're going to take down most of a popular site, you should:

1. Articulate the reason for your action

2. Explain what specific things need to happen to redress the problem

I haven't seen any clear statement of (2). Am I missing something?

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#85

Post by moneywoes »

shmatt wrote: post #27
paxys wrote: post #5

I will never understand how Reddit bungled this so badly. I'm no Harvard MBA, but here's an easier way out – instead of asking small-time app developers to pay millions, put API access contingent on the account subscribing to Reddit Premium. That way users get to keep the experience they enjoy, independent developers can keep doing their thing, Reddit gets to make up for the lost ad revenue in the form of subscriptio…

That small time developer who discussed paying millions also said it came out to $2.5/month on average[1]. Which actually isn't that bad for the service Reddit is providing One of the problems mentioned in the many Reddit threads discussing the issue about Apollo, is that its creator was selling ULTRA LIFETIME MEMBERSHIPS[2]. Yes, they were charging people money, taking it, then using a free API to deliver paying mem…

Will he have to refund those lifetime members?

Smart on him for selling those…

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#86

Post by savanaly »

bastawhiz wrote: post #79
chillbill wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The aim is not _just_ to make money, but to force users to use their crappy app so they can track users better. Sort of like what Twitter did. It’s also why they had like one dude working on their mobile website one hour a month for the last few years.

> but to force users to use their crappy app so they can track users better That's the point: let the users pay you to make up for the (potential?) revenue you're not making from tracking them. Estimates put reddit at something like $0.25 per user. Pushing them to the official app might _generously_ triple that number. Versus the user paying $5/mo? It's a braindead business case to say that users in your official app…

One problem is the type of user who opts to pay even $5 is probably worth more than triple the average. There’s the users who have money to spend at the top and a very long tail of non-spenders at the bottom dragging that average value down.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#87

Post by moneywoes »

dsm4ck wrote: post #7

I really hope one of the bigger third party apps finds a way to just point their front end to a reddit clone and eat reddits lunch.

Isn’t it 80-20 rule? If the content creators don’t post there they won’t have engagement

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#88

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

snide wrote: post #17
paxys wrote: post #5

I will never understand how Reddit bungled this so badly. I'm no Harvard MBA, but here's an easier way out – instead of asking small-time app developers to pay millions, put API access contingent on the account subscribing to Reddit Premium. That way users get to keep the experience they enjoy, independent developers can keep doing their thing, Reddit gets to make up for the lost ad revenue in the form of subscriptio…

Yes! Speaking as a heavy Reddit, but non-sub user, this is exactly what would have gotten me to pay them $50 a year. Not NFTs, stickers and avatars. I think the problem is that the API concerns are more around LLMs having easy access points to their data than anything else. Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. It's not like there are that many of them. Just seems odd h…

There's pretty much no scenario where Reddit wants to encourage 3rd party app developers to run their own intermediate "proxy" service for Reddit's API. For one it adds another barrier between Reddit and their own users, and two it would mean that there's just one more small step for the app developer to take to just implement the backend services themselves and stop using Reddit's APIs completely. I see a lot of suggestions already that app developers should do this. This of course is completely impractical for anything more than a trivial number of users unless the developers want to start paying millions to run their own infrastructure instead of just paying for access to Reddit's backend systems.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#89

Post by dvngnt_ »

beezlewax wrote: post #31
Simulacra wrote: post #8

I presume that going dark means that there will be less traffic on the site, which ostensibly would put pressure on the ad revenue. How long would this have to go on before it was a noticeable effect on read its balance sheet?

I can't imagine it will have any noticeable effect on their ad revenue. We are talking about a handful of subs out of thousands.

well over 100 million users in all sureddits

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#90

Post by Eisenstein »

Timpy wrote: post #69

If I understand this correctly, these third party apps are drawing tons of ad money away from Reddit while at the same time increasing their hosting costs and dev costs for maintaining the API, right? How is this not a win-win for Reddit? They lower the traffic that was costing them money. I know it's user-hostile and that's the crux of the complaints, but it seems a little naive that these communities are basically…

Reddit is built on free labor from mods. Without the mods they would have to pay people to moderate thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities. Most mods use old reddit on desktop or third party apps on mobile because their app and new site suck for modding. Alienating the mods means their subreddits go to shit, and reddit exists for content. Doesn't sounds like a 'win' to me.
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