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Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

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Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#521

Post by shagie »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #516
shagie wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The under $200/month isn't a rate that anyone else can get. https://api.imgur.com/#commercial takes us to https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing The two plans there are $500/month for 7.5M requests and $10k/month for 150M requests.

> The under $200/month isn't a rate that anyone else can get. Sounds to me like that rate might be Imgur saying "we welcome your business," rather than "fuck off."

Eight years ago, it was a "we welcome your business" with a "free heavy usage"

https://web.archive.org/web/20150320234625/https://api.imgur...

In 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20191002234012/https://rapidapi....

I suspect its an older rate that he got and was able to lock in for a while.

The current rate is about $0.07/1000.

If $0.24/1000 is a "fuck off" rate, then Imgur is less than an order of magnitude more friendly to new developers. Imgur's price 4 years ago was $4k for 150M requests.

Reddits pricing is mostly in line with similar social network API pricing (Twitter is still an outlier).

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#522

Post by AceJohnny2 »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #520

Reddit's sudden API intransigence can be explained solely by the shock of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Steve Hoffman, Reddit's CEO, has expressed outrage that Reddit's data was mined to train ChatGPT (and other LLMs) without any benefit to Reddit. (I absolutely do not support their drastic measures, but it's useful to understand where it comes from)

And since both Sam Altman (OpenAI's CEO) and Steve Hoffman are from the Y Combinator gang (nervously looks around), I wouldn't even be surprised if there's some form of rivalry here.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#523

Post by madeofpalk »

mvdtnz wrote: post #402
madeofpalk wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A medium-ish video game reddit that I participate in held two votes on whether to participate, and whether to shutdown for 24 or 48 hours, and in both users overwhelmingly (95%) voted in favor of shutting down, and for 48 hours. There is a vocal amount of non-mods who are also participating. Also "mods" are still users of reddit. When I'm an admin of a Facebook group, I'm still a 'facebook user'.

Gamers aren't really normal. They're a group that is especially primed for having these big tantrums.

Completely valid. But that's a non-trivial audience of reddit.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#524

Post by shagie »

actionablefiber wrote: post #513
shagie wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252 > Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the price of a subscription without interrupting service only under certain specific conditions. If the increase does not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may change the price without interrupting service. Developer…

This would be with interrupting service though wouldn't it? This would be, "I can no longer provide the service you bought, so I will refund you, cancel the subscription you have, and introduce a totally different subscription that accounts for the new upstream costs." I would not expect Apollo to do this now after Reddit swung at Christian the way it did, but I'm curious to know if there was ever a semi-graceful way…

> If you have a subscription to an app that's making a price increase that meets these specific conditions, Apple will always notify you of an increase in advance. You'll be notified in multiple ways that include an email, push notification (if push notifications are enabled), and a message that you must acknowledge which is displayed within the app. Apple will also inform you of how to view your subscription plan details and how to cancel the subscription if you prefer.

If that was done, the subscription would need a new approval for the price increase before it continued or the subscription could be canceled by the user (or automatically with the price increase) by Apple.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#525

Post by jachee »

edgyquant wrote: post #397
ntaylor wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is that there are many, many niche communities where this is simply not true. Whole sections of reddit will die off due to lack of moderation and people will be forced to go elsewhere. This may not be a killing blow for reddit, but it will be devastating to the communities that it impacts.

Every community you’re talking about has users who would love to replace the mod team.

So that they, too, can get treated like crap by reddit? I don’t buy it.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#526

Post by bagels »

mcpeepants wrote: post #519
bagels wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't maximizing revenue and at the same time reducing costs a step in the direction of profitability?

Sure, but isn’t “raise the cost of the API to the point where it is prohibitively expensive for everyone” at best a cost reduction strategy only?

No, it increases revenue and decreases costs, because many of the users of those apps will start using surfaces that show reddit ads.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#527

Post by bagels »

aniforprez wrote: post #391
bagels wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$0.12 per user per year... how many users are using third party apps to skip out on ads? Is the true value higher once they start seeing ads? Also, that number is so laughably low!

The reddit API serves no ads. The Apollo app is ad free and only asks for a one-time payment for posting and a subscription to support development which comes with a lot of nifty but ultimately completely useless features. No third party app is blocking any ads from reddit because there's nothing to block

I didn't say they were blocked, just pointed out the fact that those users are not seeing ads on those surfaces.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#528

Post by bagels »

redmerchant2 wrote: post #90
paxys wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth Are you implying that a user is worth $0.125/mo to Reddit? Because that is laughably inaccurate. Mature platforms like Facebook extract up to $60 per user per quarter in advertising revenue from developed countries. Reddit itself made an estimated $500M+ from ads last year. ~$2.50/mo is already more than fair. Thinking that Reddit owes full data acc…

Many financial sites have reported Reddit users are worthless. CNBC estimated in 2019 that FB’s ARPU monthly is $7.37 per month but Reddit’s monthly ARPU is $0.30. (Though even that number should be revised down as revenue is slower than growth of users). Again the devs are willing to pay some multiplier on this.

Seems like the winning strategy for Reddit & Facebook is for Facebook to acquire. Facebook can improve monetization.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#530

Post by unmole »

paddw wrote: post #31
googlryas wrote: post #15

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

It isn't.

> Rate limits for the free tier

> All others will continue to access the Reddit Data API without cost, in accordance with our Developer Terms, at this time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...

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