61–70 of 585 posts
From what I can tell, it’s not the users that revolted. It’s their unpaid moderator workforce striking in solidarity with the workers that used Apollo to improve their experience. I’m very curious to see what the resolution will be from Reddit’s side, but heading toward IPO while you’ve got a huge chunk of unpaid labor that makes your site work striking can’t be good for the strike price. The workers have the company…
Is this how Mastodon and Nostr expect things to work? If so, are there any "winning" websites where most Mastodon and Nostr users congregate?
For most users the back end philosophy is only there to serve the end result. For any given post or comment you need a simple website link you can share with friends; no thinking required.
*Bonus: if people feel like their views are being improperly censored they can, again, jump to a peer with different filtering standards.
It absolutely amazes me how badly reddit has handled this whole situation. From the years of broken promises to moderators, the complete lack of accessibility in their own apps, and then on top of their for their CEO to not only get caught in a major lie but for him to then double down on it. As much as reddit wants to make these developers into the bad guys, every move they've made in this mess has hurt their reputa…
99.99% of reddit users have no idea who spez is and probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans 99% of reddit users are aware that moderators do some nice volunteer work but wouldn't cross the street to save them its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff
That doesn’t even count all the people that are visiting their favorite subreddits only to see them closed with a message detailing what’s happened.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does there need to be a paid API, when reddit provides all of the content over a free HTTP API to user agents already? Are these apps more than just a custom user agent?
The free API is going away
They buried the lede. The article suggests the shutdown was because of free API to paid API. Anyone uninformed who just click off at that point. Even when they ask about costs, it was just saying it’s “ But the issue is two fold. (1) all the devs support a paid API, but the rate is absurd according to basic math. It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth. Devs were willing to take on a higher…
From the article, it says Reddit would charge Apollo $2.50 per user per month. Right now, ad-free YouTube costs $12 a month, ad-free Twitch costs $12 a month. I can't buy ad-free Twitter at any price. Is it really not worth $2.50 a month to have ad-free Reddit?
Personally, I like Apollo, and I would be willing to pay to keep an ad-free Reddit experience. I'm disappointed that the two sides didn't manage to work this out.
I feel like Reddit is getting attacked despite being the company that is trying the hardest to make this work. The standard approach is just to ban apps that compete with the in-house app. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, all of those services just completely forbid things like Apollo. All these complaints are going to encourage companies to simply ban alternate apps rather than trying to price an API in the future.
They buried the lede. The article suggests the shutdown was because of free API to paid API. Anyone uninformed who just click off at that point. Even when they ask about costs, it was just saying it’s “ But the issue is two fold. (1) all the devs support a paid API, but the rate is absurd according to basic math. It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth. Devs were willing to take on a higher…
Why does there need to be a paid API, when reddit provides all of the content over a free HTTP API to user agents already? Are these apps more than just a custom user agent?
For a hobby project you could maybe get away with scraping a GQL bearer token and issuing requests as if you were an official Reddit client. Or you could even request the HTML and scrape that. At the scale of these third party apps that approach just wouldn't work.
They buried the lede. The article suggests the shutdown was because of free API to paid API. Anyone uninformed who just click off at that point. Even when they ask about costs, it was just saying it’s “ But the issue is two fold. (1) all the devs support a paid API, but the rate is absurd according to basic math. It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth. Devs were willing to take on a higher…
Why does there need to be a paid API, when reddit provides all of the content over a free HTTP API to user agents already? Are these apps more than just a custom user agent?
I would like a breakdown of Reddit's actual costs vs their proposed fees. Why isn't Reddit profitable? Is there a way to make Reddit profitable without charging for API access?
They are asking for $0.24 per 1,000 API calls. Apollo averages ~345 calls per-user per-day (although some users are much higher), but Reddit claims that other apps are "more efficient" and only use about 100 calls/day.
If we assume 100 calls/day/user, then that's 36,500 calls/year/user, and a user is worth $0.12/year, so to break-even, reddit should be charging about $0.003 per 1,000 API calls, instead of $0.24.
From what I can tell, it’s not the users that revolted. It’s their unpaid moderator workforce striking in solidarity with the workers that used Apollo to improve their experience. I’m very curious to see what the resolution will be from Reddit’s side, but heading toward IPO while you’ve got a huge chunk of unpaid labor that makes your site work striking can’t be good for the strike price. The workers have the company…
I would like a breakdown of Reddit's actual costs vs their proposed fees. Why isn't Reddit profitable? Is there a way to make Reddit profitable without charging for API access?
The obvious places to start are: 1. Do charge for API access. But be reasonable. Nobody is calling for free api access. Charge like 2-5x their cost of operation. Not 20x. 2. Serve ads to third party apps through the API. This is a no brainer. The fact that they aren't doing this speaks volumes about their true motives with this move.