The issue, as I've come to understand it, is not that they're requiring paid access to the APIs needed, but the rate that they are charging. It's quite a bit higher than comparable social media sites, and was high enough that one of the more popular 3rd party clients (Apollo) decided they would close up shop rather than operate at a loss.
IF they'd charged a more reasonable rate, that would have kept the entire thing out of the news and there wouldn't have been a blackout.
On the other hand, I'd be curious to know how much the other rates people bring up (facebook, etc) are subsidized by those company's ad revenue. I suspect that reddit's advertising doesn't make them nearly as much money as Facebook, but I could be wrong.
It's possible that they need to charge a higher rate, overshot what they thought people would stomach, and took the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" approach when people threatened the boycott.
If I had to guess, most non-niche users will find their way back. In particular, consumers of low-effort meme posts, pretty pictures, funny videos and especially adult content don't really care where they get it from, and will likely be perfectly happy with continuing on with new mods.
> It's quite a bit higher than comparable social media sites
What site besides Twitter even has paid API access for something like this? I haven't seen anything to indicate Facebook charges for API access. Even then, you can't build a full facebook replacement with their public API's. I agree that the execution in terms of timeline was awful by reddit. But the pricing makes sense when you realize their goal is to kill off third party apps. Reddit charges $5 a month for Reddit Premium, so allowing a third party to charge less than that and deliver the same feature set is silly.
IF they'd charged a more reasonable rate, that would have kept the entire thing out of the news and there wouldn't have been a blackout.
On the other hand, I'd be curious to know how much the other rates people bring up (facebook, etc) are subsidized by those company's ad revenue. I suspect that reddit's advertising doesn't make them nearly as much money as Facebook, but I could be wrong.
It's possible that they need to charge a higher rate, overshot what they thought people would stomach, and took the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" approach when people threatened the boycott.
If I had to guess, most non-niche users will find their way back. In particular, consumers of low-effort meme posts, pretty pictures, funny videos and especially adult content don't really care where they get it from, and will likely be perfectly happy with continuing on with new mods.